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I've Been Reading Books! Here's wat I think of The Books!
a month ago
I swore an OATH that I would read FIFTY BOOKS before the year was over! ...Even if I occasionally have to stretch the definition of what a 'book' is. But nevertheless, I'm feeling pretty good about myself so far! Good enough that I wanna tell you guys about some of the books I've been reading!
Way back in January I read "Empowered: Vol. 12" (Yes, I'll be including graphic novels). If you don't know about Empowered, by Adam Warren, you should! She's a super-hero, yo! ...A superhero that, unfortunately, is reliant on a super-flimsy super-suit that tears really easy, and when it tears she loses power, making her prime to get- ah... ...tied up and gagged by villains.
Oh my.
BUT NO, LISTEN, it's not just porn! ...Well, they never even show a single nip or dick, so it's SOFT CORE porn at most, but it's not even just that! It's really good. It's hilarious, has a funny and deep super-hero world, and Empowered herself is great. Vol. 12 is kind of 'the end', in its present form, but Adam Warren said in the afterward he definitely would like to do more, just in a new form of some kind. If Vol. 12 turns out to be the last of it, I'll be happy enough. It leaves a lot open to be continued, but resolves some things that are truly heart-warming and emotionally fulfilling.
---
I didn't START reading it this year, but I did FINISH "Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground" by Stu Horvath. If you like RPG's, and ESPECIALLY if you like reading ABOUT RPG's, you'll probably like this book. Stu Horvath is a writer/podcaster/journalist with an immense RPG collection, which is put (partly) on display in this book, where he begins in the 70's and goes all the way to the 2010's, presenting beautifully photographed covers of rpg's and talking about them. Closer to a review of RPG's than an encyclopedia of them, Stu Horvath also discusses the trends of each decade, and blends his individual reviews together thusly. The 70's was when it all began, the 80's, the biggest chapter in the book, when it really took off and went in all directions, while the 90's definitely had a predisposition to things about vampires, angels, and demons. If you're a grouch like me you might be a touch on the disappointed side to see RPG's slowly shifting, beginning heavily in the 2010's, into becoming very strange, niche party-game style things like 'Coffee thieves, an rpg that can be played in five minutes' rather than the obsessive archivist-hoarder hobby it was before, but, well... buy this book if talking about that sort of thing sounds neat to you!
---
...Then I went on a small binge of CONAN THE BARBARIAN books. No no, not by Robert E. Howard. I already read most of those. No, what I read were the books about Conan written by OTHER people. This led to some very mixed results.
"Conan and the Sorcerer" by Andrew J. Offutt was pretty alright. It felt a little dry, a little long, but it was pretty alright.
"Conan the Invincible" by Robert Jordan was... ah, another matter. Boy. You guys know I'm a pervert, and I love spanking, but- boy oh boy, there's only so much 'female haughtiness' I can take. Or rather, the portrayal of 'female haughtiness' by an author who thinks a big, strapping manly-man-in-charge needs to show this belligerent female the error of her ways with his dick, and a good firm hand. Like I said, I AM a pervert, and I might have enjoyed all the tarty spanking and nudity, if only the book hadn't been so otherwise DULL, filled with endless pages of Conan and the haughty woman and her band of bandits trudging backward and forward through the desert.
"Conan: The Road of Kings" by Karl Edward Wagner is a very different story. This one I didn't only like, I LOVED. It was exciting, full of great adventure, ancient and cursed sorceries from the days of ancient empires past, and intrigue and conspiracy! Robert. E. Howard usually depicts Conan as a loner, or surrounded by fools or thuggish backstabbers, so it was fun to see Conan as part of an actual group dynamic of characters in a story.
---
I had "Firebird" by Charles L. Harness sitting on my shelf for- well, I can't rightly say how many years, more than an actual DECADE I'm sure, without reading it. I think I bought it from a book fair because it had a cat woman on the cover, and a spaceship, and I thought that looked neat.
But then I finally read it, and- well, it was neat!
'Firebird' is about an intergalctic civilization of cat-people who are under the absolute and irresistable control of a duo of master-computers. There's absolutely no hope for ever throwing off the shackles of oppression. ...Or IS there?
