I'm going through the Vampire Hunter D audiobooks. They are AWESOME!

I love the idea the vampire lords are so old that they have gathered the knowledge of science and technology to the point they are able to travel to space. All the creatures of mythology like werewolves and dragons are just the results of their genetic meddling. It's been this awesome mix of sci-fi, fantasy and Western....and all this from a Japanese author.

It's a re(several times over)read for me, but Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay. Set in a fantasy Italian peninsula with magic, it's a great read. One of my all time favorite books.

The last new thing I read was "My Name is Red" by the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. A bit more "literary" than what I normally read, but it was a lot of fun. I would highly recommend it.

The Influence of Sea Power upon History by Alfred Thayer Mahan. Kind of a drag and not something that few people will read outside of academia, but it’s very interesting considering it was written before the big naval explosion before WW1 (that it helped cause).

I'm reading a collection of essays on Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger and it's great. Also reading On Resistance to Evil by Force by Ivan Ilyan. I plan to read God is a Man of War by Steven de Young after.

Before, I just finished the Elric series which was one of the most blatant 1970s boomer worldview masturbations I've ever read, although lots of it was very fun.

Currently on the third book in a series called Dungeon Crawler Carl. It's like a DnD type adventure saga following one man. Pretty fun!

Whenever we got one of those I have to explain I usually read fantasy and/or sci-fi. I have been grinding at one for so long I can't really say what it was before, probably one of the Apothecary Diaries ones, love the story overall about a girl in the imperial court who got abducted to work there at first but slowly gets into working there and has to solve a lot of mysterious things going on. Got an anime and manga adaption so there's that(both are really good too).

I'm currently grinding @ lord of mysteries, a translated book from chinese. I started it since I saw they'll be making an anime(and they did in the meanwhile)..I'm like 1/3 through them all(of the first, there's a second one also which is equally long), according to my reader around 9k pages so I'll still be there for a while.

Story is quite interesting, the main character gets transported into a world with magic in it set in a Victorian, more steampunk-y world. He is no blank slate though, he takes over the body of someone who tried to kill himself, seemingly healing from death. What I really love about it is how the story is quite lovecraftian, don't look directly at god, don't fiddle with things you don't know, one slip up can cost you your sanity and then your life. Their magic system is also very in-depth. I don't wanna say too much, I just wanna give out my wholehearted recommendation...just be warned it's long and depending on what version you read more or less okay in terms of translation. I found one that's quite alright, still had 1-2 weird phrasings but I got used to those...that's just how it is when it is a translated novel from Chinese.

Sorry if it's too fantasy heavy, I don't really read too much historical books anymore, been doing that way too much in the past and now just wanna read fantasy/sci fi/alternative history/nothing too serious.

The Emperors Men currently. The Carpet Makers, Storm of Steel and Slaughterhouse Five before that.

Storm of Steel is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend anyone who wants to get a glimpse into how utterly insane trench warfare in WW1 was. Sitting in the trenches all day long while artillery regularly rains down on you until either you or the enemy starts an offensive where the frontline shifts maybe by a couple hundred meters in one direction only to shift into the opposite direction the following weeks. Repeat that for 4 years and you have WW1. Complete insanity.

I'm pulling most of this from Wikipedia, but I've read about the origins of the Field of Dreams novel & author several times (despite never reading the book).

