So, it’s the World Book Day and you have just posted about the fact that you are having a real hard time because the writing you no longer enjoy the two quiet hours every night to read a book.
So, what do you do?
Well, after all, it being Book Day, you go and buy more books.
Which is exactly what I did, taking advantage of a small but much welcome Amazon gift card.
So here’s the list of what’s now on my Kindle, waiting for the day when I’ll be able to finally read it.
Of the 200-and-odd books I read over four years while working on Hope & Glory, India – A History, by John Keay was the first stop. I had tried approaching the textbook for my brother’s course on History and Civilization of India and the Far East, but found it too massive, and written in a language unknown to the living. Keay’s book was fun, well documented, and it was in a language I understood.
I had to start somewhere, and I started from there, and later I also read (and enjoyed) Keay’s book about the East India Company.
So now that I am doing a bit of in-depth background research for my work on the Frontier RPG, I decided to splurge on research books all of 10 euro: the price of a night out for a pizza at Casablanca’s, what passes for a night on the town here in our house.
And half of my budget went for John Keay’s China, a History – that is a lot heftier than its Indian counterpart, but hopefully just as fun.
Once again, my brother’s university books about Chinese history are there on the shelf, but what the heck, for starters I want something as user-friendly as possible.
I will also throw into the research pot another of Keay’s books that’s here on my shelf, his old but wonderful When Men and Mountains Meet: The Explorers of the Western Himalayas, 1820–75, because it’s certainly on topic.
The other half of my budget went for Abraham Eraly’s The Mughal Throne, that I had missed in my previous book haul when researching Hope & Glory.
Amazon Italy has a few copies of the Italian translation, by a very high-end “serious” publisher, discounted to half price because they are a little worse for wear.
This way, I got my copy for six bucks, including delivery, and the volume is perfectly fine (the white cover is a little dirty, but really, that’s not an issue for a reading copy).
Thus armed, I’ll spend the next four weeks reading and taking notes. So far I’ve played fast and loose with my Stories of the Frontier, but now it’s time to start doing things properly.
And as I often repeat, I like doing research.
Having just finished Brian Murphy’s Flame and Crimson: a History of Sword-and-Sorcery, published in 2019 by Pulp Hero Press, I can now expand on my initial post of a few days back. I am doing this because I think this books deserves a wide circulation, and so we need to talk about it, and because I got wind of some less-than-positive opinions going around, and I’d like to address those, too.
So, for starters, let’s see what you get in the package.
Continue readingAs sometimes happens, the mailman delivered this morning a packet that caused me to change my plans for the rest of the day – or the next two days probably. The packet being an Amazon bubble-wrap envelope containing a copy of Brian Murphy’s Flame and Crimson: a History of Sword-and-Sorcery, published in 2019 by Pulp Hero Press (as far as I know there is no ebook edition).
Yesterday a friend informed me that the most recent Italian translation of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers was selling for 99 cents on Amazon in digital format. Now I have my old copy here somewhere in some box, but I did the math and realized it’s been something like thirty-six years since I last read the mother of all swashbuckler novels, and so I sacrificed one buck and got me the ebook.
I have just received a gift of books and chocolate from a far-away friend. It’s the sort of thing that’s good for morale, because yesterday was a bad day – sometimes these coincidences happen, and they never cease to surprise me. We live in a strange, but not necessarily hostile world.
One of the books in the box was a well-beloved classic I mentioned I wanted to re-read, another is a war story that looks quite exciting, and the third… oh, the third I am starting right away, and filing it under research.
Continue readingI am not an Agatha Christie fan. That was my aunt, in our family – she had been through the whole Christie canon, and could quote you chapter and verse of every story and novel, forward and backward.
I read about a dozen novels, but I was more of a Dorothy Sayers kind of guy. Oh, I saw the movies and liked ’em, even if I still find Miss Marple insufferable, and I am looking forward to the forthcoming The Pale Horse, mostly because it seems to have a folk-horror angle and features a few actors I like a lot.
But I recently received as a gift a digital copy of possibly the only Agatha Christie I was really interested in reading – The Hound of Death and other stories, a collection of twelve short stories, published as a volume in the UK in 1933.
A collection of more-or-less supernatural stories.
Karavansara 