Lord Samper's Library

When I said I wanted to finish the 'Crabs' series, this side of the New Year, I wasn't planning on finishing it quite so quickly. I ended up really getting into 'The Charnel Caves' though so went straight onto 'Crabs Omnibus' without even thinking about it. And then Guy N. Smith passed away, on Christmas Eve, and it really didn't seem like the time to be writing a review. I said I would though so here I am :o) Before we get into that though.. Looking back over the last few months; if there's one thing that reading this series has taught me, it's that I don't think Smith meant for anyone to read through the whole lot at once. Smith does 'giant crabs' brilliantly but if you're reading one books after another, in short order, then you will feel like you're reading the same book over and over again (and that's only natural, they're giant crabs). That's not his fault though and the next time I pick the series up, I'...

The Christmas holidays are a lot of things to a lot of people and one of the things it is for me is the ideal excuse to dig out some favourite movies, on DVD, and watch them while stuffing my greedy face with chocolate, Jelly Tots (a personal favourite) or anything else that happens to be at hand. I'm not fussy ;o) I've loved 'Ray Harryhausen movies' since I was tiny (well, maybe not that tiny...) and used to watch 'Sinbad' movies on a Sunday afternoon. It was the first time that I had ever seen monsters that weren't cheaply djasonressed 'Doctor Who' extras and actually moved and interacted with the characters. I was enthralled and have been enthralled by Harryhausen movies ever since, even in these days of CGI. Damn, I feel old saying that but it's true. There' something about a 'stop motion' monster, and the way it's set against the human cast, that gets me every time so of course I was going to use Christmas as an excuse to g...

This should have been the Boxing Day post but to be honest, a lot of things should have happened yesterday but didn't. I caught a rotten cold off one of my daughters (not sure which one but I have my suspicions...) so spent a large chunk of yesterday feeling all crap and sorry for myself. When I wasn't doing that, I was helping my youngest build a Lego Panda sanctuary which I'm sure you will all agree is really important stuff. Those Lego Pandas need our help people... ;o) I did get some books for Christmas, as it happens, although to be honest, a couple were from me rather than Father Christmas. This month hasn't been an easy one so I thought I deserved a little 'Christmas Treat' for making it through in one piece. And lets be honest, I'll bet I'm not the only person here who has done that this month. And that's ok, we deserve it ;o) I've been enjoying watching, and reading, 'Conan' again so no points at all for guessing the theme here.....

Just a quick one today to say Happy Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy However You Celebrate It Really :o)  Whatever you're up to (or have been up to) today, I hope you have (had) a good one. It's been a shitty year and we all deserve cool things to round the year off. Yep, even you (especially you). However long your holiday is this year, make sure you're kind to yourself and fill it with the things that you need. I already have and there will be a post tomorrow (probably) showing you all the books that I bought, not that many actually but quality over quantity and all that... ;o)

Well, today was going to be a review of Guy N. Smith's 'Crabs Omnibus' and then I found out that he died today and suddenly I didn't want to write that review any more. Don't get me wrong, it's a good book and I will talk about it here, just not today. So where does that leave us then...? Well, it is Christmas Eve so lets have a little chat about 'A Creepshow Holiday Special'. A quick chat though, I've got a lot of presents to wrap up before I see my kids in the morning... Robert Weston has reason to believe that he might be a werewolf, but when he goes to a Shapeshifters Anonymous support group, he learns that there's something far more sinister than his curse to worry about. Lets see if he makes it through the night... 'A Creepshow Holiday Special' is basically a long lead up to a flurry of Santa Claus' getting gunned down by possibly the unlikeliest group of were-people that you have ever met. It shouldn't work, it really sh...

For loads of reasons (up to and including, 'that book has a really cool cover, I'm reading it RIGHT NOW'), I've been pretty awful at keeping to my vague promises of reading particular series this year. And you know what? That's ok. There are far more important things going on than whether you finish reading a series or not, don't beat yourself up over it. So long as you're getting something out of whatever you read, I think that's the main thing this year. Having said that though, I would like to finish at least one 'series read through', before the end of the year, and it wasn't going to be the 'Elric' books (more on that another time, maybe) so it had to be Guy N. Smith's 'Crabs' books, it just had to. If you've been following my reviews of this series, you'll know that I got more and more frustrated with a series that felt like it was going through the motions 'but look, there are giant crabs so that make...

