What are you reading in 2023?

[Hriston]

Three Hearts is definitely his most influential work on the creation of D&D, but for my money The Broken Sword is the better book.

I'm a little over halfway through The Broken Sword now, and I'd say you're correct! It's pretty amazing!

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'm a little over halfway through The Broken Sword now, and I'd say you're correct! It's pretty amazing!

It's a visceral read that lives on the border between folktales, Norse sagas, and fantasy literature. Poul Anderson has plenty of great works, but I'd certainly say that this is my favorite.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I tried reading the Hornblower series. I started with Mr Midshipman. After the pages of describing the card game whist being played and the flat and dull duel I put the book down. Does it pick up from there? Is it a slow-burn series?

I might be the wrong person to ask since I read them over 25 years ago. Tbh, not sure i would like them now - my tastes (and patience!) have changed considerably since then

And like @Starfox said, the Aubrey Maturin books are better (or at least I liked them better), in large part due to the interplay between the two main characters Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin

 

[Hriston]

It's a visceral read that lives on the border between folktales, Norse sagas, and fantasy literature. Poul Anderson has plenty of great works, but I'd certainly say that this is my favorite.

It’s certainly gripping. I’m reading the revised version, and I love Anderson’s foreword where he refers to his younger self as a different person and says he himself would not “write anything so headlong, so prolix, and so unrelievedly savage.”

 

[Richards]

I finally finished The Complete Chronicles of Conan; it was a good read, but 925 pages all at once was quite a lot - I'm glad to be reading something else now.

As I'm off to a week-long business trip tomorrow (and won't get back until Saturday night - ugh!), I hit the library book sale yesterday and stocked up on a bunch of books that will hopefully hold my interest. Six of them are all by the same author - Mariah Stewart - including four from a single series, and two others that are the start of their own respective series, but since I've never read anything of hers before I decided it would be better to bring along more of a wider selection, so if one book turns out to be a dud I have others that will hopefully be better. So I'll be bringing along one of hers, but also two other books by two other authors. I'm starting out with Shadow of the Knife by Kenneth R. McKay, which has an interesting premise: a psychopathic killer has killed a dozen women and is still at large, but then he sets his sights on his next victim, whose husband doesn't mind stepping outside the law to not only stop him, but give him the punishment he so richly deserves. We'll see how it goes.

Johnathan

 

[Zaukrie]

Finished the stone sky. Great series, but it just makes you realize how hard it is to write a great ending. I mean, she basically foreshadowed / told us the ending a book ago....I wonder how it would read if it wasn't about saving the world. More than just survival, but less about the ultimate need, if you know what I mean.

 

[Davies]

I tried reading the Hornblower series. I started with Mr Midshipman. After the pages of describing the card game whist being played and the flat and dull duel I put the book down. Does it pick up from there? Is it a slow-burn series?

My suggestion would be to read them in publication order, rather than the chronological order of the Admiral's life.

 

[Ryujin]

Just picked up "Sakuru: the Circle" by my friend Todd Downing. It's a cyberpunk story that he wrote 30 years ago and released as a comic, but I've not read it before. Odd bit of trivia: The cover art was designed back then and the main character looks very much like Keanu Reeves, before Keanu looked like he does now.

 

[Alzrius]

Having finished these, I'm now pulling another book of my shelf which has been waiting for me to read it: the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Of course, this is a reproduction of Edward FitzGerald's first edition translation, so it's wildly inaccurate to what was actually written in the twelfth century, but I suppose after a hundred and fifty years this version has some notability in and of itself.

Having finished this, I was going to move on to a recently-purchased copy of The Descent of Ishtar, but for some reason found myself pulling my unread copy of Lewis Carroll in Numberland off the shelf.

Although it's not wrong to classify this as the biography of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the presentation leans strongly into his mathematical undertakings, rather than the whimsy for which he's known today (though that's here too). I'm only two chapters in, but it's almost like the book can't quite decide if it wants to cover his life in general, or his mathematical interests in particular, and is trying to split the difference. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished reading John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian. I enjoyed it way more than I expected. The first story is so gloriously weird that it reminds of Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Now I'm reading Shelly Mazzanoble's and Greg Tito's Welcome to Dragon Talk.

It’s certainly gripping. I’m reading the revised version, and I love Anderson’s foreword where he refers to his younger self as a different person and says he himself would not “write anything so headlong, so prolix, and so unrelievedly savage.”

It's funny, Michael Moorcock intensely prefers the original version of The Broken Sword.