Tuesday, 4 February 2020

I Read Books

In an attempt to make the blog more navigable and useful, here is every book review I have written on here (I think), in reverse order of creation. If you go back far enough, reviews turn into excerpts and fragments and I have left most of those early posts out. (If you see any I have missed, let me know in the comments).


Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier

The Colour Revolution by Regina Lee Blaszczyk

Pathfinder Bestiary Two

'Binding and Combining'; bunch of books on Colour and Vision

Thoughts on The Wind in the Willows

The Wood Engravings of Agnes Miller-Parker

Thoughts on Street Fighter - The Storytelling Game

The Memory and the Bones - Thoughts on Hilary Mantels Thomas Cromwell Trilogy

'Giant Oysters are Never Surprised - Yoon-Suin by David McGorgan

The Pernicious Pamphlet by Mateo Diaz Torres

Spacehawk by Basil Woolverton Part 1 - The Arc of the Hawk

Spacehawk by Basil Woolverton Part 2 - The Many-Coloured God

Spacehawk by Basil Woolverton Part 3 - The Case of the Missing Tyres

Through Ultans Door by Ben L

The Crimson King by Graham McNeill

Inquisitor by Gav Thorpe

Wolf Packs and Winter Snow by Emmy Allen

The Gardens of Ynn by Emmy Allen

The Mahabharata - SHRUG EMOJI

Creatures of Near Kingdoms by Zedeck Siew and Sharon Chin

The Natural History of Selbourne by Gilbert White

'There Is No Bus' - Peter Fehervaris Dark Coil

The Sabbat Worlds Crusade by Dan Abnett 

Unfamiliar Underground by Victoria Louise Howard

Anything May Be Attempted - Playing at the World by Jon Peterson

Thoughts on the Glorantha Sourcebook

Churchills 'Marlborough' Part 1

Churchills 'Marlborough' Part 2

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching

'Why Ask Me?' - The Book of Chuang Tzu

The Glass Harmonica by Barbara Ninde Byfield

'In the 31st Millennium - Your Feelings About Your Dad' - All the Horus Heresy books I read to that date

The Adventures of Robin Hood by Roger Lancelyn-Green

Priceless by William Poundstone

The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot

The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison

A Podecast about the Worm Ouroboros

The Memoirs of Usama Ibn-Minqidh

The Gloomspite Gitz Battletome for Age of Sigmar 

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Lands of Darkness by Ibn Fadlan

Seeing Like a State by James C Scott

Wrecked Lives, or, Men Who Have Failed by William Henry Davenport Adams

The Nightmares Underneath by Johnstone Metzger

The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth

'MAN ATTACKED BY CORRIDOR' - House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

'Why Should I Lengthen My Tale?" the Arthurian Romances of Chretien De Troys

Amber Diceless by Erick Wujcik

Reflection in a Polished Cheese - Operation Unfathomable by Hydra Collective

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes

Forges of Mars by Graham McNeill 

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

The Shadow People by Margaret St. Clair

Lyonesse by Jack Vance

'A Bunch of Fucking Idiots' Barbara Tuchmans' 'A Distant Mirror'

Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History by William H. McNeill

The Azathoth Cycle from Chaosium 

Wondrous Bullshit, Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

Blood in the Chocolate by Kiel Chenier

Broodmother Skyfortress by Jeff Rients

Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong

'a one-eyed sparrow with a fretful temperament' - Nick Bostroms 'Superintelligence'

And the TV-Show!

The Ice by Stephen Pyne

The City of Ladies by Christina de Pizan

'Willpower' by Roy F.Baumeister and John Tierney

Boys and Girls. Superheroes in the Doll Corner.' by Vivian Gussin Paley

Fire on the Rim by Stephen Pyne

No-oooooonne WRITES like Gaston, douses LIGHTS like Gaston - The Psychoanalysis of Fire by Gaston Bachelard

Prey by Michael Crichton 

STRANGE GRAINS - D&Difying 'The Art Of Not Being Governed' by James C. Scott

Indian Sculpture by Philip Rawson

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West 

The Cathedral at Night From ‘Cathedrals of France’ by Auguste Rodin, Chapter Ten

'Or Another Of Your Own Creation' - The Seclusium of Orphone by Vincent Baker

'Butchering the Descent' - The Descent by Jeff Long


10 comments:

  1. The link for Tuchman’s Distant Mirror leads to Vance’s Lyonesse. Thanks for making a linkdump available.

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    1. Dang it, thanks, should be fixed now.

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    2. The links to Ong's "Orality and Literacy" and Bostroms' "Superintelligence" both link to the article about Broodmother Skyfortress.

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    3. Thank you - have hopefully fixed now.

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  2. Your review of "Creatures of Near Kingdoms" was one of the more significant reviews, for me!

    (Also your post of "The Art Of Not Being Governed" was the thing that got me into writing for RPGs)

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  3. This is a very exciting resource, thank you for sharing. The Peregrine is a particular favourite of mine, one that only came to my attention recently (via Werner Herzog, weirdly), and am thus delighted to see it on your list of reviews. This may turn into my 2020 reading list.

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    1. oo, fascinating. I bet he liked the Winter sections

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    2. In my last job there was a 1 million VND training budget (about $50/£30?) for each member of my team, and given the terrible state of my Vietnamese I asked if I could spend it on a Frank Gehry online masterclass.

      (this is going somewhere, I promise)

      Because of delays to the material being made available, I was given a free pass for one year and got to "enrol" on the Werner Herzog filmmaking course, which turned out to be much more interesting. He talked insisted (in a pre-recorded video) that we students read the Peregrine, in fact that all filmmakers read The Peregrine:

      “And he watches peregrines, but the intensity of watching, and the passion with which he watches this very small segment of the world is so extraordinary, and that’s exactly how we as filmmakers should watch people...this kind of incredibly deep attachment and also visionary, visionary language.”

      The assignment was to find "something that captivates you" and to write twenty pages of prose about your observations of that person/place/animal/thing.

      It was an edifying experience, but I can't say my prose ever rose to the peregrine heights of Baker!

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  4. The Fehervari-post has led me down a horrifying spiral of books of that author that I have yet to emerge from. Thanks, Patrick, I sure haven't read as much in such a short time in ages!

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