Basternae.org

I just finished reading Thud! and Making Money by Terry Pratchett.  They’re both excellent books, and if you haven’t read any of his work you probably ought to.  It’s sort of that British-style Douglas-Adams-y thing, but applied to fantasy instead of sci-fi.

Thud! is about a racewar brewing between Trolls and Dwarves and the cops who are trying to prevent it. Making Money is the story of an ex-crook who is put in charge of a bank via inheriting the dog that owns it.  They both have plenty of comedy-meets-fantasy-parodies-reality to them.  All on a world riding on the back of a giant turtle, of course.

You could always start with The Colour of Magic at the beginning of the series, but you’ll soon reach some of the less-than-awesome books (like Eric). If you don’t start the beginning you’ll miss out on Rincewind the incompetent wizard, Death and his companion The Death of Rats, and some of the other great characters he hasn’t done too much with lately.  Most of the books are pretty standalone, so you could start anywhere.  If you’re considering reading Thud! I’d recommend Monstrous Regiment first, and for Making Money I’d recommend Going Postal first.  They’re not essential, but they develop the background of some of the characters a bit more so you get a bit better depth.

His books make good gifts for mudders and friends of mudders, so it’s something to keep in mind if you’re getting kind of last-minute on your holiday shopping.  They’re always in stock at pretty much every bookstore.

At my dayjob, I’m a C# developer. 2.5 years ago I was a C++ developer during the day. When I wrote C++, it was all for multiplatform applications that never touched any of the .NET libraries. When I switched to C#, it was all .NET. Never once did I try or even look into using any of the .NET libraries with C++. I knew there was something like __gcnew available, but I took one peek at managed C++ back in 2003 or so and got scared, running away because it looked so ugly.

I had heard that it was improved, but never bothered to look into it until now. I picked up a copy of Pro Visual C++ 2005 for C# Developers and in the first 50 pages I learned everything I need to know to be able to mix managed and unmanaged code in a C++ application, or to mix C# and C++ applications in a .NET project.  I’m not sure how much I’ll ever use that, since my main usage of C++ is for wxWidgets or Qt-based applications, but it’s nice to know, and the author, Dean Wills, did a damn fine job of explaining the differences between the two languages in a short amount of time.

The remainder of the book explains more of the intricacies and specifics, but any competent C# programmer can be writing C++ in only two hours with this book.

I’ve been reading The Harpers series from the Forgotten Realms books.  Next on my list was Crown of Fire, but it required reading the previous book, Spellfire, in order to really know what was going on.  So much for an open-ended series of books.  By “open-ended” they obviously didn’t mean “standalone”.

Spellfire was a very different book from the rest of the Harpers books in that the monsters were much more vicious — dracoliches, archmages, devils, beholders, and all manner of newbie-slaying critters.  It was a decent book overall, but the nonchalance that the epic foes were treated with took a little away from the book.  It’s obvious they expect you to have read a Monster Manual from cover to cover and don’t spend too much time on descriptions of creatures, their ferociousness, and all the horrible things they can do to a foe.

Most of the characters in this book are pretty one-dimensional, and the interactions between the main characters (especially Shandril and Narm) are pretty empty.  Even so, it’s a good adventure tale and I give it a solid 3 out of 5 stars.  I liked it well enough, but wouldn’t read it again.  At least now I can read Crown of Fire and continue the Harpers series.

I just finished reading Masquerades by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb, tenth book in The Harpers series.  I skipped over the ninth book, Crown of Fire, because I ordered it from Paperbackswap and it hadn’t arrived by the time I wanted to pick up another book.

I have mixed feelings on the book.  Most of the main characters are from Novak and Grubb’s earlier book, Azure Bonds.  The problem is, I didn’t actually like any of those characters.  They’re entirely too lifeless and one-dimensional and it’s not really worth caring about what happens to them.  Despite the characters, the book has a good plot and in defiance of the lack of character development and choppy dialogue, I had to keep reading just to find out what happened next and which factions were victorious and which were destroyed.  It wasn’t as bad as a George R.R. Martin book where the plot is enthralling but the writing is about what you’d get from a 5th grader, but it was still fairly dissonant.

Overall I’d give the book 2.5 stars out of 5.  If you actually like the characters from Azure Bonds, give it a read.  Otherwise it’s probably not worth it.  As for Azure Bonds, the gold box game (Curse of the Azure Bonds) was better than the book.

I just finished reading Elfsong by Elaine Cunningham, book 9 of The Harpers and the sequel to Elfshadow.  It was a 3.5-star book.  It had decent characters, and was your typical sword-and-sorcery novel.  A tale well-told, but not a tale you can’t live without.  Read it if you like the other Harpers books.

I finished reading book 7 of The Harpers — Soldiers of Ice by David “Zeb” Cook.  It was just as good as the previous book, but with a twist:  a plot that was pretty original for a sword-and-sorcery book.  I won’t give away the details, but I will say that it’s a solid 4-star book worth reading if you like the genre.

I just finished reading Crypt of the Shadowking by Mark Anthony, book 6 of The Harpers.  It’s been the best book in the series so far.  Unlike most fantasy, the characters are two-dimensional and the character-to-character interactions are natural.  It’s a shame the author has such a common name — he’s very hard to Google, but apparently he wrote a few more books for TSR and a series called The Last Rune that had some popularity.

I finished reading “The Ring of Winter” by James Lowder yesterday.  It was your standard formula “fantasy in the jungle” novel, complete with dinosaurs, cannibalistic goblins, and mysterious artifacts.  I would rate it as “completely average”, three out of five stars.  If you like sword-and-sorcery fiction you’ll like it.  If not, you won’t.

I just finished “The Night Parade” by Scott Ciencin.  It’s book #4 in The Harpers series.  I liked the first three quite a bit, but this one just wasn’t all that great — characters were too one-dimensional, plot devices too ham-handed, and all in all it just wasn’t very good. It also had too much of a “dingos ate my baby” feel to it.

Believe it or not, before this year I had never read any of the novels in the Forgotten Realms series. I had always been more of a fan of Dragonlance.

Lately I’ve started reading The Harpers series. I started because I read and enjoyed the Dark Sun novels by Troy Denning. Since he wrote the first book in the Harpers series, I decided to give them a try. So far I’m up to the third book, Red Magic, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to eventually end up finishing the whole series.

Of course, I know it’s a gateway drug. Before long I’ll be reading all of Salvatore.