Lord Samper's Library

I kind of feel like one of the living dead today but luckily, I managed to stave off the worst affects of the hangover and got a little reading done this afternoon. This is where I tell you all about it ;o) My copy of ‘The Living Dead 2’ has been sat on my bookshelf for a little while now, without being read, and this afternoon seemed like the ideal time to do something about that. Three stories jumped out at me, one re-read and three by authors that I have a lot of time for. This is going to be a quick post though as I have a couple of other bits that I need to get done this evening. So with that said, lets talk zombies… ‘Dating in Dead World’ – Joe McKinney Page Count: Fifteen pages (and a few extra lines) I am a big fan of Joe McKinney’s zombie books, ‘Dead City’ in particular , but I have somehow never got round to reading ‘Dating in Dead World’. When I realised that it had been in ‘The Living Dead 2’ (and on my shelf the whole time)… I didn’t waste any more time, I made it my firs...

I'll be honest, in the next few hours I'm going to be dealing with a pretty big hangover (it was a great night out though so it will be worth it) and probably in not much of a state to post anything here. That might change but... it's not looking likely right now. So, if you're reading this, here's a simple question for you while I'm nursing my poor head... What are you reading right now and do you think I'd like it (based on what's been featured on the blog over the last few years)? Leave a comment and let me know, extra points if you intrigue me enough for your read to go on my wishlist ;o)

Page Count: 172 Pages Apart from my regular trips to a certain war-torn universe of the far future, the Grimdark thing kind of passed me by. Unless things, outside my reading, have reached a point where I’m reading Grimdark stuff and just haven’t noticed…? Possibly, I don’t know. By the time I get to the party, everyone else has already gone and I’m trading slightly embarrassed looks with the guy sweeping up. But anyway… ;o) I’d been hearing a lot of good things about ‘In the Shadow of their Dying’, mostly via ‘Spells & Spaceships’ , and resolved to be into this book right from the start. Okay, when the paperback was released, you know what I mean… I should note, before I start, that I’ve never read anything by Michael Fletcher or Anna Smith Spark (and I may need to do something about that now) so honestly, I’ve got no idea where one’s writing ends and the other begins. Apologies then, if I miss something really obvious. And on that note... The third best assassin. A second rat...

I finished 'In the Shadow of Their Dying' last night and what a stunning read it was. If I still did 'Book of the Year' posts, it would easily be a very serious contender. And that's all I can really tell you at the moment, it's an awesome read but I'm still trying to get my head round some of what happened and until I can do that... Any 'review' would basically be the first two sentences of this post and nothing else. Give me a couple of days and I'll have something a little more substantial for you. In the meantime... Yesterday also saw me take a trip over to Wimbledon to do a course for work. It's been ages since I've been over there so once work was out of the way, I was keen to take a little wander round the charity shops and see what they had to offer. Not a lot was the answer and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, at least as far as my bank account was concerned. I did manage to come away with three books though, let me intro...

Page Count: 357 Pages Because you can’t just read ‘The Rising’ (I did, over Here ) and then not read ‘City of the Dead’ afterwards. That would be just… wrong. Having said that, and funnily enough, I actually read ‘City of the Dead’ before I read ‘The Rising’ first time round. Not ideal but it was all about what was on the shelf at the time. ‘City of the Dead’ does work on its own but it goes without saying that reading the whole thing in order is the way to go. But I’m getting ahead of myself a little here. Let’s start with a little blurb… Where can you go when the dead are everywhere? Cities have become overrun with legions of the dead, all of them intent on destroying what’s left of the living. Trapped inside a fortified skyscraper, a handful of survivors prepare to make their last stand against an unstoppable, undying enemy. With every hour, their chances diminish and their numbers dwindle, while the numbers of the dead can only rise. Because sooner or later, everything dies. And th...

So I had to spend a little time in the hospital, the other day, having an iron infusion; basically sitting there reading and playing on my phone while the good stuff was pumped into me. I’ve definitely had worse hospital appointments ;o) What did I read then? Well, ‘In the Shadow of their Dying’ is proving to be an excellent read but maybe not quite what I was after that morning. The clue is, of course, in the title… Yep, it was a morning for catching up on my ‘Goon’ re-read and I have to say, I had forgotten quite how good ‘Wicked Inclinations’ is… Buzzard has learned the Zombie Priest’s secret name, turning the tide in the struggle against the undead hordes of Lonely Street. Unable to harvest fresh corpses from the cemetery, and with the crimes of his past threatening to catch up with him, the Priest is forced to create a whole new breed of minion – one that may be beyond even the strength of the Goon to contain. As rival crime families attempt to use the battle as cover to move in o...

