Lord Samper's Library

 If this picture makes an appearance, it can only mean one thing ;o) Yep, I'm another year older although I wouldn't necessarily say another year wiser ;o) And if that wasn't enough, I've got the day off as well. There will be plenty of books, cake and coffee; I may even take a little time out to try and make a dent in one of the books that I have on the go. You have a good one too, I'll see you back here tomorrow ;o)

While I spend the day trying to finish just one of any number of books that I've picked up over the last few days (yep, I can't get into anything right now), take a look at the trailer for the remake of 'Salem's Lot' which will be showing on Max at the beginning of October... I don't know about you but to me, it feels like we're in an age of film where every remake of a Stephen King film, or TV show, is an immediate improvement on the original. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the original versions of 'It', 'The Stand' and so on but... you know what I mean? Either way, I've got high hopes for this version of 'Salem's Lot' ;o) Will it encourage me to dig out my old copy for a re-read...? Maybe, it's not like I'm getting into any of the other books that I have on the go right now...

This post is a little bit later than planned but I’ll be honest, that’s been a running theme for everything this week… ;o) I’m so glad that it’s finally the weekend, how about you? I finally got round to watching ‘Halls of Stone’ last night and really wanted to get my thoughts down before the weekend brushes them all away; especially as last week’s episode really made it look like the show was finally starting to build up a head of steam. That wasn’t the case this week but I think that was all for a very good reason… As always, no episode recaps here. If you’re after one of those then I would go and read the latest post over at Reactor Magazine , I am constantly in awe of how thoroughly they recap and cover each episode. Just quick thoughts here I’m afraid, that’s about all I have the energy for right now. And with that said, lets have a quick chat about ‘Halls of Stone’. I’ll be honest, in the early stages of ‘Halls of Stone’, I was ready to come on here and have a right old moan.

Thanks to one thing and another (amongst other things…), this week has been a shocking week for getting any reading done. You probably noticed that I threw all my toys out of the pram and just didn’t bother posting at all yesterday ;o) Funnily enough, I thought I might have better luck yesterday when I had to pop out and pick up my prescription; a short bus ride is always a good moment to read a few pages… Nope, I packed my glasses but no book… Luckily, Brockley Books is fairly near the pharmacy so I popped in afterwards, just so I’d have something to read on the way back :o) When I was a lot younger, I had a copy of ‘Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Planets’ but never came across its companion collection, the ‘Book of Alien Monsters’. When I saw a copy in Brockley Books then, I made sure that I grabbed it. My inner child deserved a little closure, plus the cover still looks awesome ;o) Quick thoughts then on a couple of short stories that I read on the way home… ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’ – P

‘Cimmerian September’ has got me over another ‘reading slump’; I’m really excited to see what I can read this month as far as ‘Conan’ tales go. The plan is to write about at least a couple of Howard’s original tales but I’ve also been having fun just looking through my bookshelves to see which books I’d forgotten that I owned. Any excuse for a ‘bookshelf browse’ and a re-read ;o) All of which led me to Conan’s team-up with one Elric of Melnibone… Conan first met Elric back in #14 ( A Sword Called Stormbringer ) of ‘Conan the Barbarian’ back in 1972. It was a short-lived team-up, concluding in #15 ( The Green Empress of Melnibone ) and then they both went on their merry (well, ‘doom-laden’ in the case of Elric) ways. Moorcock, and James Cawthorn, supplied the plot; Roy Thomas and Barry Smith adapted it. I first came across the story in the early 2000s, working in a psychiatric hospital where one of the patients had an extensive collection of Moorcock books. It took me a little while lon

You know that feeling you get when you read an amazing book and you come away feeling like the book must have been left in the shop for you to find? Not anyone else, just you, the universe somehow knew that you’d be in the shop and left you a book that it knew you’d really enjoy. Well, that’s me and ‘Rover Red Charlie’; a book that I enjoyed so much that I’m actually going to find it difficult to read anything else for the next few days (while it works through my system). My timing is as bad as ever, I should probably have left that until the end of my post… Oh well, If you want to duck out now, that’s fine. Just make sure that you find yourself a copy of ‘Rover Red Charlie’. If you’re still here, lets see if I can explain myself a little better… My name is Charlie and I am a dog. So are my friends Red and Rover. Something happened to the Feeders. We don’t know what. We don’t know why. But they began to hurt each other. They hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt until none of them were left.

  Sorry about the radio silence these last couple of days... Saturday was always meant to be a 'no blogging day'; yesterday was meant to be a blogging day but ended up being a 'hanging out with my daughters and playing FIFA, Crash Team Racing and Fallout' day instead. I regret nothing, especially when we met the dog in Fallout whom I haven't known for long but is clearly a good dog ;o) So yesterday's post becomes today's post instead. I'm a little bit late to the party (see the above paragraph) so I'm not going to go into great depth for this latest episode of 'The Rings of Power', everyone else has had a lot to say about it already. Nope, what you're getting here are quick thoughts and impressions (what little energy I have is needed elsewhere today, dammit). If you're after an in-depth recap of the episode, have a click Here . Otherwise, lets go... I'm running the risk of repeating myself a little too much but my main issue with