...Well... yes and no. Yes, in that, ah ha, maybe one day with the heat death of the entire universe the master computers will die, and the galaxy will be reborn. And guess what? THAT'S the stakes- the race (literally, in a way) to stop the master control from carrying out a scientific procedure that will STOP the universe from ever collapsing back in upon itself, so that the computer can live forever and eternal into infinity.
Far from a perfect book (though ostensibly in some way about the power of love, that 'love' is born from a drug that infatuates the two leads to one another), while I cannot vouch for the legitimacy of any of the physics or science it throws around, I can say it was a neat little find to discover on my bookshelf and read after so many years of having not.
---
I read a Star Trek book! "Savage Trade" by Tony Daniel.
I have a highly developed prejudice against tie-in books. I read Magic the Gathering novels for far longer than I should have, tried a few Diablo and Starcraft books, and even a Warhammer book, and I eventually decided that books written to tie-in to something else are rubbish. There are of course exceptions, as I find the Dragonlance books (at least the first trilogy) to be quite fun, if cheesy, but it's a prejudice that I have largely left untested.
But, in a science fiction kinda mood, watching lots of Star Trek OS, I saw this at the library and decided to give it a whirl. And heck, it was just like a Star Trek Episode. I knew I was in for a good time when Kirk opened hailing frequencies to an alien ship, and GEORGE WASHINGTON answered the call.
This book is so like a Star Trek episode, it captures everything, the good AND the bad. It captures the cheese, the funny old action, and even the boring, dull part of the episode they filmed to pad time, where people just pedantically talk and reiterate the same thing over and over again.
---
By pure coincidence, after reading the Star Trek book, I read "Saturn's Child" by Nichelle Nicols! (That's Ahura, from Star Trek)
Though not a Star Trek based work itself, its influence from Star Trek was apparent. It had a bit of a rough start, bouncing around through time in quick succession and to different characters, both alien and human, but once it got itself established and I figured out what it was really going to be about, this was a pretty great book. Detailing the first contact between space-faring humans looking to establish a colony on one of Saturn's moons and a colony of aliens who are already there, this is a very star-trek sort of story in that there are no action scenes of stormtroopers engaging in fights with alien forces, while heaping on plenty of SOCIAL and POLITICAL conflict. Scientists, politicians and lovers all argue and debate one another over the implications of meeting another intelligent race, what trade will mean to eachother, and what the impact might be of actually cross-breeding, and having a child born of both species!
...and that's where things dropped off for me a bit. I loved the book... ...until the eponymous saturn's child, 'Saturna' herself arrived on the scene, a child that is the daughter of a human captain and an alien prince. And GOSH, Saturna is just lovely and wonderful, gifted with the most fabulous intellect, the most brilliant psychic powers, and everyone loves her, and...
...And yeah, it turns out Saturna is Nichelle Nicols little darling OC that she's been thinking about for years and years.
Aside from that though (and hey, maybe you don't mind that kind of thing as much as I do- I'm kind of a book snob) this was a very good novel.
---
"The Pride of Chanur" by C.J. Cherryh MIGHT be one of my favorite books, if you simply take it by the metric of how many times I've read it. I read it once decades ago as a teenager, then again later on, and now finally this year once more, in preparation to read its sequels- a trilogy, consisting of "Chanur's Venture", "The Kif Strike Back" and "Chanur's Homecoming".
The Chanur books concern the adventures of captain Pyanfar Chanur and her crew, members of the Hani species (Space Lion-people), who are merchants, and part of an alliance of aliens called the Compact, including the gender and identity-shifting Stsho, the scheming and vaguely ape-like Mahendosat, a bunch of methane-breathing aliens that it's better just to have nothing to do with, and the gods-blasted KIF, who are evil space-pirate skeksis. One day, while fueling up their ship, a STRANGE NAKED ALIEN WITH NO FUR of a species no one has seen before runs aboard Chanur's ship. It doesn't speak anyone's language, but is clearly intelligent, writing strange letters in its own blood on the walls. It's escaped from the Kif, and Pyanfar can either give it back to the Kif - which no hani would ever do - or they can run away with the weird alien, and kick off an intergalactic conflict that, over the course of four books, will threaten to tear the compact apart in intrigue, war, and space-opera-drama.
