Lord Samper's Library

  ‘In The Pines’ – 31 Pages ‘Where The Summer Ends’ – 28 Pages I’ve been trying to make some room on my bookshelves, just recently, and… Yeah… You can guess how that’s gone ;o) It’s weird is what it is. I’ve managed to clear a couple of large bags worth of books, so I know I’ve got rid of a decent amount, but it has made very little impact on the state of my shelves… I guess I’m just really good at utilizing shelf space. Anyway... One good thing, that has come out of this, is that I’ve been rediscovering books that I’ve been meaning to read and then not only put them to one side but also covered them in books that I’ve been meaning to read. Now there’s a challenge for me, find a pile of books and read the book at the very bottom… I came across the Karl Edward Wagner collection ‘In A Lonely Place’, the other day, and remembered that while I’d meant to dip in and out of it, I’d never made it past reading ‘More Sinned Against’. I figured I take another shot at it and sat down for a re...

  Page Count: 128 Pages After I DNF’d ‘Scourge The Heretic’ , the other day, I decided to head back to my ‘Comic Book TBR Pile’ and try something a little different. You know, as you do when you’ve got all your ‘admin’ chores out of the way and fancy a little down time :o) Well, that was the plan until I went to Greenwich, to drop a few books off at the charity shop, and thought I’d have a quick look in Waterstones while I was there… ‘D’Orc’ is one those titles that I mean to file under ‘M’ for ‘Must Remember to Read’ but somehow ends up filed under ‘T’ for ‘Totally Forgot’. When I saw it in Waterstones, I moved that file to ‘B’ for ‘Better Buy it Right Now’ (okay, that’s enough of that…) and a couple of days later, here we are :o) D’Orc, the half Dwarf/half Orc, is fated to end the world because of some inconvenient doomsday prophecy from the Book of Certain Doom. Armed with nothing but a magical yet ambitiously violent shield and a chicken with its head cut off, ‘D’Orc is dropped...

  Page Count: 413 Pages (of which I made it through 153 Pages before saying to myself, ‘just because I’m unemployed now, doesn’t mean the time to stick with a book that isn’t working for me…) I hate to start September with a ‘Did Not Finish’ but I ended August on a ‘Did Not Finish’ so… Here we are :o) We all know how it goes here... Not every book is a winner and of these, there are books that I will finish out of a morbid fascination. Not so much these days though… Due to (resignedly gestures at everything…), my reading time is precious so I am much more inclined to drop a book, that isn’t working, and move on to something that I’ll enjoy. Which brings me round to ‘Scourge The Heretic’ and another lovely cover from the Black Library. It was a shame that the book itself didn’t work out… First up, lets have some blurb… While Space Marines and the Imperial Guard battle aliens among the stars, it is the job of the Inquisition to hunt down the heretics who corrupt society from within. ...

  Page Count: 180 Pages When I was reading ‘Eight Billion Genies’, the other day , the blurb reminded me that Ryan Browne had written ‘God Hates Astronauts’; one of many comic book series where I’ve picked up an issue or two but for some reason, never kept reading. There are many reasons, for that, by the way; limited budget, plain forgetfulness and so on… Anyway. ‘God Hates Astronauts’ is a title that stuck in my mind enough for me to find a cheap copy (job has ended now, don’t judge me…) and finally see what the story is all about. Having finished Volume 1…? I’ve honestly got no idea but it was a lot of fun to read :o) Have some blurb… God Hates Astronauts follows the story of a group of incompetent, small-minded, super powered narcissists called "The Power Persons Five" who are hired by NASA to stop all farmers from launching themselves into space in homemade rocket ships. Unfortunately for NASA, this goal is scarcely even addressed and the book focuses more on extramarit...

  This will be a much shorter post than normal… While you’re reading this, I’ll be doing ‘fun stuff’ like clearing my work locker out, shredding notes and making sure that I hand my work laptop in before I leave work for the final time. On the other hand, I will be making time for a bacon roll from my favourite cafe so, it’s not all bad ;o) Anyway… It has been a difficult couple of days for reading (there are currently two books, on the comfy chair, that are exactly my kind of thing, I just can’t get into them) but I knew this was likely to happen so I already had a little ‘Conan’ set to one side, just in case… Thirty three issues in and I’ve stopped looking for continuity between the stories; to be honest, I shouldn’t have started looking in the first place. I mean, there is an overall timeline for Conan (it’s his life…) but the comic seems to hop around that timeline and for me, that is the best way to experience Conan’s adventures, just jump in and see what he’s up right now. #3...

