Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy" discussion
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What are you currently reading?
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Aug 07, 2021 01:59PM

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Never heard of it. Is it recent?"
No idea. It might be a new YA or something. Dystopian maybe?

Never heard of it. Is it recent?"
I heard it's a rip off of Terry Brooks.
Al wrote: "I heard it's a rip off of Terry Brooks."
Of course Brooks is just ripping off Dennis McKiernan.
Of course Brooks is just ripping off Dennis McKiernan.
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S.wagenaar wrote: "The Bull Chief by Chris Carlson (Robert Holdstock)."
Enjoy it, I sure am.
Enjoy it, I sure am.
Decided to do a dive into Appendix N with Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East. (I read some number of the Swords and Lost Swords books back in high school, but at that point I didn't realize they were continuations of an earlier trilogy.)
And, having finished Empire of the East, I went to something completely different: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, which I read multiple times in high school & maybe college, but haven't picked up in probably 30+ years. And I'm liking it!

The Hornblower series is good, solid adventure-story fun!
Jason wrote: "The Hornblower series is good, solid adventure-story fun!"
Yep! It doesn't scale the heights of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, but it's also, dare I say, quite a bit more accessible. (But now I'm reminded that I need to reread Aubrey/Maturin one of these decades.)
A brief digression: A couple of years ago I was visiting my childhood hometown and stopped by the public library. This is a new library -- they tore down the one I remember back in about 1995 and built a brand new building; admittedly much nicer, but I still miss the weird old building I used to go to. Anyway, I was wandering through the shelves and I found two books that were the same physical copies I used to check out when I was young; one of them was The Indomitable Hornblower: Commodore Hornblower, Lord Hornblower & Hornblower in the West Indies.
Yep! It doesn't scale the heights of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, but it's also, dare I say, quite a bit more accessible. (But now I'm reminded that I need to reread Aubrey/Maturin one of these decades.)
A brief digression: A couple of years ago I was visiting my childhood hometown and stopped by the public library. This is a new library -- they tore down the one I remember back in about 1995 and built a brand new building; admittedly much nicer, but I still miss the weird old building I used to go to. Anyway, I was wandering through the shelves and I found two books that were the same physical copies I used to check out when I was young; one of them was The Indomitable Hornblower: Commodore Hornblower, Lord Hornblower & Hornblower in the West Indies.

Yep! It doesn't scale the heights of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, but it's also, dare I say, quite..."
Last time I visited "home," I stopped by the town's new library and had a similar experience to yours. It's a nice and very useful modern building with plenty of space and activity rooms...however, lol...I liked the cranky old brick building with bad lighting and the dungeon-like basement. There wasn't even a sour-faced old fart shushing anyone at the new place!
Our library was fascinating because (although I didn't know this when I was young) it had started life about a hundred years ago as a little Carnegie library; and then in the late 60s they'd wrapped and entirely hidden that Carnegie core inside a very 60s steel & glass structure, so the interior had all of these weird stairways and half-levels and things that only started to make sense when you understood the history.

That is cool!
Just wrapped up A Sorcerer of Atlantis: with A Prince in the Kingdom of Ghosts. Not bad, especially if you like Leiber and/or some humor in your S&S. The publication history in this may be interesting for those readers wanting more Brimm and Snoori tales.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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I mention this Joni Mitchell bio here in a fantasy group only because I discovered in the book that she wrote about LotR in some of her early songs. She did so perhaps a little more subtly than Zeppelin did on "Ramble On," but it's there in the lyrics.

Next I'm going to take a bit of a break from fantasy and read some stuff from the Hard Case Crime imprint.
I'm nearing the end of my Hornblowing -- just started Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, the final book in the series (well, there's also a collection of random Hornblower short stories that I've never read before, so that will really be the end of my reading; but this book is the end of his story).

Highly recommend it - it's a very fun read.
Finished Hornblower and am revisiting my all-time favorite fictional world, Tekumel, with The Man of Gold by M.A.R. Barker.
Finished Flamesong (sequel to The Man of Gold) and started Foundation since the TV series drops ... is it Friday?
(I'm just going to read the original Foundation trilogy, though -- none of the prequels or sequels or the other Asimov books that got retconned into the series.)
(I'm just going to read the original Foundation trilogy, though -- none of the prequels or sequels or the other Asimov books that got retconned into the series.)

Rowe was, and I perhaps still is, a D&D player who felt like the game's combat mechanics were lacking. So he did it a deep dive into medieval fighting techniques. So far, this is full of very specific detail regarding the weapons of the era and how they were used. Might be of interest to S&S types, if they're looking for in depth analysis on the topic.


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Big Magic by Eliabeth Gilbert
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
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The Averoigne Legacy
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