I can't remember exactly what I was looking for last night, on the old blog, but I found this old review that I thought was worth bringing back and posting here; especially as today is going to be another hectic one... (yay) Sometimes you've got to give yourself a little break ;o) I originally posted about 'Night Winds' over Here , you can also read my review of 'Dark Crusade' over Here . With that said then, lets revisit 'Night Winds'... In a world where Karl Edward Wagner's 'Kane' books are long out of print (and going for quite obscene prices on Amazon etc, seriously, check it out...) I've been lucky enough to build up my collection through the awesome powers of the internet. Having only read 'Dark Crusade' (reviewed at the very beginning of this month and still superb reading even after all these years) I'm pretty excited at seeing how the other books measure up so you can expect to see reviews here on a fairly regular bas...

It turns out that quite a lot can happen at work during a two hour hospital appointment... Who would have known it? Not me and now I've got to try and do something about it all... Well, while I do that, why don't you all check out the new(ish) trailer for 'House of the Dragon' Season 2. It's looking good from where I'm sat (at my work laptop, thinking, 'what the hell do I do with all this..) If you want to know what I thought of Season 1, just click Here ;o)

I came across this title while reading the latest update from ‘We Learn by Writing’ , a blog that I have a lot of time for (Jim’s thoughts are always worth a read and you should follow him if you’re not following him already). I’m still trying to get a broader picture of the scope of Howard’s writing and figured that ‘The Valley of the Worm’ would be a good title to check out next. It took me a little while to track down but my decision to pick up a whole load of Robert E. Howard collections, over the last year or so, paid off. You can probably find ‘The Valley of the Worm’ in a number of places ( Project Gutenberg for one ) but I finally found it in ‘Skullcrusher: Selected Weird Fiction Volume 1’. And with that, lets have a little chat about it, shall we? I will tell you of Niord and the Worm. You have heard the tale before in many guises wherein the hero was named Tyr, or Perseus, or Siegfried, or Beowulf, or Saint George. But it was Niord who met the loathly demoniac thing that craw...

I'm not sure if I've already used this title (it's possible and I'm too lazy to go back and look) but it certainly still counts here so, moving on then... ;o) I'm actively trying to buy less books in general at the moment, partly because of tighter finances this month but also because it's really struck me, recently, how many books I've bought (over the last few years) and how many of these are still sat on my shelves, unread. I'm not going to give you an exact number here but take it from me, there's a lot. I'm not one for reading resolutions these days (other than to just enjoy what I'm reading, that one's a given) but I would like to get through as many of those unread books as I can this year. Lets see how that goes... But having said all that, I'm still me so a couple of books made it through the blockade this week ;o) I'd heard nothing but good things about 'In the Shadows of their Dying' so had to grab a copy. And y...

It’s the end of the week… finally. Just a few more hours to go but we’re pretty much there so we can all breathe a sigh of relief. It’s been a while since I’ve read any Warhammer 40K short stories, and payday wasn’t too long ago, so I thought I’d treat myself to a couple of reads as a way of winding down yesterday. The method behind the choosing was not scientific at all; it’s been years since I read an ‘Alpha Legion’ book, hence ‘The Long Promise’ and ‘Eradicant’ has a very cool cover (which blogger won't let me show here, check it out on Amazon), that’s all it took ;o) Quick thoughts today as I’ve got a fair bit of work to get through. If you want an even quicker thought though… Both were great reads and if you’re a fan of the setting, you could do a lot worse than pick these up. ‘The Long Promise’ – Mike Brooks Solomon Akurra, Chaos Lord of the insidious Alpha Legion, infiltrates a Deathwatch watch station. When this most elite and pious of kill teams returns, Akurra offers them...

Page Count: 126 Pages You can always tell when I’ve been in the office, the commute gives me a chance to finish what I’m currently reading and then (fingers crossed) read a large chunk out of whatever is next on the list. ‘The Light Fantastic’ was finished on the bus home from work, and reviewed Here, and then it was straight onto ‘Inferno’. I saw the TV serial a few years ago but it has been a lot longer since I read the book (a slightly sobering 38 years, damn I’m old…) so when I found the copy I won on eBay, it was way past time that I gave it another shot. And... Inferno is the name of a top-secret drilling project to penetrate the Earth’s crust and release a major new energy source. A crisis develops when a noxious liquid leaks out as drilling progresses – the green poison has a grotesquely debilitating effect on human beings… As the Earth’s plight worsens, the Doctor is trapped in a parallel world, unable to rescue the planet and its inhabitants from the destructive force of Inf...

