What are you reading?

[Welleran]

And I agree, Ellison is a douchenozzle.

Don't get me wrong. I like Harlan. He's certainly got real strong opinions and obviously isn't afraid to express them strongly. In most cases, I think it's pretty refreshing. For one, he's a really staunch defended of other writers and isn't afraid to take on everyone from Gene Roddenberry to the entire SFWA when he feels great writers aren't getting their due. A whole bunch of the classic writers we love probably would never have received a lifetime achievement award before their deaths without Ellison sticking his neck out and raising an unholy stink about it. That's admirable. He's also come out and lambasted really horrible writers like Mercedes Lackey and R.A. Salvatore who so obviously deserved it. That's pretty admirable too.

But yeah, he could probably show a lot more tact when dealing with fans. Not everyone can be Isaac Asimov I guess.

Good points. Very silvery lining if you.

[grodog]

I finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring aloud with Henry tonight: we ended the book with the departure of Frodo and Sam across the Anduin to the eastern shores, and toward Mordor, while the rest of the Fellowship runs hither and thither upon Amon Hen seeking the missing Frodo....

Henry's very interested in the Elder Days, so I'm not sure we'll pick up with The Two Towers---we may instead jump back into the First Age and The Silmarillion. We'll see!

[Falconer]

IMO The Book of Lost Tales is the way to go, not The Silmarillion.

[grodog]

IMO The Book of Lost Tales is the way to go, not The Silmarillion.

Please tell me more, Philip! It has been at least 25 years since I've read the BoLT1.

[Falconer]

I have long felt that

‘The Silmarillion’ is to ‘The Lord of the Rings Appendix’
as
The Book of Lost Tales is to The Lord of the Rings

I have come to believe that BoLT and LotR are Tolkien’s two great works. BoLT is a truly readable book with a lot of heart and a lot of story; it is the rich mine of Tolkien’s imagination, which he continually for the rest of his life went back to and mined for virtually all of his fiction except for LotR. The Silmarillion works on the level of worldbuilding, but that’s pretty much it. BoLT is where the characters and stories really come to life.

I read BoLT aloud to my wife during her first pregnancy, and the words really dance off the page. It is great for reading aloud. It’s energetic and fun. It’s a bit of a “whimsically archaic” style which isn’t, to me, inaccessible for all that. You really get to know and like the characters, here, including the Valar who are the main subject of the first half.

Of course there are areas of the Elder Days that Tolkien fleshed out much later in his life. In writing ‘The Silmarillion’ he would actually expand the narrative into a much fuller storytelling style when exploring these new subjects, and when he returned to subjects already covered in BoLT he would contract again into summary style. Unfortunately, the 1977 Silmarillion cuts out these longer narratives in order to keep the summary style consistent. Therefore, the significant additions to BoLT can really be found in Morgoth’s Ring (e.g., ‘Finwë and Míriel’) and The War of the Jewels (e.g., ‘The Wanderings of Húrin’).

In reading BoLT to my wife, I interspersed some of those missing narratives. Additionally, I replaced BoLT’s version of ‘The Tale of Turambar’ with the later novel-length The Children of Húrin. However, I now feel that all of these additions tend to be stylistically dry, melancholy, and cerebral, and as such aren’t necessary and don’t improve on BoLT, which, at least on this first go around, is more than fine as-is. I would now recommend leaving those later writings for later, more in-depth reading on his own, if he is so inclined.

Just my two cents!

[Kellri]

Just finished the first Thieves' World anthology. I've read it before, as a teenager, but remembered next to nothing about it. Now I'm on the second book, Tales of the Vulgar Unicorn.

Some thoughts about the first book -

1. Most of the stories seemed pretty solid swords and sorcery tales. I especially enjoyed The Gate of the Flying Knives by Poul Anderson (apparently originally written in the 50s and not as a Thieves' World story at all).
2. Once you know Andrew J. Offutt made most of his money writing pseudonymous porn everything about the story Shadowspawn starts to make sense. At times it reads like he really, really wanted to diverge into a Penthouse forum type thing and only barely managed to restrain himself. The plot isn't bad (pretty good actually) but some of the prose verges on terrible.
3. I didn't read the Marion Zimmer Bradley story. Call me a prude, but I just don't want to read anything by someone who sexually abused her own children for years while also posing as a feminist icon. Fuck that shit.
4. The essay "The Making of Thieves World" was pointless. It came off as more of an excuse for Asprin to name-drop all the more famous writers he knew than anything else. I notice he's got another essay in Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn, and I'll probably skip that too.
5. In the Chaosium Thieves' World boxed set, Asprin notes that he both followed the FRP scene and was a player and gamemaster. More than a few things about the setting (in the anthology) seem to point to familiar D&D tropes. Generally I mean that in a good way, not a R.A. Salvatore writes about the Forgotten Realms way if you get what I mean. The stories mostly hold up as decent short stories first with some elements that appear to have been adapted from early D&D.

I'm midway through the Phillip Jose Farmer story "Spiders of the Purple Mage" in Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn and that story fucking rocks. It just may be one of the finest dungeon crawl stories I've ever read. Again, a number of elements seem to point to D&D for me, particularly how illusionary magic is handled.

Once I'm done with the whole thing I'll post more thoughts.

