Classic high fantasy and other vintage books from my youth

I'm not taking a break from SWTOR, even though I've not blogged about it all that much. Tomorrow, in fact, we're due to get update 7.01, although that promises more to fix a few bugs than it does to actually provide us with any new content. That said, I'm a lot closer to catching up on editing my raw game videos than I have been a long time. I should probably get back to it a bit more than I have been; I've mostly been doing bare minimum daily and weekly tasks. I've set some new goals for my use of my free time, and frittering away as much of it as I did on the internet or SWTOR is not a new part of the plan. Rather, I'd like to make actual progress on things that I'm doing online, or not do them, for the most part.

One thing that I used to do all of the time but which I haven't done much recently, is read loads of fantasy books. I've got loads to read, some of it stuff that I've read before (but not in decades, in some cases) and some of it is stuff that I haven't read before. Almost exactly a year ago at this very time, I was re-reading The Belgariad, for instance, and... y'know, honestly, I liked it better than I expected. In my mind, its flaws and the complaints levied against it by its critics had been magnified in my mind until I was under the impression that I didn't actually like it anymore after all, even though I remember liking it in the past. Of course, what I found that while the plot and some of its other features were fairly primitive, if not banal, the series itself was well-written and charming. I should have known. 

In any case, in spite of whatever weaknesses works like The Belgariad may have had, or other works of similar vintage by authors like Terry Brooks, R. A. Salvatore, Raymond Feist, or Weis and Hickman, I still think that they are vastly superior to the modern, "subversive" crap, very little of which I've enjoyed, and which can take the majority of the blame for my eventual dismal view of reading fantasy as a hobby overall the last several years. So, it's time to revitalize my reading, by making an effort to set aside time every day to read. I'll play either some orchestral movie soundtracks or classic music in the background, and have at it. While I've got plenty of books to have a go with, I should probably list at least some of my early targets to make sure that they get read.

• I read, quite some time ago, the first book in the Brian Daley Han Solo Adventures trilogy. Of course, I don't have that book, what I have is all three of the books in the trilogy in omnibus format, so I really have no excuse for not having read the second and third yet. They're not even very long. First target.
• I've also had Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars out and off of my shelf for some time. This is two short novels, or maybe novellas that are usually packaged together: "The Secret of Sinharat" and "People of the Talisman." I have read these before; more than once, even, but I'm due and they're really good.
• I've also had some Robert E. Howard for a long time. While I rather easily read the Del Rey Conan compilations, I have not read the Kull or Soloman Kane compilations that I bought at the same time; they've sat untouched on my shelf for years. Time to remedy that.
• It has been way too long since I've re-read The Lord of the Rings. I've lost count, but I know that I'm close to a score of read-throughs, but I also haven't done it in a good ten years. I may do this as an audiobook while walking around the parks and neighborhoods, or I may just read them like normal.
• It's also been a very long time since I've read R. A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale trilogy. Kind of on a whim, I bought an omnibus copy of the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, which I read once long ago. I'm a little annoyed that in this new packaging, the prequel omnibus is volume 1, while the original trilogy is in omnibus format as volume 2. Chronological order is not all that, guys. Publication order is more important, because that's the order (and therefore context) that readers will have originally had, and which it was originally written as. 
• Also in the D&D fiction category, which I sadly have probably way too much of, I've read the first of four loosely connected novels in the "The Inquisitives" series for Eberron. I have the other three, so I should just power through and read them too.
• Finally, I picked up the missing copies of my Riftwar Saga books a while ago, but I haven't re-read them since picking up the copies of books that I lost when a friend moved with them in a box somewhere. I never rebought them new, because I disliked the "author's cut" versions that had been in print since the 90s. Great cover art, but the editors, quite honestly, had improved the books. I found and picked up the older 80s printings that I had had before, and now I've got all four volumes again.
• Long ago I bought a copy of Dracula. I've read it before, but I always wanted to own my own copy. However, I haven't ever read my copy. Sigh. 

I've got plenty more, but that's enough to get me going for quite some time. One thing that you'll notice is that nothing on it has been published more recently than the mid 90s with the exception of the Eberron novels. In fact, other than that I've only got the Salvatore stuff written in the 80s and earliest 90s. The rest of that stuff is significantly older, much of it written before I was born. But, of course, I originally read either it or related works by the same authors in the 80s, so they're associated with that same period in my life. 

Frankly, if I can get all of that read before summer is halfway over, I'll consider this a rousing success, even though when I was younger finishing all of that in a month or two would have been easy. Because I've also got a few non-fiction books on my list, like the four-volume Write Great Fiction series, for instance, even in best case scenario, getting all of this read before the summer is too far along will be challenging.