Smudge Marks & Engel Werks Flash of Steel Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Grumble Jones Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Ravens N’ Pennies Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsPlatt’s book is really about the relationship between Britain and China before the Opium War, and shows why a conflict was unexpected, almost right up to when it did happen. The two had a stable trading relationship for about two[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The final Tomoe Gozen novel is much more cohesive as a novel than the first two. But it is broken into three parts, and they are somewhat independent. A sad repeat from the second book is that there’s an ad[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is the first book in Ben Bova’s “Grand Tour” series—chronologically at least. I get the idea it was one of the later ones written, but I haven’t looked deeply into that. Each one was written about a particular location[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s book on the northwest of British India covers from the appointment of Lord Auckland as Governor-General of India, and goes to the end of British India. In general, this is your usual good Osprey treatment of the subject, with[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is a scholarly look at American politics from roughly 1818 to 1832. Maybe a bit too scholarly for me. Many parts of the book are very finely argued, and I tended to lose track of what the argument was.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The third Ancillary book is a direct follow on to Ancillary Sword, picking up very shortly after the that one. The start re-introduces everything going on, which I needed. However, while much more of a piece with the second book[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
For a long time, waterways were the only meaningful passages from one place to another. Roads might do in a pinch, but water was much faster and easier. Canals have been used throughout history to get this fact to work[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is a bit complicated. First, at a hundred pages (plus an appendix that really is part of the novel) this is pretty much in novella territory. Really though, it’s a jumble of short stories with the same inciting event.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
There’s a few things Miller’s book is about. Most centrally, it is about the Gag Rule, or really, the series of Gag Rules about slavery in the US House of Representatives in the 1830s. It is also about the birth[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Doing a story that hops back and forth between two distinct storylines is difficult. It’s done quite well here. There’s a lot of very deliberate parallels (in fact, this is brought up inside the novel), which help strengthen the structure.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…