Lord Samper's Library

Just a mini-reset, I bet you didn't even realize that I'd gone ;o) With one thing and another (and then another), last week wasn't a good one; mostly work stuff and mental health. I thought I'd give myself a little 'time off' this weekend, just to get my head straight. Still, new week and all that, fingers crossed for a better week this week. Let's see... :o) Backing up a little bit though. Payday was last Friday and that meant 'Walking Dead Night' (for me and my eldest) was accompanied by Dominos Pizza. It also meant that on Saturday, I was able to take my daughters to Greenwich for nachos and book shopping. They like nachos and I 'really deserved' a little book shopping ;o) Lets take a little look at what came home with us... The lady who runs the bookstall, on Greenwich market, saw me coming and immediately pointed me at the small pile of 'Doctor Who' books on the table. I've never read 'Time-flight' (and I've only...

  This was originally going to be a post about the REH short tale ‘The Black Stone’; well, that was the plan until I realised that I’d already posted about it, way back in 2022 . No worries, I thought to myself, ‘The Little People’ is an intriguing title, I’ll give that a go. And to be honest, it wasn’t a bad tale either; for an entry in a collection of horror stories it certainly didn’t end how I’d expected it to (and that’s not a bad thing). The only problem I had with the tale is that while it’s certainly not a ‘fragment’, a page was missing from REH’s typescript and so ‘The Little People’ has a gap in the middle where the only thing I could gather was that the narrators sister was still annoyed with him. Not a bad tale to read, maybe not one for a whole post here though. I wasn’t in the mood to be beaten though so I took a chance and decided to do something that I very rarely do, if ever. Yep, I thought I’d read me some poetry :o) It might be the poetry that I had to study at s...

It’s kind of nice to get to Thursday and realise that no matter how hectic this week has been so far, I’ve still managed to get a decent bit of reading under my belt and write about it here. And I’ve noticed a little pattern to my weekly posts; which often start off with a full length book (or two) before moving on to comic books and finally short stories. That’s a pretty big clue as to how my energy levels progress over a week ;o) Well, I changed the order slightly this week and that’s what happens when my day in the office gets brought forward a couple of days. It wouldn’t feel the same, here, without a comic book post though so… Lets take a quick look at a couple that I’ve had on the go… ‘Die!Die!Die!’ Volume 1 – Kirkman, Gimple, Burnham, Fairbairn (Image Comics) Page Count: 128 Pages We don't like to admit it, but this is an evil world where evil people do evil stuff all the time. Thankfully, there is a secret cabal with the United States government that works outside our nor...

I’ll be honest, I’m really not sure how Wednesday has turned up so quickly, given that the last couple of days have gone so slowly. I’ll take it though, just a few more days until the weekend :o) Yesterday was a day in the office and I had a book in my bag all ready for the bus ride there and back. That was the plan anyway… What actually happened was that I overslept and had to take a train instead. Have you ever tried reading on the rush hour train? Yeah… And if that wasn’t bad enough, I fell asleep on the bus going home; not the best day for reading then ;o) And that means today’s post is one about the little bits and pieces that I’ve managed to read/listen to over the last couple of days. Hope you don’t mind… ‘More Sinned Against’ – Karl Edward Wagner Page Count: 15 Pages I’ve had a copy of Karl Edward Wagner’s ‘In A Lonely Place’ sat on my shelf for far too long now and I thought I’d dip into it and pick a story, at random, for a read. For a little context, I’ve read some of Wagner...

  Page Count: 202 Pages The hospital was pretty busy yesterday so there was a bit of a wait to see the Doctor and then, an even longer wait to pick up my tablets afterwards. Was I annoyed though, or even slightly bothered? Not this Graeme... If I’m going to be sat in a hospital waiting room, you can be damn sure that I’ll have a book or two in my bag and that’s exactly what I had yesterday ;o) It’s been a little while since I read some Warhammer 40K but I’m not quite ready to jump into another long series (not yet anyway) so Mike Brooks’ ‘Huron Blackheart: Master of the Maelstrom’, and its slim page count, seemed like a good alternative. A bite sized chunk of ‘grimdark far future’ and a leading man whom I’d heard a lot about but never really seen much of. It couldn’t go wrong, could it…? Of course it couldn’t, and it didn’t. The renegade leader of the Red Corsairs must adapt to an Imperium led by Roboute Guilliman, all while struggling to retain power in the face of dissension amon...

I’m not one for coming up with long, sprawling, posts here at the best of times, not any more. Today’s post though is definitely going to be shorter than usual, sorry about that :o) To be fair, it’s my first day back at work, after annual leave, and we all know how that goes. And on top of that, I’ll be at the hospital for most of the afternoon with blood tests and so on. And if that wasn’t enough, I felt pretty sick for most of yesterday so didn’t really read that much anyway… Not the worst problems to have but yeah, today is a ‘short post day’. I did get a little reading under my belt, yesterday, though and given the state I was in, a little ‘Doctor Who’ seemed like the best way forward. And I was pretty keen to crack open those old hardbacks that I found the other day ; given the state some of the pages were in, I thought I should read them while they were still attached to the books… ;o) There weren’t any big surprises to be had here; as a rule, Terrance Dicks sticks very closely t...