C.J. Cherryh has, with these four books, very quickly become one of my favorite authors. It's a contradictory sort of love, because sometimes, while reading the quadrilogy, I was aching for a bit more dramatic prose, for a bit of Robert Howard style attention paid to the action scene. "Boy howdy," I sometimes said, "If I have to read another twelve chapters about Pyanfar making another hyper-speed jump, step by grueling step, I'm gonna pitch a fit."
Yet, this is all the magic of Cherryh. She's not an author, so much as a documentary film maker, hitting 'record' on the camera and filming what's happening. This lends a fabulously objective voice to her narrative, where you can be intrigued by characters and their alien points of view, but never feel like you're being told for sure "What this person is saying is the right/wrong thing." It throws you into the world naked and unready, explaining nothing, but giving you the chance, like a person thrust into a foreign culture, to do your own work, and derive satisfaction from learning, by repition, what things mean, what the customs of a species are, and how everything works. Cherryh is not an easy read, but if you can manage it, you'll find a brilliant, well-thought out world, with epic turns of fate to equal or rival any star wars film.
---
All the while that I was reading proper novels, I indulged my less-than-secret pleasure of RPG's, by reading a slew of Chaosium-brand books.
Near the beginning of the year I decided to branch out from Call of Cthulhu and take some interest in "Pendragon", which was apparently just seeing a revival in a new sixth edition, and "Runequest: Glorantha."
My pursuit of Pendragon was, and continues to be, an interesting one, as it seems that... well, not ALL of the core books actually EXIST for sixth edition just yet. There's the "Pendragon Core Rulebook" which would be better known as a 'players handbook', because it's got character creation and basic rules in it. I spent a few months waiting for the "Pendragon Gamemaster's Handbook" to be released, which is full of stuff a DM needs, like a few additional rules for specific situations, stat blocks, a beginner scenario, and one or two maps and things along with some more setting knowledge. There is, apparently, still ONE MORE BOOK scheduled to be made in the future, which may concern romance, marriage, and the siring/mothering of a legacy over the years- a niche interest in any other rpg, but I've heard that this is a key part of pendragon, that the true spirit of it is to make a knight, carry out one or two heroic deeds, watch them die, then continue on into the future with one of their children.
I haven't actually played any pendragon yet, but it seems neat. I like knights and stuff, so, cool. (When I DO eventually run pendragon I probably won't be able to resist making it 'furry pendragon', and letting my players live out their disney robin hood fantasies).
Runequest: Glorantha (the : needed for very complicated reasons, it would seem), I DID manage to play, having been gifted the Start Set, and managing to get in two of the three (three of the four, if you count the solo scenario) adventures it contained!
Runequest has been a mixed parcel for me. In some ways I think it's neat and very cool, and in other ways I find it coule be simplified, and remains obtuse. It's world and lore are as confusing as they are interesting, every book I've bought (including the "Dragon Pass" supplement) only furthering my confusion. Little by little I'm beginning to grasp the idea that Glorantha's mythos, contradictory and metaphysical as it is, kind of wants you to just say "EH, FUCK IT" and do whatever you want. There's gods, they've got names, and who cares which one is related to which one, because that one is probably its own mother and died before it gave birth to its own father or some shit like that.
Way back in January I read "Empowered: Vol. 12" (Yes, I'll be including graphic novels). If you don't know about Empowered, by Adam Warren, you should! She's a super-hero, yo! ...A superhero that, unfortunately, is reliant on a super-flimsy super-suit that tears really easy, and when it tears she loses power, making her prime to get- ah... ...tied up and gagged by villains.
Oh my.
BUT NO, LISTEN, it's not just porn! ...Well, they never even show a single nip or dick, so it's SOFT CORE porn at most, but it's not even just that! It's really good. It's hilarious, has a funny and deep super-hero world, and Empowered herself is great. Vol. 12 is kind of 'the end', in its present form, but Adam Warren said in the afterward he definitely would like to do more, just in a new form of some kind. If Vol. 12 turns out to be the last of it, I'll be happy enough. It leaves a lot open to be continued, but resolves some things that are truly heart-warming and emotionally fulfilling.
