Lord Samper's Library

  The Bank Holiday Weekend may be well and truly over (at least until the next one comes along) but it left a final present in that the rest of the working week is that little bit shorter. Today feels like a Tuesday but it isn’t, is it? No, it isn’t :o) Anyway, we’re all about short reads here at the moment (a natural fit for a shorter week); mostly because of work, partly because it’s still far too hot for anything more substantial, but also because yesterdays Covid vaccination is starting to make its presence felt. In the spirit of ‘trying to focus on my shelves instead of the shelves in Waterstones’, I thought I’d (finally) check out Ronald Malfi’s ‘Ghostwritten’ collection. I had a lot of fun with ‘They Lurk’ , and four novellas means four posts here, so it all made kind of sense. And in the spirit of ‘keeping things nice and simple’, I’m starting off with the first novella in the collection. That made sense too ;o) Page Count: 86 Pages A lot of money is riding on whether the s...

I think we can all agree that it’s never too cold to curl up with a good book; it is literally what warm, fluffy blankets were invented for. We’re having a bit of a heat wave here though and I can confirm that yesterday was far too hot to curl up with a book, good or bad. The title gives it away a little bit though… I’ve watched more films, than read books, over the weekend (more on that in another post) but I did get a couple of Warhammer 40K short stories under my belt; one from a book that I picked up on Saturday, one from a book that has been stuck on my shelf for far too long… ‘Tattershield’ – William Crowe (Black Library) Page Count: 24 Pages Under the leadership of the indomitable Sergeant Taikon, the Kasrkin squad known as the Tattershields forms the elite core of a desperate defence force on a world all but lost to Chaos. When an opportunity presents itself, Taikon leads the Tattershields in a valiant attempt to eliminate the traitor commander and bring disarray to their rank...

Apologies for the silence here over the last couple of days. I had to take a couple of days off work (sickness) and that spilled over into the weekend. I'd love to say that I caught up with some reading but that would be a complete and utter lie. I did catch up with a lot of sleep though so I still came out ahead of the game, just about ;o) Anyway... I'll be spending today browsing my shelves and adding a few select reads to the TBR pile, I may even read a couple of short stories, we'll see. While I do that... Remember, back in November last year, when I read Virginia Feito's 'Victorian Psycho' and really enjoyed it ? Well, it turns out that a film adaptation is on the horizon. If the film is half as good as the book, it's going to be a lot of fun. I'll be watching it, just to make sure ;o) Here's the trailer... Seriously though, you should read the book. You're welcome ;o)

Nope, it’s a not a ‘Conan’ book that no-one has ever heard of… I had a hospital appointment, yesterday afternoon, and followed it up with a trip to Forbidden Planet on the way home. It made sense ;o) They didn’t have exactly what I was looking for but that’s OK, I can always go back. In the meantime then, here’s a what I came home with; a small lesson in remembering to stay up to date with single issues… ‘Conan the Barbarian #30’ – Zub, Braithwaite, Rodriguez (Titan Comics/Heroic Signature) This one would have made a lot more sense if I had picked up #29 but, here I am; that’s on me, not the comic. What we have here then is Conan as seen through the eyes of an assassin on a mission to kill him; there’s just no context as to why etc. And that’s not the showstopper you’d think. It was very interesting to see Conan’s character (and the lands of Shem) unfold under the gaze of the Son of the Tooth and I could see this issue working very well as a starting point for new readers. It looks lik...

There is only war, of course there is. That’s what you get for starting a sentence like that… ;o) And to be honest, that was just what I needed yesterday. Roadworks outside my flat, until about half three in the morning, is one of the worse ways to start the day; feeling all nauseous from my chemo medication was a pretty shitty way to round the day off. Fingers crossed for a better day today! Anyway… I fancied some reading that would wake me up a little and a spot of Warhammer 40K is always good for that. I wasn’t in the place to take on a full length novel though so one browse through Amazon later, I had three short stories all lined up on the Kindle app, ready to go. Just some quick thoughts today, mainly because these are all particularly short stories (not that I’m moaning this time round, ‘quick reads’ were the order of the day). Lets take a look, shall we…? ‘The Tithe’ – Ben Counter (Black Library) Brother Scoiven of the Imperial Fists brings death to the foe in his primarch’s n...

  Page Count: 291 Pages Another day, another ‘Aliens Omnibus’… Well, half an ‘Aliens Omnibus’ ;o) It’s not quite how I saw this years reading going (although I did buy the books so I really should have seen it coming at some point) but I’m enjoying it nonetheless. That love of ‘sci-fi horror’ has never really left me and the xenomorphs do it so well. And if that wasn’t enough, it always fun to watch dysfunctional groups of Colonial Marines pour ridiculous amounts of bullets etc into the Aliens, reducing them to acid drenched chunks of… Well, whatever they’re made of. What are the Aliens made of? Anyone? Anyway… Yesterday was a ‘commuting day’ and that led me to go looking for a book that would wake me up, in the morning, but would also be something that I could relax with on the bus home. Sounded like just the right time to pick up an ‘Aliens’ tie-in novel… ;o) The Alien Queen is dead, the hive mind left to flounder… and on a world bereft of its leader, two strains of Alien divide ...