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Kevin Klemme
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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River Wild Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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What BOOK(s) are you reading?

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18 Apr 2016 12:49 #226064 by Space Ghost
I'm reading Killing Pretty as well and agree with Shellhead's synopsis of the series. I think my favorite so far was the politics of hell story line.

Definitely not highbrow, but good fun nonetheless.

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18 Apr 2016 19:11 #226089 by SuperflyPete
"The 22 immutable laws of marketing" again. Every time I read it I think that Jack Trout's main skill in marketing is of himself.

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20 Apr 2016 11:00 #226140 by edulis
Listening to the audio version of Gone Girl. I have not seen the movie. It is really well written and makes me question aspects of my own relationship.

Also Dragonfly in Amber- because my wife loves the Outlander series.

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20 Apr 2016 11:44 #226141 by the_jake_1973
Gone Girl is the scariest of horror stories.

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20 Apr 2016 18:54 #226172 by Tim Champlin
I've been reading David Edding's Belgariad, on the second book right now. It's nothing too fancy but I still really like it. It's got magic, monsters, castles, fighting, all the good stuff. I feel like it's kind of a comfort read as this is the stuff that got me into fantasy in the first place. I had to laugh when one of the character's asks a guy why he's walking on a cane and he said that he "took an arrow in the knee."

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20 Apr 2016 23:30 #226187 by Not Sure
Just finished Dan Lyons' Disrupted, which is a memoir of a career journalist who joins a startup, and has to come to grips with the fact that his new company is run by rich idiots half his age.

There are some places where the dumb shit at that company is like looking into a mirror of my job.

(he's also a writer for HBO's Silicon Valley part of the time.)

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21 Apr 2016 09:06 #226192 by stoic
Replied by stoic on topic What BOOK(s) are you reading?
I finished the third in this series of Robert E. Howard's Conan reprints: The Conquering Sword of Conan.



This was my first time reading through Howard's Conan stories. Each story gets better and better, building to a crescendo as Howard master's his art and Conan's character. This last reprint volume, The Conquering Sword of Conan, features the last of Howard's Conan stories. At this stage of Howard's career, he's honed and polished his art to a fine edge and his writing gracefully cleaves through any barriers that a reader might have with the overall Conan epic. His work builds to a crescendo with Red Nails, and, I'd say that it was my favorite of all of these later Conan stories. However, of all of the stories, I found that I enjoyed Beyond the Black River the most--it had a gritty, "where civilization ends and the frontier begins..." feel that reminded me of the settings of Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad's story Heart of Darkness. In Beyond the Black River Howard also worked with the ideas of communicating with beasts through an ancient shamanism which reminded me of the movie The Beastmaster. I truly wish there were more Conan stories to read. The closest thing that I have read in my library that captures the same feel are the stories found in Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth.
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21 Apr 2016 09:13 #226194 by Gary Sax
Man, great review. I need to read the giant faux leather compendium of Conan I have. I bounced off of it when the first chapter was this giant incomprehensible prehistory of the world.

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21 Apr 2016 09:39 #226195 by Columbob

Gary Sax wrote: Man, great review. I need to read the giant faux leather compendium of Conan I have. I bounced off of it when the first chapter was this giant incomprehensible prehistory of the world.


You can safely skip that part and head to the stories proper.
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21 Apr 2016 09:42 - 21 Apr 2016 11:45 #226196 by Cranberries
I really enjoy the Sandman Slim series as well. So much fun. I think I'm four books into it. The last one I read was when he was in charge of Hell.

I also just read Ready Player One . It feels like a diluted version of Snow Crash for young adults with lots of eighties pop culture, but by the time the end rolled around I found myself really drawn into it. Spielberg is making a movie of it.

After that, I read The Reluctant Fundamentalist . Although it is well written, the experience of the main author is nothing like that of the majority of the kids who run off to join ISIS.
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21 Apr 2016 10:50 - 21 Apr 2016 10:50 #226205 by stoic
Replied by stoic on topic What BOOK(s) are you reading?

Gary Sax wrote: Man, great review. I need to read the giant faux leather compendium of Conan I have. I bounced off of it when the first chapter was this giant incomprehensible prehistory of the world.


In the reprint series that I've shown, they put all of those histories, outlines, synopses, whether by Howard or other editors, in the appendices. They aren't necessary to read to understand the Conan stories. All of these Conan stories are complete and independent of each other so if you don't like one, then just skip it and read another. They describe different periods of Conan's life, whether as a mercenary, raider, thief, pirate, war chief, adventurer, and king. Added all together, Howard's worldview, the Hyborian Age, and Conan's character do develop a macro complexity, but, you don't need it to understand the Conan stories.
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21 Apr 2016 14:55 #226229 by Almalik
A couple of years ago I re-read the Conan paperback series for the first time as an adult. As I kid I never really noticed any differences, but as an adult the drop-off between the Howard stories and Cart/de Camp ones (or even where they filled in the gaps in partial Howard stories) was huge.

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22 Apr 2016 10:39 #226288 by SuperflyPete
He also wrote about a different character who is less well known but arguably more awesome, "El Borak" (Francis Xavier Gordon). I first learned about him when I ended up buying a bunch of "penny paperbacks" from another F:ATtie (as an aside, one of my favorite things about F:AT is that many people here have turned me onto some PHENOMENAL authors). Ended up loving the books. If you like Conan but want to read of a character with similar traits in a contemporary setting, "The Lost Valley of Iskander" is a must-have. Way better than Solomon "Conan of a different name" Kane or even Bran Mak Morn (a cool pseudo-Conan set in a sort of Cthulhian setting in ancient England), although those stories were pretty bad ass.
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28 Apr 2016 14:35 - 28 Apr 2016 17:55 #226683 by stoic
Replied by stoic on topic What BOOK(s) are you reading?



I'm now reading (and almost finished) Glen Cook's The Black Company. It's been a fun read about a professional mercenary "free company" which becomes pressed into the service of an evil sorceress. The Black Company works with her enslaved demonic minions suppressing a rebellion in her kingdom. The Black Company's archivist, who is also their physician, narrates the tales. While this free company of mercenaries serve an evil sorceress, they, themselves, aren't necessarily good or evil, just professional soldiers trying to do a job and hoping to stay alive. The Black Company winds through a dark fantasy setting consisting of petty magic, sorcery, and the supernatural. I wouldn't call it high-fantasy, like Tolkien, but, rather, low fantasy--but, it's this "low fantasy" that makes this story unique and what kept me turning the pages, night-after-night. I'm going to read the rest of these novels.

For those fans of the Condottiere board game, you might know that the "Condottieri" were the historical captains of the famous medieval professional mercenary free companies which fought in and for the Italian City-States. These mercenary Captains were notorious historical characters who left annals and a history which is just as interesting as a fictional novel. One of them, John Hawkwood, an English mercenary, led mercenaries in his "White Company." His history inspired Sir Author Conan Doyle (yes, the creator of Sherlock Holmes) to write a similar serialized story describing the annals of a free company of archers in his novel called the White Company.
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28 Apr 2016 15:00 #226685 by Mr. White
Black Company is a book I always had flagged when I was reading a lot of S&S, but never got to...great write-up, I may have to pick it up this summer.

Digging into Altered Carbon at the moment.
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