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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 6, 2023 8:53:04 GMT -5
I don't remember the other book I've read by Chabon (Kavalier & Clay is great), but I recall not liking it as much. I'd be down for anything pulpy though, that sounds great! Evil for Evil (Billy Boyle #4) James Benn  By far the best of the series so far! Billy goes to his ancestral homeland and gets to see the Irish conflict he was raised on first hand. The author did an amazing job of showing all the sides and having Billy experience it from his unique view of being a romanticised believer from afar in Boston... both an outsider and a participant at once. The character growth here, while somewhat predictible, was fantastic, and the fact that it made sense didn't make it any less poignant. The author also managed to work in some great side stories, even one about Irishmen fighting in the Civil War, that seem random but were great none the less. We also get to mean Billy's Uncle Dan, which was very interesting, having him work a case along side the uncle that is portray equal parts his hero and the scary black sheep of the family. He lives up to both and the interactions really emphasized Billy's growth from a sheltered kid protected by his family in Boston to a great detective in his own right. I wasn't sure how much of this series I was going to read at first... I'm not a huge WWII buff, but I think after this one I'm in for the duration. |
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Dec 7, 2023 13:36:26 GMT -5
Finished another fantasy art book  Masterpieces of Fantasy Art put out by Taschen, but it's a slightly undersized volume and not one of their huge coffee table books. I couldn't resist a big thick fantasy art book that had that front cover plus a Moebius piece on the back cover. It's a great gallery of art, but overall I was slightly underwhelmed. It gives a brief overview of the history of fantasy illustration in the early chapters including a lot of pulp cover art, then spotlights several fantasy artists in later chapters including Frazetta, Vallejo, Bell, Giger, Whelan, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Moebius, Druillett, Rodney Matthews and others. However, the heft of the book is misleading, as each chapter is printed 3 times-once in English, once in German and once in French. Now each translation has different art samples, so there's plenty of art and the art isn't repeated, so there's that, but I paid for a lot of book I wasn't able to read and even if I could, it was already there in English, so it would have been 1/2 to 1/3 the size without the translated chapters (depending how much of the art it retained from those pages if it was just in English). If you are looking for a 1 book collection of fantasy art that provides a wide (but not deep) range of fantasy art and you don't already have other fantasy art books, it's not a bad start, and it's a beautiful package (as all Taschen books seem to be), but for me, it wasn't worth the money as I had a lot of the art in other books and the overviews didn't provide much I didn't already know. It's not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, just not the right book for me and where I am at as a fantasy art fan and collector. Much more for someone with a casual interest in the topic than someone already steeped in the genre. -M |
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Post by berkley on Dec 7, 2023 13:45:25 GMT -5
Finished another fantasy art book Masterpieces of Fantasy Art put out by Taschen, but it's a slightly undersized volume and not one of their huge coffee table books. I couldn't resist a big thick fantasy art book that had that front cover plus a Moebius piece on the back cover. It's a great gallery of art, but overall I was slightly underwhelmed. It gives a brief overview of the history of fantasy illustration in the early chapters including a lot of pulp cover art, then spotlights several fantasy artists in later chapters including Frazetta, Vallejo, Bell, Giger, Whelan, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Moebius, Druillett, Rodney Matthews and others. However, the heft of the book is misleading, as each chapter is printed 3 times-once in English, once in German and once in French. Now each translation has different art samples, so there's plenty of art and the art isn't repeated, so there's that, but I paid for a lot of book I wasn't able to read and even if I could, it was already there in English, so it would have been 1/2 to 1/3 the size without the translated chapters (depending how much of the art it retained from those pages if it was just in English). If you are looking for a 1 book collection of fantasy art that provides a wide (but not deep) range of fantasy art and you don't already have other fantasy art books, it's not a bad start, and it's a beautiful package (as all Taschen books seem to be), but for me, it wasn't worth the money as I had a lot of the art in other books and the overviews didn't provide much I didn't already know. It's not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, just not the right book for me and where I am at as a fantasy art fan and collector. Much more for someone with a casual interest in the topic than someone already steeped in the genre. -M
Great cover, one of my favourite Frazettas and also one of the best ERB-related paintings I've seen.Like most books of this kind, I'd want to leaf through it before taking the plunge and buying it, since I'm very picky about what kind of fantasy work I like. With Whelan and Vallejo, for example, there are some individual pieces I rate highly but others I have a strong dislike for, and if there were too many of those it would be a deal-killer for me.