The closer it gets to Christmas, the less likely I am to be reading all the books that I should be reading as I'm pretty much letting my brain go on permanent time out now. Look, it's been a long year and my brain deserves to just stop for a bit ;o) Just one more day of work and then I'm pretty confident that I can make it through the next week and a bit on auto-pilot. I'm pretty sure that no-one will notice. I'll try and get at least one book review up before Friday but yesterday saw me back at work, after a couple of weeks off sick, and there was no time left for reading after catching up with everything then heading out to see my kids. So what did I do instead? Watched Jason Momoa being Conan the Barbarian of course ;o) After watching Arnie make for a much better Conan than I remembered, and then reading 'Queen of the Black Coast' the other day, it was inevitable that I'd find myself watching the 2011 'Conan' movie sooner rather than later. ...

Hey everyone :o) Sorry for the brief period of silence on the blog... It was a heavy weekend, what with one thing and another, and by the time I got home each night, I really didn't feel like blogging much... so I didn't. There's nothing worse than watching me 'force' a blog post when all I really want to do is nothing much. No thanks necessary ;o) What did I do instead? I ate pizza and watched the Jason Momoa 'Conan the Barbarian' movie of course ;o) I'll post about it, of course I will, but what I'll say for now is that it's been ages since I watched it and apparently, time does heal wounds; I'm in the mood to be a bit more forgiving of it this time round. What else did I do over the weekend? I bought books! After a lean week last week, I made it into Greenwich where the hunting was a lot better. It was a day for revisiting old favourites and a day for finding new reads as well. Come and have a look at what I found... I'm no gamer but a...

And that's it... No more 'Mandalorian', at least for now. I'm now on the lookout for a new show (or shows) to watch. Any recommendations...? It doesn't feel like it's been eight weeks since Season 2 kicked off and that's really the measure of how much I've enjoyed it. 'The Mandalorian' hasn't been a perfect ride, here and there, but what it has been is a show that's been so easy to get into and get lost in. Characters, that I wanted to stick with, doing cool 'Star Wars' things that reminded me what it was like when I saw 'A New Hope' for the first time, you can't ask for a lot more than that really. And now it's done. There's nothing for it then but to talk about 'The Rescue'. I say 'talk'... I'm invoking the 'no spoilers here' rule again as the episode has only been out a few hours and I know I'd hate it if someone spoiled it for me... It's the decent thing to do ;o) So no...

It was probably inevitable that after watching 'Conan the Barbarian' and 'Conan the Destroyer', I'd want to go to the source (as it were) and read a little Robert E. Howard 'Conan'. I don't know if you're the same but the closer I get to Christmas, the more I find myself reading comfort reads (instead of the actual books that I should be reading, sorry!) and Robert E. Howard's 'Conan' is very much one of these, a lot of fun to read and they don't ask an awful lot of you while you're reading them ;o) The beauty of Howard's 'Conan' output is that there's always a story to match what you're looking for, whether it's short and snappy or something a little more involved. This time round, I fancied something a little longer so decided to read 'The Queen of the Black Coast', a story that I hadn't read for a long time... 'The Queen of the Black Coast' sees Conan fall foul of civilized men once ...

As last night was half about reading and half about watching movies, I thought I'd make today a 'two post day' and tell you all about what I read and watched. First up is the movie 'Prey', chosen because I was in the mood for a 'creature feature' last night and 'Slugs' really didn't work out when I watched it. Seriously, it was a case of having all my slightly negative thoughts, about the book, confirmed. Slugs are really slow and react badly when you pour salt over them, you can't make a whole movie about how dangerous they are, you really can't. But anyway... After having fast forwarded my way through 'Slugs', I thought I'd give 'Prey' a go instead. It's been sat on my watch list for a while and I thought last night was the time to finally give it a go. The plot of 'Prey' is very simple, a little too simple in fact but I'll come onto that in just a minute. The long and short of it is that there'...

I still can't quite get my head round Black Library having a dedicated line of horror fiction. Don't get me wrong, the stories that I've read have been great but one of the points of grimdark fiction is that there's a vein of horror running through it already and that's what we already had with 99% of Black Library fiction. Having a horror line then feels a little bit like the cake is being over-decorated or how it would look if Mills and Boon suddenly decided to do a line of books focusing on just weddings. Not that Black Library are anything like Mills and Boon but, you know what I mean (hopefully) ;o) I'm a big fan of the Black Library's output though, and I'm a huge fan of horror fiction in general, so I'll keep reading em', of course I will, especially as the nights get colder and darker. I've had my eye on 'The Wicked and the Damned' for a while now but had to wait until last payday before I could finally grab a copy. Then it ...

