Welcome to Litsy!

Final count for my #EndOfYearReadingMarathon yesterday:

542 paged read
4 books finished
9 works of short fiction read

Fourth and final book finished on my #EndOfYearReadingMarathon.

The attention paid to Robert the Bruce‘s post-Bannockburn reign is appreciated, but, like many academic historians, Penman just lets facts gush forth from his pen with little thought given to weaving a coherent narrative.

Finished my third book of my #EndOfYearReadingMarathon.

Conan, I think, has the better stories overall, but Solomon Kane is the better character.

The Del Rey collection also includes a powerful in memorium by HP Lovecraft and a masterful short bio of REH by Rusty Burke.

#REH #Pulp

Finally finished my first book of my #EndOfYearReadingMarathon. With “Hellsgarde,” C.L. Moore‘s Jirel Of Joiry stories end as strongly as they started. A master of a certain sort of creeping horror, Moore deserves mention in the same breath as Howard and Lovecraft. #Pulp #WeirdTales

“[A] great difference will immediately strike him, between what policy would dictate on the original introduction of such institutions, and on a question of their total abolition, where they have cast their roots wide and deep, and where by long habit things more valuable than themselves are so adapted to them, and in a manner interwoven with them, that the one cannot be destroyed without notably impairing the other.”
#EndOfYearReadingMarathon

“Sally” is a nice little science fiction story, but the impressive thing is that, writing in 1953, Asimov not only predicts self-driving cars and Uber, but gets the timing pretty much right as well.
#EndOfYearReadingMarathon

I commented in a blog post that Solomon Kane‘s Africa stories need N‘Longa, but he is absent from “Wings in the Night,” which may be REH‘s finest story period, let alone his finest Solomon Kane story.

The akaana in “Wings in the Night,” by the way, are almost certainly a major inspiration for the aarakocra from Dungeons & Dragons.

#EndOfYearReadingMarathon

Change of venue! #EndOfYearReadingMarathon

“Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because of all enemies it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.” #EndOfYearReadingMarathon

The various wars with England were so hard on Scotland that even late in his reign Robert the Bruce was only collecting royal income half that of his predecessor two generations prior. #EndOfYearReadingMarathon