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Dec 7, 2023 13:51:05 GMT -5
Finished another fantasy art book Masterpieces of Fantasy Art put out by Taschen, but it's a slightly undersized volume and not one of their huge coffee table books. I couldn't resist a big thick fantasy art book that had that front cover plus a Moebius piece on the back cover. It's a great gallery of art, but overall I was slightly underwhelmed. It gives a brief overview of the history of fantasy illustration in the early chapters including a lot of pulp cover art, then spotlights several fantasy artists in later chapters including Frazetta, Vallejo, Bell, Giger, Whelan, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Moebius, Druillett, Rodney Matthews and others. However, the heft of the book is misleading, as each chapter is printed 3 times-once in English, once in German and once in French. Now each translation has different art samples, so there's plenty of art and the art isn't repeated, so there's that, but I paid for a lot of book I wasn't able to read and even if I could, it was already there in English, so it would have been 1/2 to 1/3 the size without the translated chapters (depending how much of the art it retained from those pages if it was just in English). If you are looking for a 1 book collection of fantasy art that provides a wide (but not deep) range of fantasy art and you don't already have other fantasy art books, it's not a bad start, and it's a beautiful package (as all Taschen books seem to be), but for me, it wasn't worth the money as I had a lot of the art in other books and the overviews didn't provide much I didn't already know. It's not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, just not the right book for me and where I am at as a fantasy art fan and collector. Much more for someone with a casual interest in the topic than someone already steeped in the genre. -M Great cover, one of my favourite Frazettas and also one of the best ERB-related paintings I've seen.Like most books of this kind, I'd want to leaf through it before taking the plunge and buying it, since I'm very picky about what kind of fantasy work I like. With Whelan and Vallejo, for example, there are some individual pieces I rate highly but others I have a strong dislike for, and if there were too many of those it would be a deal-killer for me. It comes shrink wrapped, which would be an obstacle for that. I preordered it through my comic shop and there was nothing in the solicitation about it repeating chapters in 3 languages or I might have passed. For the price (it was about $50 before my discount) I felt I was cheated a little bit by that. If I knew ahead of time and still chose to make the purchase, that would be one thing, but paying that because it was a hefty book, but having 1/3 of the text content be original felt like a misdirect. -M |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 9, 2023 22:49:17 GMT -5
Lost Horizon
James Hilton
This is definitely not my usual read (I don't even really have a category for it here on good reads), but I picked up at a book sale a bit back for nostalgia.. this was the first book I was required to read in school I actually liked.
At this risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, back in the day in middle school and high school we had to read such weighty tomes as Grapes of Wrath, Les Miserables, Tale of Two Cities, and Moby Dick. 'Classics'. It's no wonder I never really read much for fun until I discovered Dragon Lance.. turn of the century classics are really just not for 12 year olds reading over a month or two.
In that company, Lost Horizon was a breath of fresh air to young me.. perhaps just because it was short.
Reading it now, I can see what makes it a classic. In Conway, we see the perfect epitome of the typical person of 1933.. scarred by war and worried that the worst was yet to come. Having a semi-magic monastery hidden away where no one could find you certainly could be some people's idea of paradise.. but also a coward's way out, the view we get from Mallinson.
