Nate > Recent Status Updates

Not 100 pages in and we've been to dark ages Sweden, Spain (Moorish and Christian), Ireland and Denmark. The language is very saga-y and so a lot is being done. Also, Blue-Tongue and Red-Jowl are awesome sword names.

I love the Native American flavor I get from the stuff with Redmask and the Awl'dan...I wish him the best of luck in slaying the Letherii invaders. Really, Erikson's stuff seems more akin to an antiquity setting in the Americas or Africa more than anything--a lovely change of pace from the usual medieval western Europe base in fantasy.

Back in Lether...struggling to remember all the stuff from Midnight Tides. Also, every epic fantasy needs a creepy fuck in a mask (can be male or female.)

I wish I wasn't being such an ADD-ridden spastic about reading multiple books...I have built myself a brick prison.

Man, Philip kind of sounds like a prick...especially when he's haranguing poor young Alexander about singing so well.

Where is the Feared? How did he not show up in that awesome battle?

Giant two-story mall in my city without a single bookstore. What the fuck...

The first perpetrator of the Moravian massacre gets his dick cut off while his wife watches in one of the very few instances of justice in this book.

I've been in a reading rut...hoping Abercrombie breaks me loose.

Ugh...I love McCullough but if we can get three pages of Rufus teaching Sulla how to manipulate his daughter we can get a decent battle scene.

Having a bit of trouble finishing this one. <spoiler>BECAUSE WOLF DIED.</spoiler>

It's amazing how the Romans managed to consistently win wars when they were constantly bickering and fighting with each other while waging them. The constant undermining and crying to the Senate brings back very strong memories of the Cimbrian War from the first book.

This is a horrible kind of book to read after several beers. But I'm gonna do it.

Man...just when I start to think the old Sulla is gone he reassures me by launching into a misogynist tirade and follows it up by viciously beating the shit out of his daughter. What a guy!

Not really sure who's perpetrated the grossest crimes yet between the colonists and the Shawnee. The whole "imprisoning and shooting an enemy leader who's come unarmed to formally declare war" thing was pretty bad, though.

Hard to pin down what gives this book such an odd flavor. The clash of the modern and the ancient, the rawness of the setting, the matter-of-fact brutality...very compelling and disturbing stuff. It's made more realistically alien by the fact that what I know about Ohio is that it exists.

McCullough's liberal sprinkling of self-drawn maps, character portraits and diagrams of everything from the Well of the Comitia to how a toga was worn is priceless. Such a gifted woman!

The gate opened, a man slid round it and walked toward him. Quite a little fellow compared to his own splendid height, the King was pleased to see--but very well put together. The Roman was clad in a plain steel cuirass shaped to his torzh

Soap operatic melodrama with the Caepios and the Druses...Caepii? Drusii? I really don't understand Latin at all. Anyways, this should be really lame but it's awesome.

Amparo and her "exquisite breasts" need to honestly go away. I'm fairly certain that her only purpose in this book is to provide something for Mattias to have sex with. It's mystifying, because Carla is proof Willocks can write women with true depth and purpose. But yeah...other than that, great book thus far.

Marius travels from Rome to eastern Anatolia to tell King Mithridates VI to fuck off, the Italian Allies chafe under the yoke and Sulla schemes, lusts and poisons in Rome.

McCullough continues to make a great deal of Caesar even at this point (he's two.) He has a creepy St. Alia of the Knife vibe about him.

God, Amparo's whole "child of the spirits" routine is really boring and aggravating.

Sharpe seems to have committed his most douchey and Flashmanesque act in this one.

This book is really good. I'm stumped as to how it hasn't been adapted for TV or film yet...but that's probably good considering the past King adaptions.

I really don't think I've read a book this soaked in every conceivable bodily fluid since Aztec.

I love Wolf already. Poor guy's scared of trucks :(

Barely two hundred pages in and there's a fast-growing list of world-class King creeps. Osmund is gross.

Switching to the audiobook. This is my first one and I'm digging the reader. Every character seems to have their own timbre.

Very excited for another brick from Uncle Stephen. This is my second Straub after Ghost Story. The glimpses of the Territories have been awesome.