Read this year.

Yup, I know the year's not over yet, but it will be by the time I finish the last couple that I'm working on, so I thought I'd post the obligatory list for everything I've read this year, I'll mark them in bold if I read them for school.



1. Gardens of the Moon - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #1 - Steven Erikson *****


2. Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson ****
3. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Neitzsche ***
4. The Maker of Universes - World of Tiers #1 - Phillip Jose Farmer ***
5. The King and the Cowboy - David Fromkin **
6. The Gates of Creation - World of Tiers #2 -Phillip Jose Farmer ***
7. Pigeon Feathers - John Updike ***
8. Quag Keep - Andre Norton ***
9. A Private Cosmos - World of Tiers #3 - Phillip Jose Farmer ***
10. Deadhouse Gates - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #2 - Steven Erikson ***
11. The Things they Carried - Tim O'brien ***
12. Beyond the Walls of Terra - World of Tiers #4 - Phillip Jose Farmer **
13. The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan **
14. The Rise of the West - William Hardy Mcneil ****
15. The lavalite World - World of Tiers #5 -Phillip Jose Farmer **
16. In Love and Trouble - Alice Walker **
17. The Oracle Betrayed - Oracle #1 - Catherine Fisher ****
18. World War One British Poets - Candace Ward ***
19. 1421: The Year China Discovered America - Gavin Menzies *
20. A Vocation and a Voice - Kate Chopin ***
21. Magician: Apprentice - Riftwar #1 - Raymond E. Feist ****
22. Red Orc's Rage - World of Tiers #6 - Phillip Jose Farmer *
23. Memories of Ice - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #3 - Steven Erikson ****
24. More than Fire - World of Tiers #7 - Phillip Jose Farmer **
25. Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones ****
26. Tolkien and the Great War - John Garth ****
27. House of Chains - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #4 - Steven Erikson ***
28. Landscape and Memory - Simon Schama *****
29. Carnage and Culture - Victor Hansen ***
30. Conan the Relentless - Roland Green **
31. Mr. Midshipmen Hornblower - Horatio Hornblower #1 - C.S. Forester ****
32. Midnight Tides - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #5 - Steven Erikson ***
33. Magician: Master - Riftwar #2 - Raymond E. Feist **
34. Cannibal Culture - Deborah Root **
35. Blood Follows - Bauchulain and Korbel Broach #1 - Steven Erikson **
36. The Lees of Laughter's End - Bauchulain and Korbel Broach #2 - Steven Erikson **
37. The Healthy Dead - Bauchulain and Korbel Broach #3 - Steven Erikson **
38. Crack'd Pot Trail - Bauchulain and Korbel Broach #4 - Steven Erikson **
39. Night of Knives - Tales of the Malazan Empire #1 - Ian Cameron Esselmont ****
40. Youth in Revolt - C.D. Payne ***
41. Lieutenant Hornblower - Horatio Hornblower #2 - C.S. Forester ****
42. The House of the Wolfings - William Morris ****
43. The Bonehunters - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #6 - Steven Erikson ****
44. Conan the Savage - Leonard Carpenter **
45. Hornblower and the Hotspur - Horatio Hornblower #3 - C.S. Forester ****
46. Imaro - Imaro #1 - Charles Saunders ****
47. Hornblower during the Crisis - Horatio Hornblower #4 - C.S. Forester ****
48. Hornblower and the Atropos - Horatio Hornblower #5 - C.S. Forester ****
49. Conan the Defender - Robert Jordan ***
50. Beat to Quarters - Horatio Hornblower #6 - C.S. Forester ****
51. Conan the Triumphant - Robert Jordan ***
52. Ship of the Line - Horatio Hornblower #7 - C.S. Forester ****
53. Return of the Crimson Guard - Tales of the Malazan Empire #2 - Ian Cameron Esslemont ****
54. Flying Colours - Horatio Hornblower #8 - C.S. Forester ****
55. The Polysylabic Spree - Nick Hornby ***
56. A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan ***
57. Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional life of boys - Dan Kindlon ****
58. Conan the Gaurdian - Roland Green **
59. Shadowdale - Avatar #1 - Richard Awlinson **
60. Conan at the Demon's Gate - Roland Green **
61. Manhood for Amatuers - Michael Chabon ****
62. The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Steven Chobsky (See Insert)
63. Maps and Legends - Michael Chabon ****
64. King Dork - Frank Portman ***
65. Reaper's Gale - malazan Book of the Fallen #7 - Steven Erikson ***
66. The Passion of the Western Mind - Richard Tarnas ****
67. Albert of Adelaide - Robert L. Anderson ****
68. Me: The People - Kevin Bleyer ***
69. The Essential Rumi - Rumi ***
70. Bongwater - Michael Hornburg ***
71. The Persian Book of Kings - Ferdewsi ****
72. A History of the Ostrogoths - thomas S. Burns ****
73. Tantras - Avatar #2 - Richard Awlinson **
74. Doctor Faustus - Christoper Marlowe ***
75. I'm Proud of You - Tim Madigan ***
76. The Mother Tongue - Bill Bryson ***
77. Conan The Gladiator - Leonard Carpenter **


