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The Sleeping Dragon (Guardians of the Flame #1) – Abandoned
The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenberg Published: 1983 This is the first book I’ve abandoned midway through in as long as I can remember. It’s something I have an incredibly hard time doing, but I should do it more. If I’m not enjoying a book, I’ll usually just let it ruin reading for me completely for a month while I struggle through it. There’s really no point in that. Nick Hornby abandons books he’s not enjoying, so I’m using that to justify this. This is the story of a group of university students who find themselves transported into a fantasy world while playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons. They…
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman Published: 2013 Narrated by: Neil Gaiman A man returns to his childhood home after attending a funeral and finds himself drawn to the neighbouring home of a little girl he once knew but had forgotten. Memories start flooding back, and he remembers himself as a young boy stumbling across a tragic scene, one that allowed the unworldly access to our world. I don’t think I was in the right frame of mind for this novel. I love Neil Gaiman and have read everything by him, except for most of his comics (and his Duran Duran biography obviously), but something…
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Mogworld
Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw Published: 2010 If you have any interest in video games at all, there’s a good chance you’ve watched Yahtzee Croshaw’s web series, Zero Punctuation, where he critiques games to within an inch of their lives. He’s also released a few indie computer games, co-opened a video game themed bar, and written two books. He’s the sort of person that makes you feel bad about all of your abandoned, and unstarted, projects. Mogworld, his first novel, is from the perspective of an undead zombie horde member, Jim, inside a massively online role-playing game (a la World of Warcraft). He isn’t aware of that, though. All he knows…
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A Dance with Dragons
A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin Published: 2011 I finished it! Good lord, this one took me a while. The middle of a George R.R. Martin book is not the place to hit a reading slump. It’s funny, I went through a period where I read long fantasy novels almost to the exclusion of everything else, but these days anything over 400 pages gives me pause. I guess I just don’t have the attention span anymore. There was too much material in the last book, A Feast for Crows, so half of the characters’ stories were moved into this book. They both begin at the same time, but…
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Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy
Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy by Isaac Asimov Published: 1993 Every now and then I get a hankering to write some fiction, but writing is hard, so I usually just read a book about writing instead. I have a whole shelf of them, and this time I came across Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy while thumbing through. I bought and read this over ten years ago, but I couldn’t remember a damn thing about it. This is a collection of essays on different aspects of writing, from the fundamentals of plotting and dialogue right up to submitting manuscripts and dealing with editors. Isaac Asimov is listed as the author, but…
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Truth in Fiction
Salman Rushdie on why we shouldn’t write off science fiction and fantasy when looking for stories with an insight into human nature.