I recently re-read The War of the Roses 1455-1487 by Hugh Bicheno.

I have begun reading Death's End by Cixin Liu, having just finished The Dark Forest and recently read The Three Body Problem.

Wayfriend, you write:

* I occasionally post things on KevinsWatch because I am a fan of Stephen R. Donaldson; this should not be considered as condonation of the white nationalist propaganda for which this forum has become a platform.

I completely agree.

I'm currently some 400 pages into Thomas Piketty's 1100 page Capital and Ideology. Is that the one that came out around 2014 and was released in the US as just "Capital?" Or was it the follow-up published a few years later? I got a few chapters into Capital and found it interesting, but.....

I'm currently some 400 pages into Thomas Piketty's 1100 page Capital and Ideology.

My perception in Australia is that in recent decades fantasy books have come to occupy an increasingly large proportion of the shelves in scifi/fantasy bookshops, and an increasingly large proportion of the scifi/fantasy shelves in mainstream bookshops. Is this perception accurate in terms of what w...

I have the sense that SRD intended the source of the magic of the Viles and their descendants, and the nature of the Viles themselves, to remain obscure in order to maintain a sense of the otherness of that cultural tradition within the Land.

Well, we know that there is an inconsistency between the Second Chronicles and the Last Chronicles regarding the identity of the Guardian of the One Tree and the circumstances in which he became the Guardian. Ironing that out would be the logical window into prefiguring the Insequent in the Second C...

Amok said, concerning white gold: In his last days, High Lord Kevin yearned for it in vain. Was it his need for white gold that made Kevin "know doubt"? To understand High Lord Kevin first understand Thomas Covenant, seems to me a good rule of thumb. Covenant feared the destruction of the...

the legend that is now simply remembered under the collective name of The Lord of the Rings . A crying shame neither father nor son reached eleventy-one (and beyond), as both Frodo and Bilbo had done in the Red Book. Except that we don't know that Frodo reached eleventy-one. Of course we would like...

I seem to recall SRD stating in The Gradual Interview that LOTR made it possible for him to write The Chronicles.

I also have a private joke that The First Chronicles is what LOTR would have been had it been written by Dostoevsky.

This thread may have inspired an invention.


https://www.nationofchange.org/2019/11/ ... ZofqoYcMcE

I agree with Wayfriend. The main "good" characters in The First Chronicles are genuinely good, and display very little of the attributes we could associate with "grimdark". For the most part they are incredibly idealistic and committed to high standards of rectitude, and it is a ...

I think one of the pointers to when the events in RotE occurred is that Linden has a pager. Pagers were most widely in use in the 1990s and have been largely displaced by advanced cell phones (or "mobile phones" as we Australians call them) in this century. Then there is the question of co...

It seems to me that the most straightforward explanation is that SWMNBN's crisis of identity and purpose both predated her devouring of souls and is what caused her to begin devouring souls in the first place. Once her crisis of identity and purpose was solved, releasing the captured souls was simpl...

I've reached the bit in the first book where the Hobbits plus 'Strider' have reached the top of Weathertop and have encountered the black riders during the course of the night spent atop there. Up to this point I'm surprised how well the book is reading. That's an interesting comment. When I first ...

I'm currently reading The Histories by Herodotus, which was written back in the day when the demarcation between the fantastic and the realistic wasn't all that clear.

"I touch no-one and no-one touches me"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKlSVNxLB-A

I'm currently re-reading Firstborn by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C Clarke.

For me one of the most interesting aspects of re-reading is finding out how I've changed, and how differently I think, compared to when I read the books previously, as I find myself reacting differently to particular scenes and themes in my most recent re-read to what I did in previous readings.