Still in Progress
78. Waterdeep - Avatar #3 - Richard Awlinson
79. Cosmos - Carl Sagan
80. Toll The Hounds - Malazan Book of the Fallen #8 - Steven Erikson

This year I didn't get nearly as many books finished as I would have liked. This is due to it being my first "Full" year of school, taking classes all 3 semesters, and 2 of those being English Classes. My World Lit class during Fall had far more than just The Essential Rumi, but basically I had already read all the rest of them and didn't see any reason to include them. Among those that I re-read during my World Lit class were:

The Enuma Elish
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Orestia by Asychleus
Plato's The Apology and Allegory of the Cave
The Song of Roland
Einhard's Life of Charlegemage
Dante's Divine Comedy
Machievelli's The Prince

As you can see I nearly made it to the end of the Malazan series, but the later books in the series have simply gotten so bogged down in Minutae as the series crawls to a conclusion that it's taking me longer and longer to get through it, I also started and nearly finished the Hornblower series, the only thing holding me back is that I just don't have the money to buy the remaining few in the series since they are 15$ a piece. I need to check my local Library. I read the first Imaro book, which I bought when Night Shade was having a sale, but haven't yet gotten the remaining 3 in the series from Mr. Saunders. I also started reading the Riftwar Series by Raymond E. Feist, and as interesting as Samurais riding giant insects are as villains.. I'm just not sure I will be continuing to read the series.. It didn't grab hold of me the way it does some people.. i didn't even finish the first "Trilogy" of 4 volumes. And lastly I've now made it to just shy of the halfway point in my massive Conan Read. Next year I plan to finish up Malazan, and get a start on two big series, Michael Moorcock's The Eternal Champion (Which I've read a few of, so will include some re-reads) and Arnold J. Toynbee's " A Study of History" which clocks in at about 11 or 12 volumes.. but which I found my local Library had copies of just recently, Once I've finished that I can safely say i will have read both the Pesimistic view of Historical Theory (Spengler) and the Optimistic View of Historical Theory (Toynbee). Between Moorcock and Toynbee and the remains of Erickson, it works out to be nearly 60 books just there.. add in I don't know how many I will have to read for school, and it sounds as if I have a busy year ahead of me.


Insert: Essentially I cannot rate this book due to the fact that it is so tied up in my current problems revolving around a person who had become an extremely important part of my life and then chose to extricate herself from it entirely. She had me read the book, and we went to see the film together, and the book was massively important to both of us as a result due to our similar experiences growing up, and due to the fact that we used it as something of a letter back and forth, both taking turns underlining passages before giving it back to the other. The Book itself is phenomenal, and if you want to actually taste what it is like to be alienated and alone in your most formative period, and see what it's like to absolutely hit rock bottom due to emotional trauma, regardless of the fact that you have friends and family to help you through it.. then the book is for you. I absolutely am glad I read it, I just don't think it would be fair on my part to rate the book in my current mental state. If you have children, I cannot recommend reading it enough because it hits all the warning signs of what to look out for to make sure your child doesn't hit the lows that Charlie does in the book.