I've never played 'Fallout', not once, but I do love a good 'post-apocalypse' so will be checking the show out in April. And we're getting all the episodes at once, works for me :o)

Page Count: 285 Pages. I’ve got at least three TBR Piles on the go (that I can see right now, there may be more in the other room) but sometimes, you just have to set them all to one side and go with a book that barges in and demands you read it first. I had a lot of fun with ‘The Colour of Magic’, last week , and it felt natural to just jump straight into ‘The Light Fantastic’ so that’s exactly what I did ;o) Let me tell you all about it... 'What shall we do?' saidTwoflower. 'Panic?' said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival. As it moves towards a seemingly inevitable collision with a malevolent red star, the Discworld could do with a hero. What it doesn’t need is a singularly inept and cowardly wizard, still recovering from the trauma of falling off the edge of the world, or a well-meaning tourist and his luggage which has a mind (and legs) of its own. Which is a shame, because that's all there is... So, more of t...

So I gave up on yesterday as a bad job (ok, it wasn’t that bad actually but I was still done with it…) and spent the evening reading instead. And it’s been a few weeks since I last read/posted about ‘The Goon’ so I figured it was time to revisit Lonely Street and see what’s been happening while I’ve been away. Quite a lot as it turns out, let me tell you about it (along with the usual disclaimer, I’m a huge fan etc...) Lonely Street is beset by more than just zombies when Doctor Hieronymous Alloy returns to his old, mad-science ways, unleashing man-eating eyeballs and an army of giant robots on the unsuspecting town. The Goon and Franky must travel to a freakish alternate dimension for a cure to the malady that has driven Alloy insane. But this and other acts of heroism are rewarded with pain and grief. As our hero journeys through time and through space, he learns all about virtue and the grim consequences thereof… There’s a little bit of everything in ‘ Virtue and the Grim Consequ...

It's already one of those weeks where you wake up, in the morning, and it feels like you're already five minutes behind on the day... Here I am then, trying to catch up! ;o) Because of that then, and the fact that hardly any reading happened over the weekend, I thought I'd dig up an older post, from a much older blog, and share it again here. I also thought it would go well with the 'Mythago Wood' post that I shared a couple of weeks ago. The original post made its debut over Here , now it's here in its entirety. It goes without saying that 'The Shapechanger' remains a tale worth reading if you come across it. I’m trying to ‘de-clutter’ my bookshelves at the moment. Don’t get me wrong; there is absolutely nothing wrong with bookshelves jammed full of books waiting to be discovered but my shelves feel a little bit daunting at the moment and I’m not down with that. I want my shelves to be welcoming places, with the promise of a good read to be had, and th...

It’s the weekend again! That time of the week where I’m frankly too shattered to read much so pop the telly on and let my brain time out for a bit ;o) This weekend was about re-watching some old favourites, mostly because nothing else really caught my eye but also because my daughter came over on the Friday and had a couple of requests. Lets take a quick look, shall we? ‘Dog Soldiers’ (2002) A small squad of British soldiers, on a training mission in the Highlands, find themselves hunted by a pack of werewolves. Will they make it through the night? My daughter has been asking to watch this, for a couple of weeks, so I figured it was about time we gave it a go. Not a huge deal for me as I love this movie and it had been a while since I last saw it. One viewing later and… I still love it :o) Plenty of action, a couple of sweet plot twists and a compelling blend of gore and humour. My daughter loved it as well, even though certain moments were watched with her hands over her eyes. A welco...

Page Count: Ten and a bit pages. Work tried to swamp me yesterday… I say ‘tried’, sometimes the best thing you can do when you’re in danger of being overwhelmed is to take a step back and say, ‘nope, there’s nothing here that can’t wait until tomorrow’. Or in my case, Monday ;o) So that’s why you didn’t hear from me yesterday. I did make time for a little reading though; I’m still trying to read stuff by Robert E. Howard that isn’t ‘Conan’ (there are some big gaps in my ‘Conan’ reading but that’s one for another time) and some poring over my bookshelves led me to ‘The Thing On The Roof’. ‘The Thing On The Roof’ was originally published in ‘Weird Tales’ back in February 1932. I found it in my copy of ‘The Dark Man Omnibus Volume 2’ but it’s also in ‘The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard’ (amongst other collections, I’m sure). If you’re more about e-reading, there is a copy available on Project Gutenberg . With all that said then, lets have a little chat about ‘The Thing On The Roof’. V...

