The semi-official description of Dope Stars Inc. is that they are an Italian industrial rock band. Personally I’m not exactly sure what I would categorise them under – at least the Italian part is accurate.
From a self published author to a very much published author with Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan. Another one of the books Jonas has been trying to get me to read for years now, Altered Carbon is the first of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.
Set in the distant future Altered Carbon introduces Kovacs, a former elite soldier now taking mercenary work. While that setup is not particularly enticing the world Kovacs inhabits is. Based on the passing of humanity into a meta human civilisation Kovacs‘ world is one of people having their minds “re-sleeved“ in another, possibly genetically enhanced, body for a variety of reasons.
I have been a bit lax with updating these last couple of weeks. Of course now that means that I have quite a few books to cover…
First up is “Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance“ by Derek J. Canyon. You have probably never heard of Dead Dwarves or Mr Canyon. That would be down to Dead Dwarves being a self published title.
Self published work typically has a very uneven quality level. Without the filter of a publisher a reader is left unshielded from the authors ego. Luckily, unlike some other recent examples, Mr. Canyon is not deluding himself as to the quality of what he can produce.
No doubt this will not be very interesting for anyone but me. It’s a list of all the books I’ve read since getting my Kindle and getting back into reading “properly”. I’ll be updating this list as I go. Maybe I’ll even try to arrange this in chronological order sometime… Read More…
I made short work of Hood and my early impressions held through. As I mentioned before the fact that everyone will have prior knowledge of the outline of the story provides and interesting part of a readers experience of the book. Lawhead even plays on this fact by introducing a legend from before Hoods time into the story that one character believes Hood (the character) will follow. This gives the feeling that Hood (or Bran as he is named) is both pushed from the past (via the prior legend) and pulled by the future (via the legend we all know) into fulfilling his destiny.
Since everything I read these days seems to be part of a series or trilogy I decided not to immediately follow Hood with it’s sequels Scarlet and Tuck. Instead I returned to another series that I am already invested in: The Honor Harrington novels by David Weber.
The first four Honor Harrington books. Yeah, I mention the cover art below...
So, I finished A Game of Thrones. Although this is a pointless recommendation as everyone except me has already read it I still recommend it! I don’t think that I will break into the next in the series just quite yet, but I will definitely be returning to it.
After A Game of Thrones I started on a book I bought on a whim: Hood by Stephen R. Lawhead. He may only have one R for a middle name (as opposed to George R. R.) but that doesn’t seem to stop him from writing some good stuff. Hood, which I have just found out is the first of a trilogy, is a retelling of the legend of Robin Hood.
Based upon the premise that Robin was Welsh and lived at the time of the Norman conquest of England with Norman eyes now falling on Welsh territory the book paints Robin as a wayward son of a Welsh king. After the obligatory death of his father and nearly everyone he knows Robin now has the motivation to spring into action. Since the legends of Robin Hood, and the characters involved in it, are so well known the book comes with a natural foreshadowing that provides an enjoyable meta narrative to the book. You know the general shape of the story but you don’t know what take on it Lawhead will provide.
I’m just under half way through Hood and so far, so good.
Since getting a Kindle back in October 2010 I’ve been reading a lot. And a lot of what I have been reading has been fantasy and since a lot of a lot is a lot… I read a lot of fantasy. However according to my friend Jonas there has been one glaring omission in my reading thus far: I have not read George R. R. Martin. The other day I decided to finally rectify this and I am currently half way through A Game Of Thrones.
It’s a long book, at least twice as long as my usual fare and usually I find myself losing interest by this point. Luckily the praise heaped upon A Game Of Thrones is not unwarranted. I cannot argue that AGoT is the most accessible fantasy book ever, it’s size is the first hurdle for anyone approaching it and it throws names of places, people, knights and cities at you with gay abandon.
However it is very well written and plotted and this really carries you through. The book is almost more of a political thriller with swords than it is a more stereotypical Tolkien-esque fantasy novel, and for me that is what makes this worth driving through.
I recently splashed out and picked up a trio of new boardgames. I had never been a big player of boardgames, although I always enjoyed the ones I did play, until our friend Jonas got Karin and I into playing Agricola. This led to Karin giving me my own copy as birthday gift and regular Agricola gaming nights followed. Since just browsing sites such as boardgamegeek.com informs as to the many hundreds of games out there I thought I should expand my horizons.
After a couple of trips to the game store near my office and much deliberating I picked up Small World, Cadwallon: City of Thieves and Condottiere.
Polish fantasy books. Translating some of them to english won't help. 
As I mentioned in my post about the First Law trilogy I have relatively recently started reading a lot more fantasy. I doubt that this is because the standard of fantasy books released has gone up – after all George RR Martin, Terry Pratchett, Robert Jordan et al have all been doing a fine trade in quality fantasy for ages.
To my, until recently, inexperienced eye I would hazard a guess that at least for me one reason for my sudden switch onto fantasy is accessibility. While you cannot argue that the works of Pratchett are not accessible (indeed, I started reading the discworld novels young and they are probably the only book series that I still regularly read from my youth) some authors create fantasy worlds so complete and dense unless you are equipped by experience to penetrate them you simple cannot absorb enough of what is good about them to get hooked.
This post was originally written on June 24th 2010 for a previous blog. I have reposted it here as I will be writing about Mr. Abercrombie’s latest work “The Heroes” shortly. – Mike.
I was always into science fiction and cyber punk more than fantasy growing up (which explains a lot), but not due to any great dislike of fantasy – I just never found an example that really did it for me. Curiously, after many years of trying and failing to get into fantasy 2008 turned out to be the year that I find not only two fantasy novels that float my boat but two fantasy series: The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie and the Gentlemen Bastards series by Scott Lynch.