They still refuse to see it!

Yet again, yet another writer has hacked out yet more words trying to claim that Tolkien & Fantasy in general, hate Technology.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/fall-mortality-and-the-machine-tolkien-and-technology/260412/#

The article starts out all right I suppose, but it quickly falls apart as soon as it mentions "The last Ringbearer".. Simply put, they keep missing the point of Lord of the Rings (and truth be told, so do a lot of fantasy writers who seek to emulate it).. These writers are too literal with their approach to technology for one thing, they see Technology only as industrial machinery, be that steam trains or Abrams tanks. These writers are overlooking the fact that Crop Rotation is a Technology, Charcoal making, black smithing, brewing, the gunpowder in Gandalfs fireworks, and the walls of Minus Tirith are all TECHNOLOGY.

Tolkien isn't against Technology, he's simply against the soulless INDUSTRIALIZATION of the world.  If you want to see representations of Mordor, look at London in the 1900's, look at Detroit in the 70's, look at the hole in the O-Zone layer thanks to CFC's Look at the slag dumps outside of African, South American and Chinese mineral mines, look at the clear cut, blasted, hell landscape of the former mountains of the Appalachian chain which have been completely removed.

Tolkien isn't arguing against technology, he's arguing against the fact that we don't use it responsibly. The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep, They awakened the methane gas explosion that is the balroq. Sauron and later Sauruman sought to dominate life, and they are rewarded with the dim, selfish, spiteful and malformed Orc. The Dragon Smaug's greed lead him to take by force two entire kingdoms, Esgaroth and Erebor, simply so he could horde gold to retire to Boca.. err I mean sleep on.

Think of it this way, the act of inventing the automobile was in itself not particularly bad. But once you factor in the marketization of the automobile, selling them, thus needing a constant supply of them, not to mention the oil drilling, road building, and ugh.. Suburbia.. who doesn't begin to feel a little put upon by them? Especially when you read stories about what happened in the US and Britain to their already firmly built, though no less ecologically problematic, (remember, even the attempt to use the weapon of the enemy for good, can still cause evil) public transit systems. In the 40's and 50's it was not uncommon for US automakers and oil companies to collude with cities to purchase vital segments of the public transit system and then dismantle them.. thus forcing people to have no choice but to buy a car and pay for gas. That's Mordor thinking. One car to bring them all, and in the ring-road bind them.

Everyone has been stuck in a traffic jam, you cannot tell me that if just a little be more civic responsibility had been in evidence during the planning phases that that problem couldn't have been conceived of and dealt with? The South-East US is littered with middle turn lanes, called morbidly "Suicide lanes", which account for a vast number of traffic fatalities.. there are entire towns where there are no sidewalks and no crosswalks, let alone bike lanes or any attempt at providing some alternative to the automobile. They see no reason to build any of that because everyone (who counts anyway) lives too far away from town, secluded in the suburbs and exoburbs and planned communities and gated communities to warrent building anything except more roads to bring in yet more traffic to yet more big box stores and strip malls and fast food joints to pour yet more money into the never satisfied gaping maw of corporate greed.

The US didn't crack the atom to provide clean, cheap power to the masses of the world, it cracked the atom to kill people, and for 60 years afterwards Nuclear Energy was a distant second place to the never ending quest to a bigger and better bomb. Eventually the Soviet Union, what more of a Mordor could you want than a country ruled by technocrats and engineers, crafted the Ultimate in the enormous Tzar Bomba. I'll excuse you while you go and chant GROND! GROND! GROND!.. okay, back? good.

Gandalf could have used his gunpowder to make rockets to fire at the Orcs, but he didn't he used it to make beautiful displays of light and colour to amuse and entertain a bunch of fat drunk hobbits. The Dwarves used their knowledge to make toys and jewelry and the Elves.. well now that's an interesting viewpoint as you can see the same impulses which Sauron and Sauruman had.. in Feanor and the Silmarils.

