[Maark Abbott]

QuickTidal, on 10 June 2020 - 01:02 PM, said:

Reading ONE PIECE manga from the start. It's going to be a long journey, but I've already blitzed through the first 2 volumes in about an hour, so not too long. I thought I liked the anime of this story, but man the manga is even better!

Jeez man. That's one hell of a commitment.

Anyway what am I reading right now? My own second novel. For proof edits round one. Someone kill me I wanna die

[Tatterdemalion]

I just started Paternus: War of Gods by Dyrk Ashton, which is huge and gonna derail my Goodreads challenge. I'm waiting for a physical copy to come by mail so I can switch to it and then I'm going to start Swarm and Steel by Michael R. Fletcher on my kindle.

I recently read and enjoyed:
Rage of Dragons - Evan Winter
Faithless - Graham Austin-King

[Andorion]

Tatterdemalion, on 08 July 2020 - 03:37 AM, said:

I just started Paternus: War of Gods by Dyrk Ashton, which is huge and gonna derail my Goodreads challenge. I'm waiting for a physical copy to come by mail so I can switch to it and then I'm going to start Swarm and Steel by Michael R. Fletcher on my kindle.

I recently read and enjoyed:
Rage of Dragons - Evan Winter
Faithless - Graham Austin-King

Rage of Dragons is great.
For the moment I am concentrating on finishing my reread of Midnight Tides. I might join in on the forum reread later.

[End of Disc One]

Belly of the Bow, book 2 of K.J. Parker’s Fencer Trilogy

What the fuck did I just read

[Tsundoku]

End of Disc One, on 08 July 2020 - 11:07 AM, said:

Belly of the Bow, book 2 of K.J. Parker’s Fencer Trilogy

What the fuck did I just read

The worst uncle in the history of ever.

[Macros]

I still have it on my TRP.
But Malazan reread is really fucking with my trp

[QuickTidal]

In a bit of a marathon of reading, I finished my re-read of Dragonlance War Of Souls trilogy. There's a LOT to really like about it...and mostly it's the stuff that people who wanted more Chronicles didn't like...it pushes a lot of new characters forward into the spotlight, and does some challenging things to old ones...but it never felt overwrought. I liked that the new Solamnic Knight character isn't' just Sturm Brightblade 2.0....he's got his own personality and traits and I felt Weis and Hickman went out of their way to really make the new characters like Gerard shine.

I think my only problem with the entire trilogy boils down to this:

Spoiler

I liked Mina. I found the notion of someone who had basically been raised by Goldmoon who is inherently good, being swindled into the One God nonsense under Takhisis to be a truly interesting character choice for villain...but Silvanoshei comes off as a spoiled brat for the whole thing, including his undying, yet unrequited love for Mina...and he's the catalyst for all the bad that happens to the Silvanesti elves..and you can see that on every early page with him. So it kind of ruins any notion of Alhana having him buried in the Tomb of the Last Heroes as if he's worthy of that reverence...he's not. He was a foil for Mina and Takhisis...and while Weis and Hickman try to hide that, it stood out a mile to me.

Other than that, this was a wonderful and different series from both Chronicles and Legends. I was interested enough in the new characters to buy CONUNDRUM (about the titular gnome who hangs out at the Citadel of Light), WIZARDS OF THE CONCLAVE (about Jenna, Dalamar and everyone reacting to the loss of magic), and THE LIONESS (about Kerianseray and how she meets and marries Gilthas).

Anyways, I'm on an old D&D kick now, so I've decided to finally get into Faerûn with Forgotten Realms (AKA the D&D book series that Wizards of the Coast DIDN'T abandon) and have begun my journey with the most well known Drow in SFF, Drizzt....THE CRYSTAL SHARD is solid so far, light and fun. I LOVE Drizzt so far too...