  Page Count: 240 Pages If I was still the kind of blogger that did ‘Best of’ lists (I’ve got nothing against them, these days I’d just rather be reading)… You can see where this is going :o) I think I’ve found one of my favourite reads for this year. I’m not just a sucker for some good cover art; it turns out that I can also be hooked by the right title. And what is there not to be intrigued about by the concept of eight billion genies, all with one wish to grant to ‘their person’? Yep, me neither so that is why I grabbed myself a copy and last night, sat down for a read… Everywhere, at precisely the same moment, everyone on Earth gets a Genie and one wish. As people all over the world make wishes profane and profound, the world - and humanity – change forever.We follow eight characters who find themselves in a Detroit dive bar as ‘G-Day’ descends upon humanity. They navigate their hopes, fears, dreams and wishes over the first eight seconds… The first eight hours… And ultimately…...

  Page Count: 130 Pages I’m a little bit annoyed with myself for caving in and buying the ‘Flames of Betrayal’ collection but, I really wanted to read ‘Knight of Grey’ so… :o) You see, ‘Flames of Betrayal’ is actually ‘Garro: Knight of Grey’ and then all the stories collected in ‘Era of Ruin’ which funnily enough, I went and reviewed over Here , back in March this year. So… Half annoyed at Black Library for packaging a novella alongside a collection that I already own (I mean, why didn’t they do that when they published ‘Era of Ruin’ in hardback?), half annoyed that I’m just the kind of sucker who will buy the same book twice. Oh well, if that’s the worst thing that happens to me this week… (it won’t be, my job ends on Friday) Anyway :o) One of the things that I love about the ‘Horus Heresy’, and ‘Siege of Terra’, books is that you can pretty much pick a character and then follow them through any number of novels, short stories and so on. I’ve got a few favourites and one that I’ve...

  Page Count: 300 Pages These days, what with various bits and pieces going on, I try and make sure that for at least one day over the weekend, I do as little as I can; mostly sitting in my favourite chair and trying to make a dent in my TBR pile. Gives me a chance to recharge ahead of starting over again the following week ;o) Well, that was pretty much my Saturday and while I didn’t get an awful lot of reading under my belt, I did manage a little. I was kind of ‘half and half’ about Steve Lyons’ ‘Krieg’ books until he came up with ‘Siege of Vraks’ and all of a sudden, I found that I needed to read more :o) Well, I finally got the chance, over the weekend, with ‘The Relentless Dead’ and… Five hundred years ago, Oleris III was ravaged by a Chaos plague. Now it is a world of tombs and catacombs. It belongs to the dead. Colonel Graven and his 401st Krieg Regiment are charged with searching for a missing inquisitor in the bone-filled ossuary tunnels beneath the planet. But the dead...

  Page Count: 101 Pages ‘Exit 8’ has been making itself known all over my Prime Video, and so the plan was to give it a watch at some point i.e. in about a weeks time when my job ends and I have a little more time on my hands. And then I was in Forbidden Planet yesterday and discovered that ‘Exit 8’ isn’t just a film based on a video game… It’s also a book and that book was staring at me from a shelf. It was just over a hundred pages long and there was a ‘money off’ sticker on the front… That was all the excuse I needed ;o) Quick thoughts (very quick thoughts…) are the order of the day as, well… That page count speaks for itself. ‘Exit 8’ is worth the read though, let me tell you about it. A young man is riding the Tokyo subway when he receives a life-changing text message from his ex-girlfriend. He exits the train, but extraordinary things begin to happen, and he finds that he cannot escape. The subway will loop endlessly unless he follows very precise rules: Do not overlook any a...

  Page Count: 144 Pages After all my talk, yesterday, of not diving straight into ‘Dark Creed’… Last night, I almost did just that. The days seem to be getting a little tougher, the closer my job comes to its end, and I wanted something that wasn’t going to be too demanding. Don’t judge me ;o) And then I ended up spending the evening with my ex-wife and daughters and I feel like I need to clarify. My ex-wife is the only ‘ex’, my daughters are still my daughters ;o) Damn I’m tired. Anyway… I still fancied a read, last night, but by the time I got back, there wasn’t time to get stuck into ‘Dark Creed’. There was time for an hour, or two, with Volume 3 of ‘Saga’ though so… As new parents Marko and Alana travel to an alien world to visit their hero, the family's pursuers finally close in on their targets. For one of them though, the reason for that pursuit has suddenly changed… Volume 3 of ‘Saga’ ended up being just what I needed last night. A read with plenty to say but also a re...

