Ye Olde Inn

by **StratosVX** » December 15th, 2015, 7:38 pm

Currently reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Sjeng wrote:Just finished Gauntlgrim, on to Neverwinter. After that, only 1 more Drizzt book to go and I'll have read them all... Seriously, if you aren't the BIGGEST Drizzt fan, read the first 6 and stop. There are a few good ones, a few okay ones, and some boring ones too, so unless you really want to know it all, just stop after 6.

Wow, yeah. I would argue that you should stop after the original three, the Ice WInd Dale Trilogy (4-6?). I picked them up and read all the way through to Gauntlgrim earlier this year. Should have stopped with the original three. Passages from the Ice Wind Dale trilogy which I had remembered from my youth seemed short and lacking details... My imagination had made these books better than they really are! Too often Salvator relies on the reader's familiarity with D&D to avoid describing creatures entirely.

by **whitebeard** » December 15th, 2015, 9:17 pm

Bareheaded Warrior wrote:I'm (re)reading some of the Conan stories as nothing is as inspiring when trying to generate ideas for quests!

Yes, I just picked this up on Amazon for my Kindle as a free sample and read the first two stories in a large collection. Connan is a king in the first two. In the third he is a young thief... I seem to be reading them in publication order? True pulp fiction.

For $1.99 I'm definitely going to buy it, but there are other collections. I just don't know where to start or how to avoid getting all of the original Howard stories without buying the same stories 5 different times to get one missing story from the collection. I seem to be unable to find the "books" listed on the Wikipedia page. Connan the Cimmarian, Connan the ...

Anybody have a kindle that can help me out here with what I should be reading?

The first three stories were fantastic. Then you consider that Howard died before the Hobbit was published... absolutely amazing.

by **Sjeng** » December 16th, 2015, 8:03 am

whitebeard wrote:
Sjeng wrote:Just finished Gauntlgrim, on to Neverwinter. After that, only 1 more Drizzt book to go and I'll have read them all... Seriously, if you aren't the BIGGEST Drizzt fan, read the first 6 and stop. There are a few good ones, a few okay ones, and some boring ones too, so unless you really want to know it all, just stop after 6.

Wow, yeah. I would argue that you should stop after the original three, the Ice WInd Dale Trilogy (4-6?). I picked them up and read all the way through to Gauntlgrim earlier this year. Should have stopped with the original three. Passages from the Ice Wind Dale trilogy which I had remembered from my youth seemed short and lacking details... My imagination had made these books better than they really are! Too often Salvatore relies on the reader's familiarity with D&D to avoid describing creatures entirely.

Oh no, the prequel trilogy 1-3 is great man! Loved those.

I also read Dune and the prequel trilogy by his son, Brian Herbert. Loved those even more than the Original Dune books.

by **Anderas** » January 11th, 2016, 3:55 pm

The Christmas holiday had been great!

- First i was reading "Providence" by Alan Moore. One third comic, one third diary, one third collage, this was really an experience. It was a re-interpretation of Lovecrafts oldest stories, and well done!

- "The Humans" describes an alien that comes down to the earth to kill some humans.... a nice view from outside on our habits and everything we do. Very good, easy reading.

- Then there was "The three body problem" and "The dark Forest". They're the first two books of a trilogy. It's a chinese author, and the translation to english is awful. But it is hard science fiction. A chinese scientist, broken by the revolutions of the sixties in china, doesn't believe any more in the good inside humankind and invites an alien race to invade us. They need 450 years to come here, so plenty of time to prepare... would you think. A very good story, but awfully long with 500 pages per book. And every concept of hard science fiction gets explained in detail... well, i read a lot of science fiction (it's nearly the only thing i read), so i know all of these concepts already. I guess that the topic for the third book will be the technological singularity - one of the few topics avoided until now. If you're not SciFi fan, i would advise not to read it.

The best was "Providence"!

by **lucasdp** » January 11th, 2016, 5:56 pm

@Anderas, thanks for the great recommendation of "Providence!" I'm a fan of both Moore and Lovecraft, but I'm not familiar with that one. I'll have to check it out! |_P

To answer the OP question myself, I picked up the first two Fighting Fantasy books, after my interest was piqued by Goblin King's thread (viewtopic.php?f=49&t=3175). They've been great fun so far. Super light reading, I found a halfway decent, Android app for tracking character stats (https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... heet&hl=en), and there are Amazon sellers with some of the FF books going for just a penny so you basically just pay for shipping. :geek:

by **slev** » January 19th, 2016, 8:44 am

I finished "The Broken Sword" by Poul Andersen over the weekend. Fantastic, tragic, dark classic fantasy, contemperous to LotR.

I've now mpved on to "The Ringworld Engineers" by Larry Niven, and I'm being suprisd at how a theoretical look at addiction is tying into modern assessments of it's causes.

by **Decipher** » January 19th, 2016, 11:36 am

After watching that terrible monstrosity of Jar Jar Abrams' "Star Wars" The Force Takes A Crap, I had to dig out my Timothy Zawn trilogy novels to erase the memory.

by **Patroclus** » January 19th, 2016, 4:25 pm

I’ve read Moorcock’s “elric of melnibone” (very good books), Salvatore (some of the old books was great, the new ones are not), and the one and only Robert E Howard. I am stuck with Robert E Howard from the 90s. I should have read about 50 stories of Howard, and I am still searching for more. Even the horror stories are awesome.

If you don’t have any of his books there are a lot of audio books on youtube (in English).

by **Redav** » January 20th, 2016, 10:05 pm

Any chance anyone can make any suggestions for historical fiction books / series for the UK? I'm probably more interested in anything from around the Battle of Hastings (1066 to The Hundred Years war. In particular the Normans and Plantagenets but also Welsh and Scottish stories and how they interact with the English.