[TheRetiredBridgeburner]

Will be interested to see what you make of Salvatore's books. I'm just not sure whether to give them a go - I like Dragonlance so the light and fun fluff aspect isn't necessarily a problem, but at the same time I'm nostalgic about Dragonlance so not sure how I'd feel about approaching such fluff new.

Also, I re-read War of Souls last year and agree with all that, particularly your point in the spoiler tags!

[Andorion]

Macros, on 08 July 2020 - 01:13 PM, said:

I still have it on my TRP.
But Malazan reread is really fucking with my trp

I really have to start Parker soon .
Either Fencer or Engineer

[T77]

QuickTidal, on 08 July 2020 - 01:18 PM, said:

In a bit of a marathon of reading, I finished my re-read of Dragonlance War Of Souls trilogy. There's a LOT to really like about it...and mostly it's the stuff that people who wanted more Chronicles didn't like...it pushes a lot of new characters forward into the spotlight, and does some challenging things to old ones...but it never felt overwrought. I liked that the new Solamnic Knight character isn't' just Sturm Brightblade 2.0....he's got his own personality and traits and I felt Weis and Hickman went out of their way to really make the new characters like Gerard shine.

I think my only problem with the entire trilogy boils down to this:

Spoiler

I liked Mina. I found the notion of someone who had basically been raised by Goldmoon who is inherently good, being swindled into the One God nonsense under Takhisis to be a truly interesting character choice for villain...but Silvanoshei comes off as a spoiled brat for the whole thing, including his undying, yet unrequited love for Mina...and he's the catalyst for all the bad that happens to the Silvanesti elves..and you can see that on every early page with him. So it kind of ruins any notion of Alhana having him buried in the Tomb of the Last Heroes as if he's worthy of that reverence...he's not. He was a foil for Mina and Takhisis...and while Weis and Hickman try to hide that, it stood out a mile to me.

Other than that, this was a wonderful and different series from both Chronicles and Legends. I was interested enough in the new characters to buy CONUNDRUM (about the titular gnome who hangs out at the Citadel of Light), WIZARDS OF THE CONCLAVE (about Jenna, Dalamar and everyone reacting to the loss of magic), and THE LIONESS (about Kerianseray and how she meets and marries Gilthas).

Anyways, I'm on an old D&D kick now, so I've decided to finally get into Faerûn with Forgotten Realms (AKA the D&D book series that Wizards of the Coast DIDN'T abandon) and have begun my journey with the most well known Drow in SFF, Drizzt....THE CRYSTAL SHARD is solid so far, light and fun. I LOVE Drizzt so far too...

The Crystal Shard by Salvatore is book 4. Is that where you started? I've only read the first 3.

[QuickTidal]

TheRetiredBridgeburner, on 08 July 2020 - 01:22 PM, said:

Will be interested to see what you make of Salvatore's books. I'm just not sure whether to give them a go - I like Dragonlance so the light and fun fluff aspect isn't necessarily a problem, but at the same time I'm nostalgic about Dragonlance so not sure how I'd feel about approaching such fluff new.

I've read some of his Demon Wars stuff and I quite liked it, and I find he does action scenes REALLY well.

And yes, I was 100% a Dragonlance kid too, so the nostalgia for that series is strong in me.

It's actually been looking into Dragonlance and the issues with TSR and WotC and how and why it became defunct that lead me to trying FORGOTTEN REALMS...

Insider baseball for anyone who cares:

Spoiler

So apparently, When Wizards of the Coast made the initial Dragonlance series, it was WAY more of a hit than they had bargained for. People LOVED the books. The problem was that the books were never supposed to be the Hit....they wanted to sell their D&D game modules, not a series of fiction. The fiction was supposed to just enhance the world for those playing the game. The problem was that Hickman & Weis hit their books out of the park and the books sold hardcore, but the game modules after a while, did not. TSR/Wizards of the Coast who owned it all tried to get new Modules going and wanted Weis and Hickman to write books that helped sell them. They sort of did their own thing (LEGENDS) and those sold bananas too....so WotC could not exactly tell them to walk. Then when they wanted to do the 5E module (a module for D&D that I heard people LOATHED) they asked W&H to write a series that lent itself to those rules...and they did, but War of Souls didn't sell quite as well as CHRONICLES or LEGENDS...and from what I understand this was because Dragonlance is one continuous story, in a fairly small continent (Ansalon), in a world that every attempt to expand Krynn, like the continent of Taladas, failed miserably. So there were only so many stories you could tell in Ansalon without repeating yourself. Dragonlance, was too small and as such could never become a juggernaut book series to hold itself up with simply not enough stories to tell. The fact that the module associated with it didn't sell either, didn't help matters.

So by around 2007 or so, WotC thinking people wanted what they loved to begin with just more of it...they hired Weis & Hickman to write the Lost Chronicles to return to the characters who made DL famous in the first place and tell in between stories. Which didn't work. I mean DL fans obviously bought it...but it was not the success they'd planned, and it was around the time that they published the last book DRAGONS OF THE HOURGLASS MAGE that WotC dropped the Dragonlance portion of the D&D world.

Conversely, Forgotten Realms is was established as a HUGE and diverse world with different authors tackling different continents and places from the outset...like I've heard that when Salvatore was asked to write for FR, he saw a massive map of Faerûn and saw a list of the places where people were writing content, and he saw a tiny portion in the top corner of mountains and ice and barren plains and was like "What's going on up here?" and they told him "nothing, it's just Tundra" and he replied "Okay, let me have that slice of the map, I'll write stories that take place there"...and that place turned into Icewind Dale. So from the get-go Forgotten Realms strove to be a wide and varied world where you would never feasibly run out of stories to tell. They might overlap in places and some characters might drop in on others you know, but the world was massive enough that they'd never have to. So while the magic, species and physics of the world would remain constant, the tales you could tell would be vast.

So FR lasted, and DL eventually ran out of steam simply because of the amount of stories you could tell in each world and have it be viable. If that makes sense?

I'l let you know how I enjoy the FR books, but I already enjoy Salvatore so that may have a bias. After this I might check out Erin M. Evans books about a female Tiefling protagonist.

Oh, and I've also been warned off anything by the guy who started FR, Ed Greenwood as his stuff is reportedly really bad...but a bunch of other authors have been praised, like Salvatore, Paul Kemp and others.

T77, on 08 July 2020 - 01:54 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 08 July 2020 - 01:18 PM, said:

Anyways, I'm on an old D&D kick now, so I've decided to finally get into Faerûn with Forgotten Realms (AKA the D&D book series that Wizards of the Coast DIDN'T abandon) and have begun my journey with the most well known Drow in SFF, Drizzt....THE CRYSTAL SHARD is solid so far, light and fun. I LOVE Drizzt so far too...

The Crystal Shard by Salvatore is book 4. Is that where you started? I've only read the first 3.

The Homeland/Menzoberanzzan books didn't interest me as much (and they were actually written later than the Icewind Dale books; they just chronologically take place earlier), so I read the summaries of them as I don't enjoy books that take place entirely in caves/underground as I have trouble picturing the locale...the story in them seemed interesting based on those summaries, but I'm getting way more out of the Icewind Dale books because they concern more than just the Drow.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 08 July 2020 - 02:02 PM

[T77]

QuickTidal, on 08 July 2020 - 01:55 PM, said:

TheRetiredBridgeburner, on 08 July 2020 - 01:22 PM, said:

Will be interested to see what you make of Salvatore's books. I'm just not sure whether to give them a go - I like Dragonlance so the light and fun fluff aspect isn't necessarily a problem, but at the same time I'm nostalgic about Dragonlance so not sure how I'd feel about approaching such fluff new.

I've read some of his Demon Wars stuff and I quite liked it, and I find he does action scenes REALLY well.

And yes, I was 100% a Dragonlance kid too, so the nostalgia for that series is strong in me.