  Page Count: 254 Pages (at least as far as the ‘Word Bearers Omnibus’ Collection is concerned) These days, I’m trying not to ‘read the sequel’ straight after finishing the first book; it helps me keep my reading ‘fresh’ but perhaps more importantly, it saves this blog from getting too repetitive. It has happened here before and it’s always a little awkward, isn’t it? ;o) Last night though… I’d just come off the back of the kind of Monday where it’s not only a Monday (which is bad enough) but also a Monday where I’ve only got ten working days left before my job finishes up. There were all sorts of confusing thoughts going round my head then and on days like that, well… Those days are exactly the kind of days where you jump straight into a sequel and blog be damned. I was after something familiar and a bit distracting, don’t judge me ;o) ‘Dark Disciple’ it was then and while I might just take a little break now, before tackling the final book ‘Dark Creed’, this ended up being just t...

  Page Count: 415 Pages This weekend was not a good one for reading or blog posts, you probably noticed ;o) Lets just say that it was far too hot and Cat 1 finally lost all patience with Cat 2. Not that Cat 2 really cared much at all, she just got on with the important work of polishing off Cat 1’s breakfast when she got the chance. Honestly, I’m just glad that both of them are back with their owner and no longer my problem ;o) (I miss them…) I did manage to read one book though, just the one (and mainly whenever the cats took themselves off to find a shady spot)… I found a copy of Anthony Reynolds’ ‘Dark Apostle’, Greenwich Oxfam (again), the other day, and while it was a re-read, that worked for me as it was just too hot to read something new. And I say ‘re-read’ but does it count if the last time you read it was seventeen years ago? Anyway… While I’d say never trust a Heretic Astartes (although the World Eaters are surprisingly honest about their aims), the Word Bearers are part...

  Page Count: 93 Pages While it hasn’t been a great week, it has been a pretty good week for reading and you know what…? I’ll take that, especially when I’ve got no plans for the weekend other than to keep on reading ;o) In the meantime, I thought I’d round off the working week with a Jack Ketchum novella that I found lurking in the back of ‘Red’ . And… When Janet’s car breaks down on a quiet road, her only real concern is how long it will take before she can flag down a passing car, any passing car. One lift, from a very angry motorist, later and it couldn’t possibly get any worse, could it?  Oh, it could. And it does… Before we get going, I feel like a little advance warning would be useful here. I’m not really going to go into the rape scene, in this post, but it does happen and that’s something that some readers may want to consider before reading ‘The Passenger’. It’s up to you. Ketchum doesn’t make it the focus of this tale but similarly to ‘Red’, it does happen. Anyway…...

The end of my job is only two and a bit weeks away but somehow seems to be dragging out at the same time… I’ve handed all of my projects over, to the new folk, now and I’m left with all the ‘leavers admin’ stuff and all the fiddly little bits that it wouldn’t be fair to leave to someone else. If only I could remember where I left my motivation in the meantime… ;o) Add a couple of pissed off cats into the mix (it’s far too hot at the moment…) and yesterday was pretty miserable to be honest. As luck would have it though, ‘past me’ saw a situation like this occurring and very thoughtfully ordered some comic books that turned up yesterday morning. So, once all the ‘work stuff’ was done for the day, I settled down for some reading… ‘Event Horizon: Inferno’ #4 – Ward, Carey, Honchar (ID Dark) After all the excitement, and a little heartbreak, of #3, this fourth instalment slows things right down again; some of the players didn’t get their ‘time in the sun’ and presumably need to get caught ...

Page Count: 178 Pages You wouldn’t have thought it possible but living in a small flat (with loads of books) makes me uniquely qualified to say this ;o) The smaller the flat, and the more books you own, the easier it is for those books to ‘hide in plain sight. And I’m pretty sure that I don’t own that many books… Either way, my books like to hide right in front of me and while sometimes it can be bloody annoying trying to find a book that I was sure I owned, sometimes it makes for a nice surprise to come across a ‘forgotten’ book and think to myself, ‘I was going to read that…’ ‘Currency of Souls’ has been lurking in various TBR piles since October 2024 (thanks for the reminder Amazon) and when I came across it, the other day, I thought to myself, ‘I was going to read that’. So, before I forgot (again), that’s exactly what I did. Welcome to Eddie's Tavern, the only functioning waterhole in a near-dead town. Among the people you'll meet tonight are: Tom, Milestone's haunted ...

