Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerOsprey’s book on Byzantine infantry covers from around the reign of Emperor Leo VI, which saw a revival of interest in military matters, to the fall of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, which interrupted tradition, and very effectively brought the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
David Potter’s book on Constantine is at first a little hard to pin down. It’s not really a biography, and despite the title, only about half the book is about the reign of Emperor Constantine, with the first half being[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I was expecting something of a detailed look at the Greek myths of Amazons with modern archaeology put in to start telling us just how much of it might have been true. Instead, this is a bit more wide-ranging, largely[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s Fortress book on ancient Troy is not a bad guide to the history of the site as known to archaeology as a whole, but the bulk of the book concentrates (understandably) on Troy VIh, which is one of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It’s hard to figure out where I should start with this book, because there’s a lot of places where I could start. The Name of the Rose is set in 1327, and the struggles of the Christian church in northern[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Helen Castor describes the story of Joan of Arc as normally being written backwards. Everything is colored by the knowledge of what she would become to history. Also, the histories pour over the transcripts of her trials looking for clues[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I picked up Peter Heather’s 2009 book simply because it was cheap on Kindle at one point. I’m now thinking I want to get a proper hard copy book. This is mostly a measure of how much I liked the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Smudge picked this up at APE 2015 last week. It’s a self-published graphic novel of a webcomic that finished up a couple years ago. The general high concept is Victorian fantasy, and it delivers on that quite well. The art[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Deep Secret begins with a cryptic message that the following was secretly deposited in the archive at Iforion. I’d pretty much forgotten that by the time reference was made to it late in the book. There’s a number of things[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Elizabeth Moon’s Legacy of Gird is a pair of prequel novels to her Deed of Paksenarrion series. They’re something of an odd pair: the two books have some significant overlap in time, and while the first one is easy to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…