Paper Blog

For the moment, I no longer have the capability to access my blog as easily and frequently as I used to, so I'm keeping a few notes in good old-fashioned hand-written journal style that I can transfer to the blog later. This is the first entry recorded that way. Plus, new title!

I've been reading a lot again. Sometimes I find it difficult to read because my time available for such pursuits is low and so many competing activities vie for my time. Specifically: I've been trying to watch a number of movies lately, and making very little progress. I've been trying to write a novel and making an embarrassingly little amount of headway. I've been trying to play through Jade Empire and had to quit again (I somehow screwed up the romance with Silk Fox again, though, so that's not just about time.) Of course, those are the things that just compete for my free time, which with all the things going on in the evenings is already a vanishingly small commodity as it is.

But at the moment, more things are suffering because I've been in the mood to read. I just read Thieves' World, the first short story anthology by Robert Aspring in the infamous shared world sword & sorcery mileu. After a fitful start, I plowed through Book I of the Lord of the Rings in short order. I've been really anxious to read Raymond Feist's Riftwar Saga again, but over the years it appears that I've lost my copies of the first three books, so I'm waiting to get my hands on them again.

I can afford to wait; I've still got plenty of the Lord of the Rings to read and the first Malazan Book of the Fallen book by Erikson to read, and some Leigh Brackett to read, and... and more, of course. As always, my queue of books to read is quite long. But that's the way I like it. I like to have plenty of things waiting in the wings to read. Speaking of which, I want to pick up some Jim Butcher and Brandon Sanderson soon too—I've heard great things about both. And, as always, since I have some friends who rave constantly about the merits of Brust (Corey and Scott, mostly) I want to see exactly what it is that I'm missing. Finally, I enjoyed the first three Black Company books by Glen Cook well enough (alhough the writing style wasn't exactly to my taste) so I want to go on and read the rest of them. I've even—Heaven help me—been seized by a desire to reread the Belgariad. Clearly my hunger for fantasy fiction, which had been slumbering for some time, has awaken with a vengeance.