It's actually been looking into Dragonlance and the issues with TSR and WotC and how and why it became defunct that lead me to trying FORGOTTEN REALMS...

Insider baseball for anyone who cares:

Spoiler

So apparently, When Wizards of the Coast made the initial Dragonlance series, it was WAY more of a hit than they had bargained for. People LOVED the books. The problem was that the books were never supposed to be the Hit....they wanted to sell their D&D game modules, not a series of fiction. The fiction was supposed to just enhance the world for those playing the game. The problem was that Hickman & Weis hit their books out of the park and the books sold hardcore, but the game modules after a while, did not. TSR/Wizards of the Coast who owned it all tried to get new Modules going and wanted Weis and Hickman to write books that helped sell them. They sort of did their own thing (LEGENDS) and those sold bananas too....so WotC could not exactly tell them to walk. Then when they wanted to do the 5E module (a module for D&D that I heard people LOATHED) they asked W&H to write a series that lent itself to those rules...and they did, but War of Souls didn't sell quite as well as CHRONICLES or LEGENDS...and from what I understand this was because Dragonlance is one continuous story, in a fairly small continent (Ansalon), in a world that every attempt to expand Krynn, like the continent of Taladas, failed miserably. So there were only so many stories you could tell in Ansalon without repeating yourself. Dragonlance, was too small and as such could never become a juggernaut book series to hold itself up with simply not enough stories to tell. The fact that the module associated with it didn't sell either, didn't help matters.

So by around 2007 or so, WotC thinking people wanted what they loved to begin with just more of it...they hired Weis & Hickman to write the Lost Chronicles to return to the characters who made DL famous in the first place and tell in between stories. Which didn't work. I mean DL fans obviously bought it...but it was not the success they'd planned, and it was around the time that they published the last book DRAGONS OF THE HOURGLASS MAGE that WotC dropped the Dragonlance portion of the D&D world.

Conversely, Forgotten Realms is was established as a HUGE and diverse world with different authors tackling different continents and places from the outset...like I've heard that when Salvatore was asked to write for FR, he saw a massive map of Faerûn and saw a list of the places where people were writing content, and he saw a tiny portion in the top corner of mountains and ice and barren plains and was like "What's going on up here?" and they told him "nothing, it's just Tundra" and he replied "Okay, let me have that slice of the map, I'll write stories that take place there"...and that place turned into Icewind Dale. So from the get-go Forgotten Realms strove to be a wide and varied world where you would never feasibly run out of stories to tell. They might overlap in places and some characters might drop in on others you know, but the world was massive enough that they'd never have to. So while the magic, species and physics of the world would remain constant, the tales you could tell would be vast.

So FR lasted, and DL eventually ran out of steam simply because of the amount of stories you could tell in each world and have it be viable. If that makes sense?

I'l let you know how I enjoy the FR books, but I already enjoy Salvatore so that may have a bias. After this I might check out Erin M. Evans books about a female Tiefling protagonist.

Oh, and I've also been warned off anything by the guy who started FR, Ed Greenwood as his stuff is reportedly really bad...but a bunch of other authors have been praised, like Salvatore, Paul Kemp and others.

T77, on 08 July 2020 - 01:54 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 08 July 2020 - 01:18 PM, said:

Anyways, I'm on an old D&D kick now, so I've decided to finally get into Faerûn with Forgotten Realms (AKA the D&D book series that Wizards of the Coast DIDN'T abandon) and have begun my journey with the most well known Drow in SFF, Drizzt....THE CRYSTAL SHARD is solid so far, light and fun. I LOVE Drizzt so far too...

The Crystal Shard by Salvatore is book 4. Is that where you started? I've only read the first 3.

The Homeland/Menzoberanzzan books didn't interest me as much (and they were actually written later than the Icewind Dale books; they just chronologically take place earlier), so I read the summaries of them as I don't enjoy books that take place entirely in caves/underground as I have trouble picturing the locale...the story in them seemed interesting based on those summaries, but I'm getting way more out of the Icewind Dale books because they concern more than just the Drow.

