jian's latest activity

I’m starting my current 100-book challenge with Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras. This is a 1953 fixup novel collecting a series of...

Similarly, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is an incredibly compact yet emotive piece of storytelling - there’s a whole journey...

See how hard it is these days - I wasn’t able to cancel it before, just suspend it for a month. I think you need to do an online chat to...

I really need to cancel Disney+. I keep it around because it's got all the old Marvel and Star Wars stuff that I like, but when I...

Watching A Writer’s Odyssey, a recent Chinese fantasy film, on Tubi. It’s pretty good but weirdly feels as if it has more lavish...

Read a few back in the day. My personal favourite is The Wyvern’s Spur, the second in the Finder’s Stone trilogy by Jeff Grubb and Kate...

The best D&D novels of all time... are not officially D&D novels. Villains by Necessity, by Eve Forward is set in a world in which Good...

It's not just that. It's the idea that the time right before the Cataclysm was "too" good. The idea that goodness, without an equal...

Gygax thought that Lawful Good paladins should be killing orc children and babies. I suspect by early TSR standards (along with Weis &...

Sadly, many real-world religious texts also contain many examples of far from ideal divine behaviour, at least by the standards of D&D...

He was writing it in an early version of a serialized format, so even more than with Dickens, there's no reason for Cervantes to wrap...

This is how I feel about Don Quixote. I'm starting to wonder if all the people who claim it's the greatest novel ever -- a surprisingly...

I haven't read Don Quixote for reasons, but I will point out that it's really early in the development of the Western novel, and kinda...

Yeah, “you were all pissing me off so I dropped a mountain on you and then went and sulked for a few centuries” is far from ideal divine...

I finished my reread of the DL Chronicles trilogy. Definitely not literature but still fun to read. Some great characters and a good...