• The author W.P. Kinsella, was a Canadian born on an Alberta homestead to Irish parents in 1935.
• He lived on a farm in rural Alberta before moving to the major center of Edmonton, Alberta until age 10. He was initially homeschooled and didn't start public education until Grade 5.
• He later moved further west as an adult to British Columbia. He didn't attend university until age 35 in the capital of Victoria, BC on Vancouver Island.
• In the late 70s, he attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop for a Master of Fine Arts, which was the basis for the short story and eventual longer novel of 265 pages Shoeless Joe (1982) that would later be adapted into Field of Dreams.
• Despite hailing from the Western Canadian provinces of Alberta & BC without much of a baseball history, he wrote 3 novels & 40 short stories about baseball. Shoeless Joe was his first such novel and most successful.
• His other obsession was writing about Indians. Even in 1990 the chugs were big mad about his cultural appropriation. Despite spending a lot of time on the Left Coast, he essentially told them at the time to shove it, that he could write about any topic he liked as a fantasy writer.
• Some of his other work about Indians was later adapted into a Canadian CBC TV show called The Rez from '96-'98 that I have no recollection of.
• The OG novel had IRL reclusive author JD Salinger as the James Earl Jones/Terrance Mann character. Hollywood execs changed it for fear of litigation. They felt the change was irrelevant, estimating only 15% of the audience would recognize JD Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, as an IRL figure, assuming most would consider him imaginary.
• The Canadian author Kinsella had a weird relationship with the JD Salinger character in his novel. He chose the Kevin Costner lead character in the novel to be named Ray Kinsella, sharing his surname and lifted as a character from one of Salinger's short stories as well. There's also a character with the Kinsella in The Catcher in the Rye, who is the protagonist Holden Caufield's roommate.
• Despite claiming to have read JD Salinger's entire catalogue in preparation to write Shoeless Joe, WP Kinsella claims the Salinger character in his seminal novel shares no similarities with the IRL author besides being famous & being a recluse. It's possible that this denial is simply a legal strategy, as Salinger living at the time of the novel's publishing in 1982 did reach out to WP Kinsella's publisher noting displeasure of being portrayed in fiction and threatening legal action.
• IRL, JD Salinger's mother was also from Iowa
• WP Kinsella started playing competitive Scrabble after becoming disillusioned with MLB Baseball after the 1994 strike
• In 1997, WP Kinsella suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury by being struck by a vehicle as a pedestrian. He claimed it changed his personality and motivation, stopping him from producing any new work for 14 years.
• One of WP Kinsella's short stories "Lieberman in Love" about a character called Joe Lieberman (unclear if based on the IRL politician) falling in love with a prostitute in Hawaii was later adapted into a film that won an Oscar. Kinsella wasn't credited whatsoever, though a newspaper ad was later run to correct the oversight.
• Salinger died in 2010, Kinsella in 2016. In true Leaf pioneering fashion, he offed himself with MAiD just 2 months after it became law.
• The Moonlight Graham baseball player in the novel is based off an IRL person who debuted in 1905, later became a medical doctor in Chisholm, MN and died in 1965.

Last Rites Ozzy's autobiography

Book before was just a collection of short stories called 21 Great Stories that I picked up at the library's Book Fair.

If audiobooks count, I got through all of Dan Abnett's mainline Eisenhorn, Ravenor and Bequin books plus a few of the shorts, about the adventures and tribulations of certain inquisitors in the WH40k universe. As someone not very familiar with 40k, it's interesting to be following a group of characters who operate largely in the civilian plebeian level of intrigue, without the backing of power armour and titans and such, to the extent that the appearance of an actual space marine in the story tends to be a major event which disrupts the power balance. Abnett's good at making these low level events tie into massive schemes which dictate the fate of whole systems, as well as putting a nice note of cosmic horror into his warp-related descriptions.

An unfortunate side effect is that I've somehow become less interested in the grander scale violence of 40k as a result. I tried listening to one of his books about titans and bounced right off. A friend recommended I listen to or read (the latter is unlikely these days) the Gaunt's Ghosts series as a middle ground.

200 Years Together and random web fiction. New Life as a Max Level Archmage

Finished the Iliad.

Reading The Warlord Wants for More (female romance novel. I'm trying to get an understanding of what exactly one-shotted women worse than porn for men)

Next book will be The Complete Ingersoll Lockwood collection

Jewel in the Skull by Moorcock. Haven't read this in 30 years and it's better than I remember.

Finished the Wax and Wayne series, finally. It's good, don't get me wrong, but the second and third were not addictive, like the Mistborn trilogy.