No, the Elves I think are the one example in which Tolkien may have created a group of beings who either nearly did or entirely did abstain from most technology.. and guess what.. they are declining and slipping away into the past to be replaced by those pesky humans who aren't afraid to harness the weapon of the enemy, hopefully to try and use it for good.  To build solar panels and sea walls and hospitals and high speed electric rail to connect all the little villages and hamlets to magnificently planned urban centers groaning with parks and industry which sequesters it's emmisions and appropriately sources it's raw materials.

Tolkien was a man who had seen the absolute worst of what human ingenuity could concoct. Poison Gas, The Tank, Machine Guns, Grenades, Artillery capable of turning a human into a fine red particulate from a hundred miles away, there is a reason why that war lead to the Geneva Convention.. which itself, in it's attempt to restrain the insanity, simply made humans more ingenuitive  If they can't use poison gas, lets just use cluster bombs, lets coat our bullets with white phosphorus, anti-coagulants, or make them out of depleted uranium.  Let's do all these horrible things because it's easier than finding common ground and working together, sharing a bite and sup and a song and then going for a walk along the hedgerows, or through the park.

Tolkien wasn't saying not to use technology, he was simply saying to advance technology responsibly and with as little negative impact to the surrounding world, and preferably without killing anyone or destroying anyone's home. Tolkien wasn't telling us to become neo-Luddites huddling around tallow candles or to become subsistence farmers.. He was simply telling us that there are better things in life to strive for than greed and death.

An Attempt at Organization. Mark 1.

To preface; I own a LOT of books. Somewhere in the realm of 5000+ individual volumes in a variety of formats, not including about another 1500 E-Books. For the Fiction books, finding what I want is simplicity itself, Anthologies come first, alpha by editor, and all the rest are alpha by author. Art books are the same way, alpha by artist. The Non-Fiction books however are a trickier proposition. Though they are mostly Social Sciences (History, Anthropology, Archeaology, Biography, Sociology, Comparative religion, Political theory) I also have Geology, Geography, Natural history, theoretical physics, and lastly and I'm not ashamed to say, a sizable metaphysics section on Ancient astronauts and the like (it's bogus, but fun!).

There are a few paths one can go by, but in the long run, you can only choose one road which to walk upon. (Led Zeppelin, yeah!) Primarily you have three main choices in the United States.

First, the Library of Congress system which organizes book not by strict subject categories but rather by Publication and Publisher data, since it is primarily a repository of works published in the United States, thus making it rather oddly laid out since you will wind up with books about automobiles next to books about birds. On the plus side, it's easy to find out the LOC# for your specific book.

Second, the Dewey Decimal system, which is extremely easy to navigate and easy to find out where your books go, with one caveat. It's proprietary, and expensive. You have to purchase a silence to the catalog in order to find the multi-digit code for your specific books.

Neither of these options was really that good, for one, I didn't want a book on the Migration Age to be sitting next to a book on Alestair Crowley, and for two, I didn't have the money to buy a lisence and a hand scanner to put my books into the DD system, and three, I simply don't have enough books to make all those extra categories necessary. Since in the grand scheme of things, I have so few areas of interest I opted to simply make my own.

It has 22 Categories, each with a number of Sub Categories and Sub-Sub Categories depending on the scope and depth of my collection.

       I.        Antiquity
    II.            Classical Age
 III.            Late Classical Age
 IV.            Migration Age
    V.            Early Middle Ages
 VI.            High Middle Ages
VII.            Late Middle Ages
VIII.            Renaissance
 IX.            Historical Outlines
    X.            Anthropology
 XI.            Comparative Religion
XII.            Psychology
XIII.            Sociology
XIV.            Archeology
XV.            Geology & Geography
XVI.            The late Victorian & early Edwardian Age
XVII.            World War I
XVIII.            World War II
XIX.            The post war world
XX.            Science
XXI.            Language
XXII.            Metaphysical 

I'm hoping to start actually putting the books into order, making citation/abstract pages for each one, over the winter break from school. Hopefully pictures of the final product will also be included. 

