I finished Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest (paid link) today, and it blew me away. I wasn’t sure he could follow The Three-Body Problem (paid link),and the first 80% of the book was a solid four stars — I thought that was about the best I could hope for, given how amazing and surprising and wonderdul […]
The Three-Body Problem (paid link) was amazing. The hook is great. The story it promises puts a twist on a premise I’ve seen before, but it’s solid. But underneath that story, unfolding throughout the book, is a story that went nowhere I expected it to, in the best way possible. Reading it reminded me of
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Terry Pratchett’s final Discworld book, The Shepherd’s Crown (paid link), came in the mail today, a bittersweet arrival to say the least. I almost never buy fiction in print anymore, but I’ve got every Discworld book in print; it felt right that I should read this one in print as well.
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Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (paid link): All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology
At 36, I can expect to live another 45 years or so, barring any surprises. Before getting a Kindle I was reading maybe a book a month (in recent years; I used to read more often). Now I’m reading a book every week or so. A book a week for the next 45 years is
Don’t finish shitty books Read More »
My high school girlfriend introduced me to the Amber series back in the early 1990s, and shortly thereafter to Amber Diceless Role-Playing (paid link), the RPG based on the books. Zelazny, like a lot of Appendix N authors, writes with economy and punch. Nine Princes in Amber grabbed me with its opening sentence, “It was starting
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Martin Brown from Grognard Games produced a great short video introduction to Appendix N, the influence the works therein in had on D&D — from thieves and paladins to plane-hopping and alignment — and the inspiration those works can provide today. It’s a bit surreal for me, though: He’s called Martin as well, and is
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I finished Fritz Leiber’s The Swords of Lankhmar this morning — my 20th Appendix N book. I’m not a fast reader, or perhaps more accurately I’m not a hurried reader, so tackling all 100 books of Appendix N is going to take me a while. “Swords” took longer than the other Lankhmar books to date
Appendix N: 20 down, 80 to go Read More »
Since I first posted about Reading Appendix N, I’ve been pointed to several similar reading lists that are either contemporary with Appendix N or related to it in some other way. None of them are additions to Appendix N — to date, Gary’s 2007 additions are the only ones I’ve found — but they’re all
Other Appendices N Read More »
Yesterday I stumbled onto an excellent blog, Raven Crowking’s Nest, which is also home to a project to read and write about the books in Appendix N. The author, Daniel Bishop, is an old-school gamer with a lot of insight into the hobby, and his posts on Appendix N books are great. He kicked off
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