---
I didn't START reading it this year, but I did FINISH "Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground" by Stu Horvath. If you like RPG's, and ESPECIALLY if you like reading ABOUT RPG's, you'll probably like this book. Stu Horvath is a writer/podcaster/journalist with an immense RPG collection, which is put (partly) on display in this book, where he begins in the 70's and goes all the way to the 2010's, presenting beautifully photographed covers of rpg's and talking about them. Closer to a review of RPG's than an encyclopedia of them, Stu Horvath also discusses the trends of each decade, and blends his individual reviews together thusly. The 70's was when it all began, the 80's, the biggest chapter in the book, when it really took off and went in all directions, while the 90's definitely had a predisposition to things about vampires, angels, and demons. If you're a grouch like me you might be a touch on the disappointed side to see RPG's slowly shifting, beginning heavily in the 2010's, into becoming very strange, niche party-game style things like 'Coffee thieves, an rpg that can be played in five minutes' rather than the obsessive archivist-hoarder hobby it was before, but, well... buy this book if talking about that sort of thing sounds neat to you!
---
...Then I went on a small binge of CONAN THE BARBARIAN books. No no, not by Robert E. Howard. I already read most of those. No, what I read were the books about Conan written by OTHER people. This led to some very mixed results.
"Conan and the Sorcerer" by Andrew J. Offutt was pretty alright. It felt a little dry, a little long, but it was pretty alright.
"Conan the Invincible" by Robert Jordan was... ah, another matter. Boy. You guys know I'm a pervert, and I love spanking, but- boy oh boy, there's only so much 'female haughtiness' I can take. Or rather, the portrayal of 'female haughtiness' by an author who thinks a big, strapping manly-man-in-charge needs to show this belligerent female the error of her ways with his dick, and a good firm hand. Like I said, I AM a pervert, and I might have enjoyed all the tarty spanking and nudity, if only the book hadn't been so otherwise DULL, filled with endless pages of Conan and the haughty woman and her band of bandits trudging backward and forward through the desert.
"Conan: The Road of Kings" by Karl Edward Wagner is a very different story. This one I didn't only like, I LOVED. It was exciting, full of great adventure, ancient and cursed sorceries from the days of ancient empires past, and intrigue and conspiracy! Robert. E. Howard usually depicts Conan as a loner, or surrounded by fools or thuggish backstabbers, so it was fun to see Conan as part of an actual group dynamic of characters in a story.
---
I had "Firebird" by Charles L. Harness sitting on my shelf for- well, I can't rightly say how many years, more than an actual DECADE I'm sure, without reading it. I think I bought it from a book fair because it had a cat woman on the cover, and a spaceship, and I thought that looked neat.
But then I finally read it, and- well, it was neat!
'Firebird' is about an intergalctic civilization of cat-people who are under the absolute and irresistable control of a duo of master-computers. There's absolutely no hope for ever throwing off the shackles of oppression. ...Or IS there?
...Well... yes and no. Yes, in that, ah ha, maybe one day with the heat death of the entire universe the master computers will die, and the galaxy will be reborn. And guess what? THAT'S the stakes- the race (literally, in a way) to stop the master control from carrying out a scientific procedure that will STOP the universe from ever collapsing back in upon itself, so that the computer can live forever and eternal into infinity.
Far from a perfect book (though ostensibly in some way about the power of love, that 'love' is born from a drug that infatuates the two leads to one another), while I cannot vouch for the legitimacy of any of the physics or science it throws around, I can say it was a neat little find to discover on my bookshelf and read after so many years of having not.
---
I read a Star Trek book! "Savage Trade" by Tony Daniel.
I have a highly developed prejudice against tie-in books. I read Magic the Gathering novels for far longer than I should have, tried a few Diablo and Starcraft books, and even a Warhammer book, and I eventually decided that books written to tie-in to something else are rubbish. There are of course exceptions, as I find the Dragonlance books (at least the first trilogy) to be quite fun, if cheesy, but it's a prejudice that I have largely left untested.