The plan was get loads done today, read a book and post a review for another. What really happened though... Well, I slept in late (really late), replied to the wrong email from my home insurer (having a go at them after they'd apologised, well done Graeme...) and then just wasn't in the mood for reading or posting at all. My mental health isn't brilliant at the moment and there's nothing like coming across as a complete arsehole to make me just curl up in bed and do nothing much for the rest of the day. Well, I say 'nothing much' but I did watch a few movies over the afternoon and evening; part of my trawling the depths of Prime Video to see if I can find anything, free to watch, that's half decent. Or absolute garbage, I'll take either :o) I made it through three movies today, ranging from asolutely awful to 'I loved it' (that was a bit of a cheat as it's a favourite of mine, the other two weren't great though and I had to watch somet...

After watching 'Conan the Destroyer' the other day, I realised that there was no way I could go on without watching (and posting about) 'Conan the Barbarian' as well. It would be like starting with 'The Empire Strikes' back and then carrying on without bothering with 'A New Hope'; do-able but strangely unfulfilling at the same time. It was this realisation that led to the next realisation, I didn't have a copy of 'Conan the Barbarian'. Luckily, a random browse through the Deptford CEX sorted me out and I settled down to watch it last night... Okay, and part of this morning as well, I'm all middle aged now so can't quite manage the late nights these days ;o) 'Conan the Barbarian' tells the story of Conan (surprise!) and his lifelong quest to have revenge on the men who slaughtered his village and, for some inexplicable reason, sent Conan to do loads of exercise, learn how to fight and then gain his freedom. What was that all a...

Hey, how's it going? Did you have a good weekend? Mine wasn't too bad actually although standing in the rain, this afternoon, getting cold and wet, while the girls cycled around the playground, wasn't a great moment. Watching my youngest cycle about with her three favourite cuddly toy cats, in her new bike basket, was pretty cute though, it has to be said :o) So I'm counting down the days until payday and then it's one last flurry of shopping before Christmas kicks off. I've still got loads to do actually, I don't normally leave it so late but there's been a lot of other stuff going on recently so it is what it is. Oh well, that's what Amazon is for... But you're not here for these ramblings (unless you are, I don't know...), you want to know what books I've gone and found this week. Well... The short answer is 'hardly any'. Deptford Market was pretty much 'book-less' this time round and the charity shops weren't great...

I've never really been a big fan of historical fiction as, well... I don't know really. Actually, yes I do... As a kid, I was constantly being pushed not to read fantasy and having certain historical fiction held up as being a better read as it was about stuff that actually happened. I'm as stubborn as you like so, of course, not only did I carry right on reading what I wanted but I also stayed away from reading any historical fiction at all, just on principle really. Also, it felt like a lot of the 'swords and sandals' historical fiction was just fantasy for people who didn't want to be seen reading a fantasy book. You know, a little bit of history for context but the same old sword fights, quests and high adventure. Look, I'm not saying I was right; just that it was the way I felt at the time ;o) So why is today all about a review for 'The Last Kingdom'? Well, loads of reasons really, most of them to do with the fact that I wanted to read somethin...

Today was meant to be my review of Bernard Cornwell's 'The Last Kingdom' but I'm having trouble ordering my thoughts there so you might have to wait a little longer for that. In the meantime, lets just say I loved it, because I did. That did leave a 'blog post sized gap' in today but then I woke up this morning, realised that today is 'new episode of The Mandalorian' day and got watching soon afterwards. Pretty good timing really :o) After last week's episode, I didn't want to hang around getting into whatever happened next. There's a little green Grogu in peril and I need to see people rushing to his rescue, dammit! 'The Believer' gives us some of that (which is fair enough as there's still one more episode to go) but gives us a lot more at the same time. Not the episode you're expecting then but very much the episode you didn't realise that you needed, until you watch it. There will be mild spoilers, just so you know ...

Look, today was meant to be a book review but stuff happened, then more stuff happened, then I had a little sleep and the next thing I know it's the evening and there's not an awful lot of time left for a book review (especially if I do what I normally do and put off writing anything until about 11pm). I did watch 'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom' though so here are some thoughts on that instead. Not many thoughts though because to be honest, 'Fallen Kingdom' isn't a film to inspire much in the way of thoughts. And that may be the way I like it, normally, but I'm not so sure this time. It’s been three years since theme park and luxury resort Jurassic World was destroyed by dinosaurs out of containment. Isla Nublar now sits abandoned by humans while the surviving dinosaurs fend for themselves in the jungles. When the island’s dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) mount a campaign to rescue the remain...