The book argues the philosophy while telling a story, which is not an easy thing to do. The same thing bothered me now though that did when I read it a long time ago, and it was one of the few details I remembered... I won't say since it's the ending of the book, but I needed more explanation of WHY it happened that way. I think if the book was actually written from Conway's point of view, instead of someone passing on his story, it would have worked even better.
And while I'm still jealous my kids got to read things like Ender's Game, or just 'read a book' for their high school reading, if I had done that I likely would have missed out on this one, so I guess the old English teachers weren't TOTALLY wrong.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 14, 2023 12:52:32 GMT -5
I've been suffering some pretty severe reader's block. I did make it through a couple of books since I last posted. One took a long time...the other breezed by.
Don't Ask by Donald Westlake - This is the 8th Dortmunder book and the second one in a row I thought was about 1/3 too long. Honestly it just drug so bad and then in the third act it finally came together and felt like a Dortmunder book. Maybe I'm burnt out on this series. But I really think that Westlake made the conscious decision to write somewhat longer books for...reasons. And it isn't working. They also haven't had the same level of humor as the early entries. So I'm putting Dortmunder on hiatus for a while.
The Count of 9 by A. A. Fair - The Cool and Lam series have become my antidote for reader's block. I know that they are formula, but at this point in the series the formula is absolutely at its height. They are fun, breezy, fairly light reads that just get into your head. I read this in two sessions when I'd been struggling to be able to read anything at all. So you can say it was good.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 16, 2023 12:10:12 GMT -5
Black Ball
Theresa Runstedtler
This was an impulse grab from the new books section at the library... this is the generation of the game just before I was born, and I love good ABA stories.
The 1st half of the book was focused on the ABA and how it changed the game in the context of contracts, and was pretty interesting. Contrary to the title though, the author was pointing out racial discrimination in the NBA, and by its fans, not anything about the style changes. In fact, the focus (through a few very specific examples), was about how the white management discriminated against the black players.
While I definitely don't deny that is the case, the book did not make a good argument. The very focused examples and lack of context definitely diluted the authors message. For instance, the entire section on how cocaine was a problem in the league was focused on Bernard King, and just a brief mention of a couple other players.. no mention at all of David Thompson (the poster child in my mind for the era). It also did alot of saying the black players got treated differently without showing any examples.
Like when taking about fighting in the league.. the author made a good point about how such activity was acceptable in Hockey, but the didn't follow it through. One my earliest memories of basketball was the fight between Kevin McHale and Kurt Rambis (both white).. that would be a great example of the lack of punishment there as opposite to Kermit Washington or Daryl Dawkins (the focuses in the book) but it wasn't mentioned at all
Last, and certainly most important, how do you talk about 'Black Ball' and barely mention Bill Russell...he would be an ideal example for talking about a 'white ceiling' in management, but there was barely a mention. The author did talk about KC Jones supposedly getting blackballed after
losing the NBA finals.. but then I know he was the head coach for Boston later for some time, and they seemed to forget that, only mentioning he hired on as an assistant there because no one else would hire him.
