Lord Samper's Library

And I do mean a 'quick update'... It's been a hell of a month and my reading goals (along with any reading in general) have all gone belly up :o( I have managed to get a few audiobooks under my belt (thanks, Audible Offer!) but nothing else. I'm going to have another crack at David Wragg's 'The Hunters' over the weekend so, maybe things will change. Fingers crossed ;o) The reason for all of this was the surgery I had right at the end of last month. I really needed it and I'm glad that I finally had it done, it's going to make a real difference going forwards. They did warn me that it was going to be a painful recovery but I was all, 'oh it can't be any worse than it already is...' Gentle reader, it was a lot worse than I thought it would be... In fact... Damn that hurt... I'm definitely on the mend though so hopefully it won't be like this for much longer. Fingers crossed ;o) As you can probably guess though, its killed my reading...

Like the title says, this will probably be the last post for a while. Tomorrow, I'm off to hospital for a spot of surgery; nothing serious (it just really, really needs to be done) but it's going to take a couple of weeks off work to get over and I'll don't think I'll be in any mood to blog during that time. I'm sure I'll pop my head round the door on Bluesky, I'll just be reading books rather than writing about them ;o) And I've got loads to keep me going, including the following ones that I've picked up over the last week... I read the original Frank Herbert books, years ago, and never felt the urge to go back, let alone read the ones written by his son and Kevin J. Anderson (are they any good?), even though I still have a couple lurking on my shelves. That was until I saw this copy of 'Dune Messiah' on the shelf in Greenwich Oxfam and the cover not only really caught my eye but also gave me no option but to buy it. I should read 'D...

I've got a busy weekend ahead of me, what with one thing and another, so I thought I'd take a little of the load off by pinching another post from the dim annals of an old blog of mine. You wouldn't believe it but I really try not to do this too often but like I said, busy weekend and Monday is going to be brutal as I try and clear as much work as possible before going into hospital on Tuesday (nothing serious, just something that really needs to be done). Which kind of leaves me here, with another old 'Doctor Who' post for your reading pleasure ;o) The full review can be found Here but you won't be missing much by not reading it (not unless you really want to hear me wax lyrical about cheese on toast, I love cheese on toast...) And it's also worth mentioning that since this review originally went up, I have finally watched 'The Ark in Space' and you read about that Here if you like ;o) 'Doctor Who' was an absolutely massive part of my chil...

'Alien: Romulus' deserved to have a post all to itself but I have been watching other movies over the last few days. This is a quick post where I can get them all in one place and say a little bit about them all. You know, like all the other movie posts here ;o) Here goes... 'Final Days' (2020) As the world crumbles outside, Aidan barricades himself inside his flat. With the infected at his door, Aidan finds that it's the loneliness that is the greatest threat to his sanity. Until one day, he looks out of his window to see a fellow survivor in the flat opposite... 'Final Days' has been sat in my queue for far too long so the other day, I took the plunge and gave it a watch. It's not a bad movie, a little lightweight and straightforward but tense in all the right places and an interesting study in loneliness. What I really got the most out of though was taking the time to listen to what the infected were screaming as they did their thing, it added an int...

I somehow never got round to watching ‘Alien: Romulus’ at my local cinema (and there’s a big question over whether anyone will watch anything there ever again but that’s another story) but after a few weeks of waiting for the price, on Prime Video, to come down, ‘Romulus’ suddenly became affordable and that was my cue to grab a copy, order a pizza in and give it a watch. I’ll be honest, I’m more of a ‘Predator’ fan myself but I’ll never pass up the chance of watching an ‘Alien’ movie and the prospect of an ‘Alien’ movie directed by the same guy who directed the ‘Evil Dead’ remake was an intriguing one to me. So, slice of pizza in hand, I started watching and… While scavenging a derelict space station, a group of young colonists looking for a better life find the most terrifying life form in the universe instead. And there may well be something even more terrifying on board… As I’ve got older, I’ve found that my natural ‘movie run-time tolerance’ peters out at about an hour and half. An...

Last night was a bit hectic so I never made it round to writing a blog post for today. Lets just say for now that 'Alien: Romulus' was as good as I'd hoped it would be; not brilliant but good, solid 'Xenomorph Fun'. Maybe I'll even go into a little more detail about that soon, we'll see. All of which led me to looking for an old post (from an older blog) that I could purloin. I found this quote instead, I think it's one that we can all do with remembering every now and then. 'This is the reader's book. All proper names are therefore to be pronounced in any way he chooses, except in conversation with another reader, in which case the two must settle their differences as best they can, for there is no rule.' From the 'Author's Note', 'The Well of the Unicorn' (Fletcher Pratt) Because if life is too short to be reading books that you don't enjoy, it's certainly too short for you to be tying yourself in knots over whet...