I'm not sure what happened yesterday but I somehow managed to get through the whole day without reading anything at all, not a single page (well, work stuff but we're not counting that here) It happens, not very often but it happens ;o) So where does that leave us today? Well... You already know that I like to give myself a little break every now and then by recycling older reviews, from much older blogs, and giving them a little extra time here. It was way past time that Richard Matheson featured here a little more (seriously, there's only been the one post and that's not right) and where better a place to start than 'I Am Legend'? Nope, me neither ;o) The original post can be found over Here but I'm reposting it here in its entirety. I don't have the 'Gollancz 50 edition anymore though. The cover art for the 'SF Masterworks' edition is far better so when I saw the chance to grab a copy... Anyway, enough of that, let's talk about 'I...

Page Count: 285 Pages. It’s not often that I pick up a ‘Discworld’ book these days; nothing against ‘em but I have developed a habit of buying loads of other books and then feeling guilty that I’m not reading them. I really should do something about that, shouldn’t I…? Maybe one day… That’s the way things usually go but with a nasty case of readers block happening, and a week that’s swiftly shaping up to be one of those weeks. I wanted some comfort reading and something that would make me laugh a bit (I really need a laugh…) Terry Pratchett and ‘Discworld’ it was then. I’m not going to go through the whole series (and not just because I gave my original copies away), just pick out a few that I haven’t read it in a while, and with that said, where better place to start than at the beginning? Lets talk about ‘The Colour of Magic’… On a world supported on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown), a gleeful, explosive, wickedly eccentric expedition sets out. There’s an avaricious but inept...

Another book that I’ve read, fairly recently, but not posted about here, hiding in plain sight on a bookshelf. It might take a little while but I will track them all down, I promise you that! Erm… Sorry, I’m not sure what just happened there. Anyway… As much as I love the ‘Malazan’ books, and I really do, I’ve never quite been able to finish the main series so find myself nibbling away at the books lurking around the edges (which may become ‘main series’ themselves one day, who knows…) It took me a while to get into but I finally managed to polish off ‘Dancer’s Lament’ (that’s on me rather than the book, there was a lot going on at the time) and I’m really glad that I did. It was very much a case of rediscovering all the things that got me into the ‘Malazan’ books in the first place and I’ve promised myself that I won’t leave it too long before I get stuck into ‘Deadhouse Landing’... It was once a land ravaged by war, minor city states, baronies and principates fighting for supremacy....

I’m slowly, but surely, navigating my way through the ol’ reading slump; mostly with the help of my ‘Discworld’ collection. More on that as we head into the week… In the meantime, when I wasn’t book-shopping, I spent most of the weekend in the front of the telly; treating my brain to a little downtime by watching some of the most ridiculous stuff that I could find on Prime. Let me tell you about some of it… ;o) ‘Sand Sharks’ (2012) The residents of a small town team up to kill a group of evolved sharks that can swim in sand, and are terrorizing local beaches. I didn’t really need to copy/paste any blurb, the title says it all :o) If you’re looking for something silly to watch, ‘Sand Sharks’ should be one of the first places that you visit. It’s daft but a lot of fun at the same time with many opportunities to watch the sharks snack on innocent beachgoers. That’s all I was after and that’s exactly what ‘Sand Sharks’ delivered :o) ‘The Children’ (1980) A nuclear-plant leak turns a bus-lo...

So, the heart nurse told me that I need to be exercising a bit more and she does have a point so... Yesterday, I decided to exercise in the best way that I know how... I went for a walk and found some bookshops of course ;o) Starting off from my place, I took a walk up to The Bookshop on the Heath  where, if you're lucky, you'll find a shelf or two of sci-fi and fantasy amongst the antiquarian books, first editions and all that. A special nod as well to the lady at the counter who asked me, as I came in, if I'd like to browse; that was my plan the whole time ;o) No fantasy books this time but there were a couple of boxes of sci-fi and I walked out with the following, I think I have the whole 'Helliconia' trilogy now, I just need to find my copy of 'Helliconia Spring' before I can start reading. And while I'm not a huge fan of 'Series Guides', I am a fan of any book that has 'Doctor Who' on the cover so, here we are. With all three books b...