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? 

The Scott-i-verse.

Recently there have been a number of articles floating around on the internet revolving around some Easter eggs off of the new Prometheus DVD. Specifically the a journal entry where Weyland relates a conversation with Tyrell from Blade Runner. Their conversation is related to whether Tyrell's Replicants or Weyland's Androids are the wave of the future in terms of artificial humanoids.

This is to me, precisely the sort of thing that makes me get excited.. I love stuff like the Wold Newton Universe and Comic Book Crossovers.. I felt that what Marvel pulled off with the Avengers films, and is likely to amplify with future releases, was really cool. I love it when a plan comes together.

So, to see Ridley Scott at least playing around with the idea of his movies tying into one another at least in a thematic way is rather exciting.

When taken together, Scott's films tend to deal with common themes, especially dreams and what it means to be human, and what i means to have faith in something. Prometheus, Alien, Blade Runner, but also Legend deal with the major themes of Humaneness and Dreams..

 Certainly if we consider the theory presented that the reason the Engineers were planning to destroy humanity with the black slime was related to an engineer, supposed savior of humanity, being nailed to some planks of wood and then fought over for 2000 years, Really changes the view of the historical epics that Scott made.. though I'm not saying that his historical epics should be included.. but I could certainly see an argument for it...

What if all of his movies, mainly just his Sci-fi/Fantasy films, are actually connected? What if Legend is just a dream in the mind of a replicant? What if Tyrell corporation was an early competitor with Weyland industries...


I suppose we might eventually find out if the proposed sequel to blade runner gets off the ground..

I'm afraid I have made a grave error.

Following my spring missteps in picking professors I seem to have struck out yet again. This time instead of picking a history professor who allows his political biases to color his attitudes, I picked a Literature professor who is obsessed with minutiae and trying to promulgate the idea that pederasty just isn't really all that bad.

I opted to take World Literature because British Literature didn't fit the time I had in my schedule.. I should have waited and taken the class I really wanted.. but unfortunately I didn't. Instead I am stuck with a professor who openly criticizes the bulk of western writing, disregards the entirety of non western or Islamic writing.. and fixates on greco-roman stories and poems which extol the virtues of man on boy love. If questioned about this, she will repeatedly state "It just was".

"It Just was" is of course an acceptable if not entirely fulfilling answer as to WHY it was practiced at all in greco-roman and islamic world.. but it doesn't even begin to explain WHY we need to read so damn many stories about it.

Which, the very fact that so many greco-roman writings deal with the subject is itself very telling. Either that the act was some what abhorrent and in need of defense in Rome and Greece itself.. or that the christian and islamic leaders who chose to save the stories were looking for historical justifications for acts which had become taboo by their times. This of course was an unacceptable question to pose in class, I was asked to stop speaking, and yet again told "It just was".

Plato, Ovid, perfumed garden.. the whole thing just keeps reminding me of a line from "The Perks of being a wallflower" when the main character Charlie is given a copy of the Fountainhead by his english teacher and told to be a Filter, not a Sponge, of the ideas presented within it..

I realize that these writers are vastly important to western culture, but so was the Jewish old testement and the Christian new testement and neither of them are being studied in class.. and in my opinion the choice of texts from the greco-roman world are far to fixated on works seeking to justify deviant behavior. To be honest, her class is making me miss the days of bowdlerization.

Simply put, my confusion is growing to preposterous levels due simply to the fact that, Plato, Ovid, and the Islamic caliphs have actual important and mind expanding things to speak of.. if the answer "It just was" is the be all end all answer.. then we need to swiftly move past the perniciously out of date material and stick to reading and discussing the works which are actually important to western culture as a whole today, rather than simply to perverts and child abusers.

I further more resent the idea that nothing of any value came out of the Middle Ages except for from the Islamic world.. unless you are Dante.

I really cannot wait till December 12th when I'm rid of this class.

The Show of Shannara.