Page Count: 20 Pages I didn’t realize this until the other but September isn’t just the month of my birthday… Nope. Presumably for alliterative purposes (but also to celebrate great stories), September is also the month where fans celebrate ‘Cimmerian September’ by either reading Howard’s original tales or the pastiche novels and comics that continue the tales of that most famous barbarian. Or both, you don’t have to read one or the other ;o) I thought I’d get involved this year so you can absolutely expect to see a little more Conan here before the month is out. L.Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter helped keep Conan’s tales alive, either by completing some of Howard’s unfinished tales or by filling in gaps, in the timeline, with stories entirely their own. Again, I’m no scholar of Robert E. Howard but his name is next to the title so I’m assuming that ‘The Bloodstained God’ was taken on and completed by De Camp. I found this tale in an old copy of ‘Conan of Cimmeria’; I’m not sure where e

I had a bit of a day yesterday... Nothing bad or even out of the ordinary really, just one of those days where you feel like you're trying to squeeze twenty five hours worth of stuff into a twenty four hour day. You know what I mean, don't you? ;o) By the time I'd dropped my youngest daughter back with her Mum and her sister. I was pretty much done for the day. I still haven't quite decided on my next read so I thought I'd watch a few movies instead. And here's the post where I tell you all about them ;o) One surprisingly good movie, one that... wasn't bad and a 'creature feature' to round things off. 'Ghost Stories' (2017) Professor Phillip Goodman devotes his life to exposing phony psychics and fraudulent supernatural shenanigans. His skepticism soon gets put to the test when he receives news of three chilling and inexplicable cases - each of which seem to have a sinister connection to the professor's own life... If you're a regular

Page Count: 393 Pages It feels like a lot longer than it actually has been (I’m blaming, well… everything) but… I hadn’t read any fantasy in a while and I wanted to do something about that sooner rather than later. Where better place to kick off then, than with the new book from Greg Keyes. I’ll always have a lot of time for his ‘Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone’ series (which may be due a re-read now) so the prospect of a brand new fantasy, in ‘The Wind the Sweeps the Stars’, had me pretty excited to get reading. A weekend of house sitting and a days commuting was all I needed to finish the book, which should tell you a fair bit. That would make for a short post here though so lets see if I can do better than that, shall we…? ALONE AGAINST AN EMPIRE... When Yash of Zeltah arrives in the fortress city of Honaq, she is greeted as a barbarian, a simple pawn. Her marriage to prince Chej has been arranged, they say, to avert war. Yet she knows the truth, for the armies already ravage the land.

A little departure from my normal fare but this is what happens when I have a lot of nostalgia, for the books I read as a much smaller Graeme, and a little disposable income. Sometimes you just have to go with it ;o) I was massively into the ‘Fighting Fantasy’ books during the eighties (and perhaps a little more of the nineties than I should have been) so it wasn’t too much of a leap to read anything else with a dragon on the front and a promise that I could decide how the story went. I can’t quite remember when I got my copy of ‘The Siege of the Dragonriders’, the smart money is on either a birthday or a Christmas, but it was a lot of fun to read; especially because you weren’t just stuck with one character (you could chose to be either the Wizard or the Warrior) and the gaming system was very simple. Seriously, no dice rolling, just flipping a coin or closing your eyes and seeing which colour you saw first. I could do that :o) So… I kept my copy for years until it fell victim to a ‘p

I just saw that some kind soul has posted the entire movie, on Youtube, and it is lunchtime so I thought I'd combine the two and share this with you while you're eating your sandwiches. It's a classic but you knew that already... ;o) Talking of sandwiches, I'd better go and make mine. Happy movie watching ;o)

A couple of weeks ago, while I was on leave, I took my girls into Forbidden Planet as part of a little trip into London. I’m not feeling too guilty by the way ;o) My eldest loves a bit of Manga (loads of that in FP) while youngest found a shelf full of ‘Greek Myth’ books. True to form, we ended up having a little conversation about why ‘The Palace of Eros’ might not be the most appropriate book for a ten year old… You should have seen how quickly she put the book down after I let her read the blurb… Anyway, I’m digressing… While they were off doing their thing, I had a little mooch along the shelves and found a couple of comic books that I liked the look of. It took me a while to get round to reading them but in the end, a weekend of house sitting ended up being exactly right time to do just that. Quick thoughts then on the following… ‘Elric the Necromancer #2’ – Blondel, Cano, Secher (Titan Comics) It’s funny how things work… I wasn’t too keen on the last instalment and its focus on t

I've been house-sitting this weekend and one of the things I've been looking after is an absolutely massive TV; well, far bigger than my plucky little telly. What better time then to get stuck into the first three episodes of the new season of 'The Rings of Power'? Nope, me neither so that's exactly what I did yesterday. In a world where you either hate 'The Rings of Power' or will defend it to the death, I've tried to plant myself firmly in the middle. There was a lot that I didn't enjoy about Season 1 but at the same time, Amazon Prime hasn't killed Middle Earth or anything daft like that. It was a fun show, with potential, that had an unfortunate habit of being a little too verbose at times. Like someone had read 'The Silmarillion' and thought to themselves, ' that's how we tell our story...' ;o) Well, lets see if the show has moved on from that... I'm not going to recap the episodes, this post from Reactor Mag does th