But, in a science fiction kinda mood, watching lots of Star Trek OS, I saw this at the library and decided to give it a whirl. And heck, it was just like a Star Trek Episode. I knew I was in for a good time when Kirk opened hailing frequencies to an alien ship, and GEORGE WASHINGTON answered the call.
This book is so like a Star Trek episode, it captures everything, the good AND the bad. It captures the cheese, the funny old action, and even the boring, dull part of the episode they filmed to pad time, where people just pedantically talk and reiterate the same thing over and over again.
---
By pure coincidence, after reading the Star Trek book, I read "Saturn's Child" by Nichelle Nicols! (That's Ahura, from Star Trek)
Though not a Star Trek based work itself, its influence from Star Trek was apparent. It had a bit of a rough start, bouncing around through time in quick succession and to different characters, both alien and human, but once it got itself established and I figured out what it was really going to be about, this was a pretty great book. Detailing the first contact between space-faring humans looking to establish a colony on one of Saturn's moons and a colony of aliens who are already there, this is a very star-trek sort of story in that there are no action scenes of stormtroopers engaging in fights with alien forces, while heaping on plenty of SOCIAL and POLITICAL conflict. Scientists, politicians and lovers all argue and debate one another over the implications of meeting another intelligent race, what trade will mean to eachother, and what the impact might be of actually cross-breeding, and having a child born of both species!
...and that's where things dropped off for me a bit. I loved the book... ...until the eponymous saturn's child, 'Saturna' herself arrived on the scene, a child that is the daughter of a human captain and an alien prince. And GOSH, Saturna is just lovely and wonderful, gifted with the most fabulous intellect, the most brilliant psychic powers, and everyone loves her, and...
...And yeah, it turns out Saturna is Nichelle Nicols little darling OC that she's been thinking about for years and years.
Aside from that though (and hey, maybe you don't mind that kind of thing as much as I do- I'm kind of a book snob) this was a very good novel.
---
"The Pride of Chanur" by C.J. Cherryh MIGHT be one of my favorite books, if you simply take it by the metric of how many times I've read it. I read it once decades ago as a teenager, then again later on, and now finally this year once more, in preparation to read its sequels- a trilogy, consisting of "Chanur's Venture", "The Kif Strike Back" and "Chanur's Homecoming".
The Chanur books concern the adventures of captain Pyanfar Chanur and her crew, members of the Hani species (Space Lion-people), who are merchants, and part of an alliance of aliens called the Compact, including the gender and identity-shifting Stsho, the scheming and vaguely ape-like Mahendosat, a bunch of methane-breathing aliens that it's better just to have nothing to do with, and the gods-blasted KIF, who are evil space-pirate skeksis. One day, while fueling up their ship, a STRANGE NAKED ALIEN WITH NO FUR of a species no one has seen before runs aboard Chanur's ship. It doesn't speak anyone's language, but is clearly intelligent, writing strange letters in its own blood on the walls. It's escaped from the Kif, and Pyanfar can either give it back to the Kif - which no hani would ever do - or they can run away with the weird alien, and kick off an intergalactic conflict that, over the course of four books, will threaten to tear the compact apart in intrigue, war, and space-opera-drama.
C.J. Cherryh has, with these four books, very quickly become one of my favorite authors. It's a contradictory sort of love, because sometimes, while reading the quadrilogy, I was aching for a bit more dramatic prose, for a bit of Robert Howard style attention paid to the action scene. "Boy howdy," I sometimes said, "If I have to read another twelve chapters about Pyanfar making another hyper-speed jump, step by grueling step, I'm gonna pitch a fit."
Yet, this is all the magic of Cherryh. She's not an author, so much as a documentary film maker, hitting 'record' on the camera and filming what's happening. This lends a fabulously objective voice to her narrative, where you can be intrigued by characters and their alien points of view, but never feel like you're being told for sure "What this person is saying is the right/wrong thing." It throws you into the world naked and unready, explaining nothing, but giving you the chance, like a person thrust into a foreign culture, to do your own work, and derive satisfaction from learning, by repition, what things mean, what the customs of a species are, and how everything works. Cherryh is not an easy read, but if you can manage it, you'll find a brilliant, well-thought out world, with epic turns of fate to equal or rival any star wars film.
