Inside GMT Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerI’ve been interested in the Merovingian period of (proto-)France for some time. So I was very happy when I finally got Ian Wood’s The Merovingian Kingdoms for my birthday. It’s not a great book. Though I’d say for the period[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror a couple days ago. I’ll admit I was a bit surprised when I started it. I wasn’t expecting a 600-page book in 8-point type in oversized paperback format. This is a long[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ospery has been doing a bunch of ‘Battle Tactics’ books recently. I think it would have been neat if they’d made them their own line, instead of just part of the Elite series. I decided to start off with the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Norwich’s A History of Venice is a good and thorough work covering from the initial colonization of the islands of the Rialto to the city’s fall to Napoleon (roughly 420 to 1797), but I found it a bit disappointing. However,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Late last year, I picked up Empires of the Silk Road, as it looked very interesting. And it is, I highly recommend it as an extremely well done history of a part of the world that most people just don’t[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Lost to the West is a very good readable brief history of the Byzantine Empire, and I recommend it as such to anyone who would like to familiarize themselves with the subject. However, the subtitle “The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
My roommate Dave just wrote a snarky little rant about the quality of Baen’s main authors. There are some points I disagree with, but at the same time I have to agree with the overall assessment. The main thing I[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I just stumbled across this on Ruggles’ LJ. I did a direct response, but now I’m going to do my essay/rant on the underlying subject. There are three elements that any story will have: Language (or cinematography for movies, or[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Been meaning to get to this for ages. I try to leaven all my fiction reading with some non-fiction. As my primary interest is history, I generally end up reading something about the past. I don’t care for dry academic[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is salvaged from an ages old forum post. Reading and history are a couple of my main hobbies, so I naturally have an interest in books that talk about history. This is a list of books that are at[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…