Lord Samper's Library

  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...

  Page Count: 134 Pages I can feel my reading starting to head in a ‘fantasy direction’, more specifically a ‘Sword & Sorcery’ direction. That’s never a bad direction to head in and we’ll see where the road takes us but for now, I thought I’d start off with some short stories from ‘Old Moon Quarterly: Volume V’. Well, all the short stories from ‘Old Moon Quarterly: Volume V’, actually. You know what I mean ;o) One of the reasons I follow Jim’s blog (and you should too) is that he really knows his ‘Sword & Sorcery’ and has a happy knack for broadening my knowledge of the genre with what he writes about. So when I saw Jim had posted about ‘Old Moon Quarterly: Volume V’ , I thought to myself, ‘I’ll have some of that...’ And after I turned off my work laptop last night, that’s exactly what I did :o) I’ll be honest, I read through the whole volume, in one sitting, but came unstuck with the two poems; ‘The Kings Two Bodies’ (Joe Koch) and ‘A Warning Agaynste Woldes’ (Zachary Bo...

A quick post for today as I’ve got so much to do for work… Two things leave me absolutely cold when I'm reading; well... two things as far as this post goes anyway. Poetry and bloody Tom Bombadil... Poetry and I have never got on, possibly because it was something that I had to study at school, rather than discover for myself, and so maybe I haven't discovered the poetry for me? I don't know... Whatever the reason, I generally find poetry to be self indulgent wall paper that delights in showing off, how clever it is, instead of painting a scene or telling a story. I don't have time for that these days, give me something a bit more straightforward instead. And Tom Bombadil... I've never seen the point of Tom Bombadil, an unnecessary interlude in our Hobbit's journey. He is so disconnected from Middle Earth, and it's struggles, that I always end up wondering why he's there, I just want to get on with the good stuff. I'm not going to lie, it's...