And...nothing. the last couple weeks, most of the horror movies have come to cheap streaming, and BDs have been going on sale. So, I've been watching movies, and stocking up on chubby cases and box sets.

Except for the Vincent Price Collection II. Looks I'll have to pick all those up separately. Scream Factory put I and III out again, and Amazon has had them on sale, so I figure it must be a license issue. Grrr...

Got Last Rites, for when I go back to reading instead of just watching.

The Religion virus. It's about how religion spreads bad ideas to good people. Of course it's actually how propaganda is used to control people, but the left doesn't cast reflections.

Two books on Figital Design. Lost them from ADHD tornadoes. One has a lot of bolox in it, but a few good details. The other is a more hands on idea.

Dracula again. It's Halloween and a tradition for me.

I finished the 3rd book of the Forgotten Realms: The Dark Elf Trilogy which is about Drizzt. Now I have to go find the next 5 books, having bought the 4 books from the series after that one :/ There's also (apparently) several more books featuring Drizzt too.

I read the first 2 books of the Aho-Girl manga. The anime is funny too.

I bought a few manga books at the big charity sale, but have to wait until April for the really really big annual one.

Mostly I read manga online :>

I've been diving into the sword and sorcery genre lately. I just finished up The Sundered Realm by Robert E. Vardeman and Victor Milán, published by Playboy of all things. Although I suppose that tracks with the raunchy bedding of wenches that go along with our protagonists quest to hunt down some mythical amulet to gain himself immortality. It's been a nice easy read but had me constantly looking up vocabulary which is something I haven't had to do in close to twenty years.

Before that I was reading Tarnsman of Gor. Stumbled across that one while browsing the Dark Sun subreddit. Looked it up and discovered that it's an infamous series that pisses of all the right people with its portrayals of women and dove right in. Definitely not the best writing I've encountered but decent enough and the world building itself is actually pretty good. Our hero gets whisked away to a second earth that is eternally hidden on the other side of the sun and gets a crash course in being a barbarian warrior and then sent out to steal another town's high treasure. Adventure and sexy slave girls follow. Honestly it's kind of timid compared to what makes the rounds these days and the misogyny is way overpromised and underdelivered, but it definitely caters to a male centric understanding of how the world works, which is a welcome relief in this modern hellscape we live in.

Reading Gulag Archipelago. 11% in and it's interesting but a bit of a slog. I finished Project Hail Mary earlier this month and it was a page turner. Same author that wrote The Martian, and pretty similar. "Science dude solves problems" genre.

On the third book of the Dresden Files. It’s a mix of fantasy and detective work, with the main character being a wizard in modern day Chicago who works as a detective specializing in the supernatural.

It’s quite entertaining so far.

Before that I was reading a few novels by Simon Green about a modern day Druid whose family protect the world from evil.

It was okay. Bit slow in parts. It’s a big series that I put aside since it became frustrating in certain spots.

The Day of the Jackal, just finished No Country for Old Men, gonna see what other great movies were originalky books

There's another book series (not Manga) that turned anime that I absolutely admire too and that's The Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It is a space epic of space epics! There are so many well written characters with such a well written history. I'm quite surprised at how well the author treats military characters, you got officers with good by the book conduct to military crayon eaters. It all feels like the author has done his research.

The scale of the fleet battles are wild too with fleets of tens-of-thousands ships engaging each other. There's plenty of cool sci-fi gizmos like power armor being so powerful that everyone has gone back to melee fighting. Yet despite all the tech lore in it, the driving factor is still the characters, some sci-fi focus too much on the "stuff and things" to be interesting.

If you just want to watch the anime series, there is a older 1980s series and 2020 series....I encourage them both! The 2020 series goes by events a little faster, which oddly goes into its favor, as the books didn't drag out events like the 1980s series did. The 1980s series though is also very well detailed. I personally favor the 2020 series more because of how it handled one specific event that makes it accurate to the books but that is major spoilers.

the hobbit, just finished the frontlines series