---
All the while that I was reading proper novels, I indulged my less-than-secret pleasure of RPG's, by reading a slew of Chaosium-brand books.
Near the beginning of the year I decided to branch out from Call of Cthulhu and take some interest in "Pendragon", which was apparently just seeing a revival in a new sixth edition, and "Runequest: Glorantha."
My pursuit of Pendragon was, and continues to be, an interesting one, as it seems that... well, not ALL of the core books actually EXIST for sixth edition just yet. There's the "Pendragon Core Rulebook" which would be better known as a 'players handbook', because it's got character creation and basic rules in it. I spent a few months waiting for the "Pendragon Gamemaster's Handbook" to be released, which is full of stuff a DM needs, like a few additional rules for specific situations, stat blocks, a beginner scenario, and one or two maps and things along with some more setting knowledge. There is, apparently, still ONE MORE BOOK scheduled to be made in the future, which may concern romance, marriage, and the siring/mothering of a legacy over the years- a niche interest in any other rpg, but I've heard that this is a key part of pendragon, that the true spirit of it is to make a knight, carry out one or two heroic deeds, watch them die, then continue on into the future with one of their children.
I haven't actually played any pendragon yet, but it seems neat. I like knights and stuff, so, cool. (When I DO eventually run pendragon I probably won't be able to resist making it 'furry pendragon', and letting my players live out their disney robin hood fantasies).
Runequest: Glorantha (the : needed for very complicated reasons, it would seem), I DID manage to play, having been gifted the Start Set, and managing to get in two of the three (three of the four, if you count the solo scenario) adventures it contained!
Runequest has been a mixed parcel for me. In some ways I think it's neat and very cool, and in other ways I find it coule be simplified, and remains obtuse. It's world and lore are as confusing as they are interesting, every book I've bought (including the "Dragon Pass" supplement) only furthering my confusion. Little by little I'm beginning to grasp the idea that Glorantha's mythos, contradictory and metaphysical as it is, kind of wants you to just say "EH, FUCK IT" and do whatever you want. There's gods, they've got names, and who cares which one is related to which one, because that one is probably its own mother and died before it gave birth to its own father or some shit like that.
Good on your quest!!
Have you read Niven's Man/Kzin wars stuff? Among other weird fun facts, the watered down version of the Kzinti Niven added in his episode of The Animated Series have been recanonized in Star Trek thanks to Lower Decks. And extra bonus, they're Federation allies now.
Never heard of the Kzin Wars books, but I'll give it a look-see ^^ My 'to-read' pile is already more vast than I have hope of getting to, but, that hasn't stopped me from still adding stuff onto it yet.
Mutants and Masterminds has always seemed like a fun rpg- not exactly the sort I'd want to DM myself, but I'd prolly have fun playing in it. I suspect the group I play with wouldn't be doing anything like a kink game, but ;3 Fun to know it's got that level of flexibility!
I too have a tabletop group which isn't kinky (though, hilariously, they make more lewd/furry jokes than the times when I've played with actual furries, and one Delta Green subplot involved a literal snake dominatrix with hypnotic powers; I tried to keep a straight face for that). I hardly ever run games, but have started occasionally running M&M 3e one-shots for them. Little do they know, this is practice for an eventual furry kink game, run for a very different group.
Intriguing picks there :)
I probably should've known it was not gonna be understanding me when the first entry in the list was the Drizz't series. "What could be more non-human than a DARK elf!?" No, that's just an elf with pointy ears facing Fantasy Racism for having dark skin.
I ended up picking out "Assassin's Apprentice" by Robin Hobb from that list, because it talked about how the MC apparently was secretly part "beastfolk" and had some ability that let him commune with animals and become more bestial. But halfway through (It took FOREVER for him to actually become an apprentice to an assassin, too!) and he hasn't really shown any of this? He was able to telepathically bond with animals, and people have told him to knock it off because he'll "lose himself to the animal mind" or something, but it's just been not that inhuman vibe I wanted.