Still, there was definitely some great stuff about the ABA/NBA feud and alot of legal details on the merger that were really interesting that I hadn't read before, so that was a plus.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 19, 2023 16:17:54 GMT -5
 The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
I haven't been reading a lot of SF of late. But I like Scalzi's work and this one caught my eye. So when Humble Bundle had a big Scalzi bundle I went ahead and got it. And I'm glad I did, because this is a super fun book. Not Redshirts level fun. But still really fun. This is fairly old-school SF. The science is...questionable in a number of places, but that's okay. The Big Bad is fairly well telegraphed. But mostly it doesn't matter because it's super fun SF with giant monsters and insects that want to suck all your bodily fluids and very large crabs. So...fun. |
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Dec 20, 2023 16:06:12 GMT -5
Latest read: Elric of Melnibone Pt. 1 of the Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock. Revisiting this for the first time in 15 or so years and quite enjoyed it. A lot packed into a slighter book than you get in modern fantasy. Just missed finishing this on Moorcock's birthday (had some other things going on earlier this week). Not surprising for me, I have been on a big sword & sorcery prose kick these last 6 months, but had been exploring a lot of more recent vintage stuff and stuff I hadn't read before, but had the urge to revisit some old favorites with Elric. I intend on reading the initial series as I don't think I've ever read past the first 3 before, but I will be mixing in some other stuff, new & old.  -M |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 20, 2023 23:45:39 GMT -5
That's definitely on my re-read list as well... I think it'll be the Alvin Maker series next, but maybe this after. rag and Bone (Billy Boyle #5) James Benn  Definitely the best in the series so far! Benn has some great insights (through the characters) of what life in war time might be like... the actors in the story have very logical, real motivations... all with the backdrop of the actual events that occurred. Kaz's development through these first few stories has been especially interesting... with the real life events depicted in this volume, it will be very interesting to see where he goes and does next. I also really like Major Cosgrove in this book. Spy-types in a non-spy novel very often are always just 1st order ends justify the means types, and that was not the case here. In fact, the guy that was like that was sacked... very refreshing. I'm really glad I stumbled upon this series, its not something I would have been likely to pick up with the cool covers catching my eye! |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 22, 2023 13:49:49 GMT -5
 Mac Raboy: Master of the Comics by Roger Hill
I've read a lot of these artist biographies from Twomorrows. And mostly you know what you're going to get. A long interview with the artist. A lot of artwork. Maybe a few interviews with contemporaries and maybe family. But with Mac Raboy, that initial interview was an absolute impossibility. Raboy was an intensely private person. There are less than a handful of known photos of him. And he also died, quite young, at age 53 in 1967. At that point comics fandom was just starting to track down the largely anonymous Golden Age artists. Not that Raboy was all that anonymous, since he was the artist on the Flash Gordon Sunday strip at the time, but it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway, because he wasn't going to give anyone interviews. For those who aren't comics nerds, Mac Raboy drew some of the most beautifully rendered comics from the 1940s through his death. His work on Captain Marvel, Jr., was simply gorgeous. He was also one of the very slowest artists in comic books at the time. He would work an entire day on one panel and then decide it wasn't good enough and erase the entire thing. As a result he had a number of assistants while at Fawcett who did most of the backgrounds in the Captain Marvel, Jr. stories. He also used a lot of photostats when he came up on deadlines. But his work was so good that his editors put up with it. He later did the Green Lama for Spark Publications and then took over Flash Gordon from Alex Raymond. Nobody but Raboy could have followed Raymond. Roger Hill conducted a number of interviews with Raboy's various assistants, with other folks who had worked for Fawcett and with Raboy's son. This is a great look at an amazing artist. And it's one that we really could only get from a publisher like Twomorrows. |
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Dec 23, 2023 21:46:39 GMT -5
