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What BOOK(s) are you reading?
- Space Ghost
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- fastkmeans
Definitely not highbrow, but good fun nonetheless.
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- SuperflyPete
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- Salty AF
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Also Dragonfly in Amber- because my wife loves the Outlander series.
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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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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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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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- Cranberries
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- Don't give up.
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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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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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- SuperflyPete
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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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Digging into Altered Carbon at the moment.
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