[Wheggi]

My main memory of the Dumarest series is that I was personally given shit by Harlan Ellison for buying them. It was at a SF/Fantasy specialty bookstore in the Sherman Oaks, sometime around the turn of the century. He'd possibly done a reading/signing a few hours earlier but at the time I was there was just sitting around ranting to whoever would listen. I was browsing and spotted a set of 6 or so Dumarest books in the used bin and when I went to the counter to buy them he, of course, lit into my choice of reading material until the cashier defused the tension with a joke or two about whether Dumarest ever actually made it to earth or not. Not wanting to get into it with him I just said something like "yeah, I like the heavy stuff" and left with my purchase. Unsurprisingly, that store went out of business a few months later.

Dangerous Visions was my favorite speculative fiction bookstore. Pure awesome, especially on the horror front. And it was a shame H.E. frequented the place, because he is such an asshole. However, lots of other great writers stopped by as well, notably Clive Barker, Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury, Dennis Etchison and Jerry Pournelle.

As time permits, I'm currently reading Back to the Front, a visual history of Metallica's Master of Puppets album and tour.

- Wheggi

[grodog]

Just finished the first Thieves' World anthology. I've read it before, as a teenager, but remembered next to nothing about it. Now I'm on the second book, Tales of the Vulgar Unicorn.

I reread the first three to five books every 7-12 years or so, and generally enjoy them. They do hold up well, I think.

I'm midway through the Phillip Jose Farmer story "Spiders of the Purple Mage" in Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn and that story fucking rocks. It just may be one of the finest dungeon crawl stories I've ever read. Again, a number of elements seem to point to D&D for me, particularly how illusionary magic is handled.

PJF just rocks in general =)

[Matthew]

3. I didn't read the Marion Zimmer Bradley story. Call me a prude, but I just don't want to read anything by someone who sexually abused her own children for years while also posing as a feminist icon. Fuck that shit.

Yikes! That revelation passed me by.

[Kellri]

Yeah...it's pretty horrific. Her daughter explained her hesitation to come forward earlier on the fact that her mother was so revered as a feminist author and she didn't want to destroy that. Another real distasteful thing about MZB was that for years she allowed, and even encouraged, fan-fction in her Darkover universe - right up until it became obvious she had pretty much plagiarized one such fan-written novel without giving any kind of credit (or cash) whatsoever to the person who wrote it. Predictably, MZB immediately (and not a little bit ironically) decided she would no longer approve of any fan-fiction. So yeah...I just don't like her one bit, and I'll admit that has absolutely nothing to do with her writing per se. However, unlike some other authors I don't much care for, when it's revealed you've been sexually molesting children I'm just not going to read anymore of your shit, period.

[Matthew]

Something about her writing never quite sat exactly right with me, but I never would have guessed this. I read Troy and Mists of Avalon in my late teens, and remember enjoying the former a great deal and the latter somewhat less so. Naturally, I will not be recommending them to anybody in the future, though. Definitely puts Lovecraft's failings into perspective.

Further discussion about Lovecraft has been split into its own thread. —Moderator

[T. Foster]

I didn't know about this stuff until just now, but even before this came out (in 2014?) it was already well known that she was a total creep. There were stories about how she used to seduce young geek boys at cons, and her husband was arrested for child molestation back in the 90s.

I never read any of her novels, and definitely won't be doing so now.

[Flambeaux]

I've got a stats textbook and a marketing textbook for school, along with the ancillary class readings, David Mamet's Theater (for my own sanity), and we're reading Ember Falls by S.D. Smith to the kids at bedtime.

I recommend Ember Falls and its predecessor The Green Ember for the young and young at heart interested in adventure stories involving anthropomorphic bunnies wielding swords. It reminds me in some ways of Watership Down and in others of Redwall while being distinct from both.

I finally finished The Shores of Tripoli, which I mentioned above. I can recommend that, too. It's good. Not quite O'Brian-level quality, but shows promise. But definitely not as juvenile as Forester's Hornblower.

All my literate kids are tearing through more books a day than I can keep up with, many of them favorites that get reread. We keep an average of 60 items checked out from the local library in addition to our extensive collections.

Number 1 Son, read Starship Troopers over Christmas, and is on a reread of LotR, having recently reread A Princess of Mars. So he's reading good stuff.

[francisca]

1. Most of the stories seemed pretty solid swords and sorcery tales. I especially enjoyed The Gate of the Flying Knives by Poul Anderson (apparently originally written in the 50s and not as a Thieves' World story at all).

Yeah, I enjoyed that, too. I generally enjoy his work.

2. Once you know Andrew J. Offutt made most of his money writing pseudonymous porn everything about the story Shadowspawn starts to make sense. At times it reads like he really, really wanted to diverge into a Penthouse forum type thing and only barely managed to restrain himself. The plot isn't bad (pretty good actually) but some of the prose verges on terrible.

Ah. And now I know. That makes perfect sense. I really didn't care for that story, and now I know why.

I'm just going to say I agree with the rest of your post.

[grodog]

1. Most of the stories seemed pretty solid swords and sorcery tales. I especially enjoyed The Gate of the Flying Knives by Poul Anderson (apparently originally written in the 50s and not as a Thieves' World story at all).

Yeah, I enjoyed that, too. I generally enjoy his work.

Apparently there are at least four Cappen Varra stories penned by Anderson:

- "The Valor of Cappen Varra" (1957) - short story - first published in Fantastic Universe Science Fiction magazine, and available for free for the Kindle
- "The Gate of the Flying Knives" (in Thieves World #1)
- "Fairy Gold" (which apparently mentions CV but isn't about him per se), from his collection The Unicorn Trade
- "The Lady of the Winds" - from Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine anniversary issue (Oct/Nov 2001)

Some more info/context @ http://web.archive.org/web/201006190104 ... ople_c.htm and http://poulandersonappreciation.blogspo ... en%20Varra