What are you reading - Sep 2017

I read The Girl With All the Gifts again, and a few other books I can't recall right now, and currently finishing up Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Like Cryptonomicon, it's just kinda ambling along. Stephenson does a LOT of worldbuilding, but it's like he's just written the footnotes into the main text. You've heard of show and not tell? This ain't it.

I finished reading the Ashen Stars RPG Core Rules. I really enjoyed how it's basically a more gritty version of the Star Trek tv shows. I hadn't really realized before how closely almost every episode resembles the basic structure of an investigative story. However, I still believe I'd find it hard to come up with good stories and developing a 'network' of clues to connect the different scenes.

Now I'm back to reading novels again (at least until I get the 'Eyes of the Stonethief' megadungeon campaign for 13th Age...). I started reading 'Zoo City' by Lauren Beukes today.

I'm reading The Theory of Poker - David Sklansky and trying to practice to play here. Always wanted to learn how to play

It has taken me quite some years to codify exactly what I dislike about *Joel Rosenberg's writing. And that is, that his protagonists tend to be one unrelieved field of varying grey. Sometimes one will do something unreservedly heroic; another time, that same one will nearly kill a close friend in a fit of rage.

As one LindyBeige once commented on characters in TV series (paraphrased and adapted), "...with an abnormally large host of astounding issues."

* Not to be confused with Joel C. Rosenberg, whose books I have never read nor heard about, that I recall, before today, and have no strong opinion on.