I also picked out the first Temeraire book, "His Majesty's Dragon" by Naomi Novik. The list talked about how great it was to go through the dragon's thoughts and perspectives. Which would be nice, but everything's filtered from the close third-person following of the rider. We get to see what the rider is thinking and going through, but we only get the dragon's mindset through conversation, but we don't really get to see the inner workings of that mind. (Plus, the dragons are too big for me. I don't like them mountain-sized.)
I also picked up a collection (all ten novels now in one book) of the Amber series ("Nine Princes of Amber", "The Guns of Avalon", "Sign of the Unicorn", "The Hand of Oberon", "The Courts of Chaos", "Trumps of Doom", "Blood of Amber", "Signs of Chaos", "Knight of Chaos", and "Prince of Chaos") by Roger Zelazny. It's a series I read once as a teenager, so I wanted to read it again. There's some slightly dated stuff, especially "Nine Princes of Amber", but that's what happens when the book was first written in the 70's. It's still a good read, even if the characters are just immortal humans with magic.
In the end, I wound up just writing my own books and publishing them here to FA, posting each chapter as I complete it. First-person POV from someone who's not human, though most are former humans. Pet dragon (size of a large dog or wolf) in "Princess Tells Her Story" (about 65%ish done with Book 3, almost definitely ending the series), horse/rabbit hybrid hoofbun in "Exodimensional Hoofbun Flopsy" (superhero comic book meets double reverse isekai, currently in Book 2 where she faces her Mysterious Evil Twin), and yinglet (from the webcomic "Out of Placers" by Valsalia) in present-day (kinda) Earth in "Modern Major Yinglet" (which doesn't do "books" because life isn't so nicely structured, but chapters 1-15 would be "book 1" if it did, and it's up to Chapter 17 currently). (Oh, and I have one chapter of a fourth series, "Cinnabar: The Dragon of Eden", but only got one chapter out before my health issues ground me down to a halt. But I'm finally getting a medication for it agian, so hopefully that means I'll be able to get back into it.)
I might have to give a couple on this list a try some time, like "Firebird" or that "The Pride of Chanur" series. It's been a while since I've read outside stuff. ^_^;;
Ha ha, Robin Hobb is quite an undertaking. I read 'Ship of Magic' by her, and found it to be soul-crushing. Assassin's Apprentice was described to be as ten times worse in the 'misery' department.
S'been a long age, but I remember being obsessed with the Books of Amber- at least, the first five- I recall I was disappointed with the direction things took in the sequel series. I grabbed paperbacks of 'em all recently, intending to give 'em a read-through once more!
The main character has not, so far, grown a tail at any point. Major disappointment. ^_~ I like to think I'm not actually that shallow, but at the same time, if I have the choice of a form of fantasy that doesn't include my species dysphoria, I will take it.
I read the Amber books, but I don't remember if I finished all ten as a teenager. I did, however, briefly try to play the Amber TTRPG that a friend's mom picked up and was going to run, but it fell apart pretty much instantly (and wasn't helped by the fact that I hadn't finished reading the books yet, so half the time I tried to establish anything, I was met with "It, uh. It actually doesn't work that way. Sorry.") I know I had gotten at least partially into the Merlin set (6-10), but not how far I got. And then I got hit with fatigue after only finishing the first book in the collection on this run. I'll get back to it eventually. Probably.
Adam Warren's work has always been really fun - Love his sense of humor going back to his days of The Dirty pair and the GEN-13 Bootleg comics. He also did some really cool work for Playstation Magazine back in the day =)
So, my vow this year was to read every day until I'm bored and feel like stopping. I've gotten through a few, but lost track.
I absolutely love Pride of Chanur and the Trilogy sequel.
So, the two most recent I've read were; Crime and Punishment, by Dostoevsky, and A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Both are famous, and they were pretty good.
I've got Anna Karenina, and one of those Pride and Prejudice and Zombies rewrites: which Anna Karenina, so Tolstoy and this other guy. Reviews said that 19th Century Russia works well as a Steampunk setting, so I guess I'll compare them as I go.