Yup, after Warner Brothers let their option to make a film out of the first of Terry Brook's fantasy trilogies lapse, I kind of thought that we had seen the last of the attempts to adapt them. Apparently I was incorrect.

This is interesting news, and one that doesn't particularly inspire me nor fill me with dread. I presume they will be sticking with the same format they had looked at for the films, adapting Elfstones and Wishsong straight, but using Sword for copious flashback sequences in order to make it's similarities to Lord of the Rings a little more subtle. By no means a bad plan, but one which still rankles my chronology obsessed brain. Still, I hope they manage to make a serious go of it, Brook's series is some what uniquely well suited to a long form TV series since most of his books don't feature the same characters, or they feature the children of previous characters, nephews and neices with occasional cameos from earlier characters.

Now, don't get me wrong, I actually really like Terry Brooks as a person, and despite what Lin Carter wrote about Sword, I even enjoyed it for what it was. Mr. Brooks has an undeservedly poor reputation mostly stemming from some very unfavourable reviews of his first book. A book which Lester Del Rey had a tremendous amount of input into, and we really don't know, and likely won't know just how many editorial changes were made due to that input. Though, with the upcoming publication of the Annotated 35th Anniversary edition of Sword, we may get some insight.

Besides, as Frank Herbert said:

 Don't fault Brooks for entering the world of letters through the Tolkien door. Every writer owes a similar debt to those who have come before. Some will admit it. Tolkien's debt was equally obvious. The classical myth structure is deeply embedded in Western society.

That's why you should not be surprised at finding these elements in The Sword of Shannara. Yes, you will find here the young prince in search of his grail; the secret (and not always benign) powers of nature; the magician; the wise old man; the witch mother; the malignant threat from a sorcerer; the holy talisman; the virgin queen; the fool (in the ancient tarot sense of the one who asks the disturbing questions) and all of the other Arthurian trappings.

What Brooks has done is to present a marvelous exposition of why the idea is not the story. Because of the popular assumption (which assumes mythic proportions of its own) that ideas form 99 percent of a story, writers are plagued by that foolish question, "Where do you get your ideas?" Brooks demonstrates that it doesn't matter where you get the idea; what matters is that you tell a rousing story.

My main hope is, that since Shannara takes place in a post apocalyptic Pacific Northwest, they film in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska and Hawaii, and that they limit the non American Accents on the show. At it's heart Shannara is one of the first attempts at American High Fantasy vs. English or British High Fantasy. It needs to feel that way. It can be bucolic and pastoral, but it takes place in North America and that should be obvious. Especially when the characters find ruins or half functioning machines..  Maybe a ruined Boeing Plant.. or a half eroded Space Needle. The setting of Shannara is what makes it unique and what makes it stand apart from Tolkien.. I hope they play it up. Other than that, it would be nice if the filmmakers and tv studios stay away from the trap they laid for themselves when adapting that other Terry a few years ago with Legend of the Seeker. That is, water down a book series which you have no fear of running out of material to mine for ages.. to the point where it becomes blander and less inspired than the original book it is based on.

Steven Erikson Quote

"Authors will subvert that, and many do, and we are left (usually) with unease, with dissatisfaction: we are also left wondering, what was the author’s point here? That we’re all fucked: that life is shit; that the bad guys win; that we exist in a nihilistic nightmare? At which point, isn’t it fair to ask: ”why did you bother telling me that? I mean, what’s the fucking point, asshole?“ And you know what, you’d have a point..." - Steven Erikson

This is a great example of an author of books, which some classify in the "Grimdark" sub genre.. explaining how he feels about those sorts of attitudes. I've maintained since first cracking open "Gardens of the Moon" back in January.. that there is no way that the Malazan series, despite it's huge death toll and sometimes lurid and disturbing imagery.. fits into that sub genre classification.. The cast of characters is simply to varied and there are to many good people, who are often just as successful as the bad people.. for it to be compared to the likes of Abercrombie, Morgan and Bakker. I'd even argue that the Malazan series is marginally less hopeless feeling than Game of Thrones is.