Latest read: The Lazy Dungeon Master by Mike Shea  Mike is the mind behind Sly Flourish and the Lazy DM cottage industry. He runs a weekly podcast/youtube show called the Lazy GM Talk Show, and has published several books in the Lazy DM series and the Fantastic Adventures series. I usually check out the youtube version of the podcast while I am down doing laundry or sorting comics, and the books (which are mostly PDF or print on demand) had been on my radar, but I hadn't gotten any of them. Mike recently ran a Bundle of Holding sale (similar to a Humble Bundle, just done by a different company) and I picked up a bunch of the Lazy DM and Fantastic Adventures PDFs for just about $20. I am ore interested in some of the later volumes, where Mike has refined and developed his ideas more, and which are more relevant to current editions of the game, but I wanted to start at the beginning to see where it all started, so I read the initial Lazy DM volume over the course of a few days. It is an advice book on how to focus your time spent on prep when you don't have a lot of time to prep and don't want to waste time on inefficient tasks. It consists of advice on what to prioritize and what can often be a waste of time, some random tables to help in certain areas, and a series of interviews with many folks who DM frequently (or as a part of their job) on what they find to be helpful prep, not helpful prep/wastes of time, the balance of prep/improv in their games, horror stories about sessions sunk by lack of prep or overprep, etc. to give a pretty broad range of perspectives on the matter. I'm pretty good at prioritizing what I need to prep for my games, and lean towards/heavily on imrpov for a lot of things, but I do tend to overprep certain things and have been rethinking how I approach my games that last few months, especially with us on hiatus since I went in the hospital (which continues through the holidays and ends at the beginning of January), so I have been checking a number of books/articles/podcasts and such on these topics to provide fodder for thought an to challenge some of my assumptions about my approach. This volume was written in the 4E era and a lot pertains to that edition (or the 1E Pathfinder rules which were the main alternative at the time), so a lot is not quite relevant in the specifics, but the approaches and thought process still hold some interest and insights. It's a relatively quick read (only about 55-60 pages), but there's some good stuff in it, and a decent look into the minds of different DM/GMs. -M |
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Post by Batflunkie on Dec 25, 2023 19:42:21 GMT -5
Latest read: Elric of Melnibone Pt. 1 of the Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock. Revisiting this for the first time in 15 or so years and quite enjoyed it. A lot packed into a slighter book than you get in modern fantasy. Just missed finishing this on Moorcock's birthday (had some other things going on earlier this week). Not surprising for me, I have been on a big sword & sorcery prose kick these last 6 months, but had been exploring a lot of more recent vintage stuff and stuff I hadn't read before, but had the urge to revisit some old favorites with Elric. I intend on reading the initial series as I don't think I've ever read past the first 3 before, but I will be mixing in some other stuff, new & old. -M So far I've read "Elric Of Melnibone" and "The Final Programme" and it was interesting to see how those books paralleled with one another in different ways. I'm reading "The Jewel In The Skull" right now and it's probably my favorite of the three so far. I'm also kind of interested in delving into Corum I don't think I've been this interested a writer before like I am with Moorcock I'm also thinking of upgrading my old "Nelson Doubleday" release of Elric Saga 1 for the new modern edition that has an extra story that fits between "Elric Of Melnibone" and "Sailor Of The Seas Of Fate" called "Fortress Of The Pearl", but I honestly can't decide |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 25, 2023 23:05:23 GMT -5
Early Innings: A Documentary History of baseball 1825 - 1908
edited by Dean Sullivan
This is more a curated collections of articles than a book, when the editor comments on as far as their significance and why he included them. If you're looking for a narrative history, this book is not it.
It is super interesting though, showing how the game evolved from a trendy exercise fad to the national pastime. It also has quite a bit about the creation (and attempted challenge) of the reserve clause, which I didn't know much about previously. While some of the documents are a bit tiresome as far as legal minutae and the listing of attendees at meetings, quite a bit of it is great stuff... well worth it to read and as a reference.
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Post by Batflunkie on Dec 28, 2023 20:10:04 GMT -5
The Jewel In The Skull (1967) by Michael Moorcock  Set in a fantasy world of our own possible future, the book tells the story of Dorian Hawkmoon, a man enslaved by a tyrannical, colonial dictatorship under the flag of what was once Great Britain. They force upon him a black jewel that will kill him if he does not cooperate with them in their cause to overtake present day France and the lone hold out of Count Brass. But Hawkmoon is swayed to the cause of Count Brass and relents, hoping to free himself of the jewel's sinister powers Having read both Moorcock's "Elric Of Melnibone" and "The Final Programme", this is probably the one that I had enjoyed the most. I heard about it through a video by thelibraryladder covering Moorcock's Eternal Champion saga (and the many books therein) and I became intrigued by the premise. That being said, a lot of the elements that were talked about in the video of it taking place in a post-nuclear steam punk landscape were largely underplayed and were mostly just bits of flavor interspersed, which was good I think That being said, this is a very well written story that has an almost timeless quality about it that speaks volumes to Moorcock as a writer |
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