Yeah, they were just OK. I had no desire to read further, but maybe I'll give it a shot. I've read a few Salvatore books and I find them just slightly better than mediocre. I prefer the Weiss and Hickman books, the few that I've read.

[JPK]

Since I'm skipping this month's reread of RotCG, I'm taking the opportunity to jump into Kellanved's Reach and get caught back up. I'm super excited cause of all the (mostly) positive buzz you have all given this one.

[End of Disc One]

Tsundoku, on 08 July 2020 - 12:50 PM, said:

End of Disc One, on 08 July 2020 - 11:07 AM, said:

Belly of the Bow, book 2 of K.J. Parker’s Fencer Trilogy

What the fuck did I just read

I had heard that Parker was dark, but I didn't really believe it until now. It's weird, these books could almost be PG-13. There are no F-bombs or graphic sex scenes, and they're fairly lighthearted. And then this happens.

[amphibian]

I think skipping the Menzoberrazen books is a bad idea if you like Drizzt and the Icewind Dale books. I think they're actually better than the Icewind books.

[QuickTidal]

amphibian, on 08 July 2020 - 05:20 PM, said:

I think skipping the Menzoberrazen books is a bad idea if you like Drizzt and the Icewind Dale books. I think they're actually better than the Icewind books.

I read the summaries, and I disagree? I got the gist of them, but I LOATHE under dark stuff. I'm happy with how I've handled it.

Not to say those books aren't good, I just have very little interest in Drizzt underground with his people and reading a summary of why and how he left, is fine for me.

[Tiste Simeon]

Andorion, on 08 July 2020 - 01:50 PM, said:

Macros, on 08 July 2020 - 01:13 PM, said:

I still have it on my TRP.
But Malazan reread is really fucking with my trp

I really have to start Parker soon .
Either Fencer or Engineer

I'm loving 16 WAYS TO DEFEND A WALLED CITY at the moment so I'm willing to go for other stuff he's written.

[Andorion]

Tiste Simeon, on 08 July 2020 - 05:32 PM, said:

Andorion, on 08 July 2020 - 01:50 PM, said:

Macros, on 08 July 2020 - 01:13 PM, said:

I still have it on my TRP.
But Malazan reread is really fucking with my trp

I really have to start Parker soon .
Either Fencer or Engineer

I'm loving 16 WAYS TO DEFEND A WALLED CITY at the moment so I'm willing to go for other stuff he's written.

I loved that and Folding Knife, so I think I will like the rest.

His basic approach to storytelling and worldbuilding works for me.

[Abyss]

Just Finished book 5 of Campbell's LOST FLEET: BEYOND THE FRONTIER and thus, the series.
Very satisfying series... min one awesome space battle per book, usually two or more. The last two books' engagements were ridiculously rivetting.
Campbell worked in way more worldbuilding and character dev this time and it utterly paid off. If you read and enjoyed LOST FLEET, i reco this.


Now a chapter into Shannen Chakarabortay's Daevabad trilo bk 3, EMPIRE OF GOLD, earbook.
It's SO. DAMN. GOOD.

[Andorion]

Abyss, on 09 July 2020 - 02:35 AM, said:

Just Finished book 5 of Campbell's LOST FLEET: BEYOND THE FRONTIER and thus, the series.
Very satisfying series... min one awesome space battle per book, usually two or more. The last two books' engagements were ridiculously rivetting.
Campbell worked in way more worldbuilding and character dev this time and it utterly paid off. If you read and enjoyed LOST FLEET, i reco this.


Now a chapter into Shannen Chakarabortay's Daevabad trilo bk 3, EMPIRE OF GOLD, earbook.
It's SO. DAMN. GOOD.

I loved Beyond the Frontier as well. Great continuation, well imagined aliens
How would you rate the Daevabad series as a whole? been meaning to take a look at it