New book

You may have noticed (most likely not) that I quietly put away the image of Blood and Honor in the "What I'm Reading" sidebar, and replaced it with one of The Dying Earth, the first of the Dying Earth series by Jack Vance. It was simply taking me too long to get through the D&D novels, and I, frankly, wasn't enjoying them enough to attempt to renew them at the library for a third time. So, back they go, the last one unread except for a few pages in. I'll try it again some other time.

In the meantime, I've never actually read Jack Vance. The Dying Earth is not really a novel per se, but a "fixup", which means that it is a series of loosely related short stories that have been strung together, bridged, slightly modified and framed to approximate the form of a novel. So far, I've only read the first of the short stories that is essentially Chapter 1: "Turjan of Miir."

Interesting stuff. I'm not going to say that I've been blown away by its brilliance (nor that I expected to be) but it's one of those kinds of things that pretty much every fantasy fan, and particularly D&D fans are expected to have read, so I figgered I better get on the bandwagon already.

Anyway, because I have more than one cover image, I'm attaching a different one to this post than I have in the "What am I reading?" sidebar. Actually, the version that I'm reading has neither cover; I'm reading an omnibus edition with all of the Dying Earth series combined.