  Page Count: 211 Pages I’ll be honest… I’m very much a ‘dog person’ (although Cats 1 & 2 are growing on me) and that’s the reason I haven’t read ‘Red’ up until now. If you’ve read the book, or even just the blurb, you know what happens and I just wasn’t ready to go there. And then I saw a copy of ‘Red’ for sale (Greenwich Oxfam, I love that shop...), the other day, and couldn’t very well leave it there. And once I’d brought it home, I couldn’t very well not read it; not when I’m trying to be a little more disciplined about reading the books that I buy… I’ll warn you now, there’s an absolutely massive spoiler in the blurb, below, and if you’re a dog person, you might not want to read the blurb at all. I get it :o) It all started with a simple act of brutality. Three boys shot and killed an old man’s dog. No reason, just plain meanness. But the dog was the best thing in the old man’s world, and he wasn’t about to let it pass. He wanted justice, and he’d make sure the kids paid f...

  Page Count: 211 Pages Now, here is a book that I really should have read a long time before now… Nothing to do with how good the book is (it’s not bad but we’ll get onto that a little later), more that I put it in my work backpack a year ago, for a ‘commute read’, and then spent most of the last year either off sick or working from home. ‘Typical me’ really, I completely forgot it was there until a few days ago. Due to, erm… reasons, my ‘work backpack’ is now ‘just a regular backpack’ and I found ‘Luther’ nestled inside, looking slightly reproachful but ready to be read. I’m just starting out on a week of cat-sitting so thought that yesterday would be the ideal moment to finally read it… Knight of the Angelicasta. Saviour of the Lion. Grand Master of the Order. Lord of the Dark Angels. Protector of Caliban. Chaos Heretic. Destroyer of Caliban. Sorcerer of the Abyss. Arch-traitor. Dark Oracle. First of the Fallen. Can one man be all of these things? Kept alive and imprisoned f...

So, I’m back at my ex-partner’s place, looking after house and cats while her and my daughters are away. And… I don’t want to jinx it but here goes… I think I may have finally got the hang of this cat-sitting business :o) Cat Number 1 still isn’t too keen on me but knows that ‘Graeme = Being Fed’ so I’m tolerated. Cat Number 2… I’m pretty sure I saw her, from the bathroom window, trying to catch a sparrow, the little psycho. And just to clarify… If I see her with a bird, that bird will be rescued. Anyway, the cats being cats, yesterday was quite a nice one actually. While they were doing their thing, I did mine; that being just sitting there and working my way through a couple of comic books that I’ve been meaning to get to. One re-read, one ‘first time read’. Today will be more of the same :o) While I do that, have some quick thoughts on yesterday’s comic book reading… ‘The Walking Dead: Volume 3, Safety Behind Bars’ – Kirkman, Adlard, Rathburn (Image) Page Count: 136 Pages Last week...

  So, we’ve already established that I’m a sucker for a title that has a pun in it. Not only that, I’ve also got a real soft spot for any horror book with a garish cover (takes me right back to the eighties, that does). That is all it took for me to take a chance on ‘Splasher’, the other day. I keep telling you, there is absolutely nothing scientific about how I choose what to read next ;o) It’s a little bit of a relief then to know that I’m not just drawn to a shiny cover etc; the words, in between the cover art and the blurb, still determine how much I get out of a book. Unfortunately for ‘Splasher’, I ended up putting the book down after a hundred and thirty pages. These days though, I’m a lot more forgiving about ‘DNFs’. The way I see it, as the reader, I’m as much a part of the experience as the book so I’ll happily shoulder some of the responsibility for a read that didn’t quite work out. Right book, wrong reader? Something like that ;o) Have some blurb… Autumn 2006. Low-rise...

  Page Count: 29 Pages It’s all starting to get a little intense over here… It’s mostly work related. to be honest, and that’s fair enough, given that my job is coming to an end at the end of the month. There’s still a fair bit to hand over and I’m right in the middle of not wanting to leave (it’s a good company to work for) but really looking forward to the holiday that I’m planning on taking in September. I’ll have earned it ;o) Anyway… That was a roundabout way of saying that while three books read isn’t a bad return for this week, I ran out of time (and steam) to finish off a fourth. That’s ok though, that’s what the weekend is for ;o) I did have a few minutes spare though and ‘Ushers’ looked like it could be an interesting read so… Martin Lorensen is a twenty-three-year-old counselor for disturbed teenagers. He’s bright, compassionate, attractive, and outgoing. He’s also—and this is the most interesting thing—not dead. Martin has improbably survived not one but two deadly disa...