Christmas Books - Part One

Except for the Norton Critical Edition of The Pilgrim's Progress which only exists as a physical book, I put all e-books on my Christmas wish list. First, I just don't have room for anymore real books. Our shelves are packed, even doubled in a few places. Secondly, I've gotten really comfortable reading on my various kindles. Between changing the background/text colors and the brightness I'm pretty much able to read easily wherever I am.

I only got one actual book off my wish list, Howard Andrew Jones' The Bones of the Old Ones. Everything else I got was as generic Amazon kindle credits. So I had a few decisions to make. Some of my picks were things I've been too cheap to buy and others were things that caught my eye tooling around Amazon tonight.

I've been meaning to read this one and its predecessor for some time now. I was totally taken by the short story collection The Waters of Eternity. Now I can read the whole saga as it now stands.

I first read Ty's work in The Return of the Sword and really dug it. I've been meaning to read more and at $4.99 for an omnibus collection how could I not get this one?

I'm way too cheap to buy these collections most days of the week. With "free" Christmas credit things are different. I've been told this is the best overall introduction to Lamb's vivid adventure stories. We'll see.

I'm a big fan of Milton Davis, the ceaseless engine behind much sword & soul action. Nice to see this get a solid review on Black Gate last month.

If you gamed in the seventies and early eighties you should remember David Hargrave's utterly bonkers D&D supplement Arduin. For its sheer scale and crazed ingenuity the first volume of this series, Seven Princes, brought that to mind. I'm really looking forward to digging into these.

My first knowledge of this book was from Leo Grin's bracing essay "The Bankrupt Nihilism of Our Fallen Fantasists." I've read numerous other commentary attacking it as well as defending it in the years since Grin's article. It's reached a point where if I'm going to hold myself up as any sort of authority on heroic fiction
I've got to give Abercrombie a go at least once.

This one, well, lots of people have gone on about it being top notch, so, I figured I'd check it out. Sounds fun.







I have got so many freakin' books to read right now. I'm still in the middle of the second Gonji book with the third staring over my shoulder. Then there's a backlog of magazine short stories to plow through. Then, I just don't know. Maybe Carole McDonnell's Wind Follower. Or something else.