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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9609618" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Which ones?  I quite liked some of the early ones, particularly Mike Stackpole's Warrior trilogy (En Garde, Riposte, and Coupé), which predate his later very successful Star Wars: Rogue Squadron series which he's more famous for.  I also have fond memories of Heir to the Dragon and Wolves on the Border, by Bob Charrette.  These are all set in the lead up to and the Fourth Succession War, preceding the Clan invasion.  The first few Clan war books (Lethal Heritage, Blood Legacy, and Lost Destiny), by Stackpole, are pretty decent, IMO, and continue well from Wolves on the Border.  Later books by other authors I did not find as well-written and my interest dropped off quickly during the next two or three.I agree that Lovecraft is a notoriously poor prose stylist, but I genuinely think Howard is pretty good.  His descriptions are more vivid and his prose page-turning and readable.  His poetry is not great, but it's fun, at least.Eh. Dickens is infamously tough and excessively wordy.  He's been canonized as a Great Writer but he's always been criticized for his prose.  Joyce is also famously opaque.  Shakespeare is a bit different. A big part of the challenge of reading him is the vocabulary and grammar being a bit archaic. He also coined a lot of new words, but a ton of those are in common usage today.  But when you read it aloud and have footnotes and other explanations of unfamiliar words, it transforms and becomes MUCH more accessible.With Gygax you note that the adjective can be a compliment or criticism.  Most people acknowledge that he was not a great writer, though many of us have sentimental fondness.  The adjective is, IME, mostly value-neutral, just intended to label his idiosyncratic style, using circumlocutous grammar and showing off his vocabulary at every opportunity. And describing things in purple detail, as did many of the pulp authors he admired.Eh.  Some archaic vocab, but it's pretty damn understandable.  Nothing like Middle English or Old English which are genuinely incomprehensible if you haven't studied them as languages.</blockquote>

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