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Congratulations on getting close to the finish! I'm enjoying reading fiction more again. But it helps that my PhD is on hold so I'm not reading non fiction all the time.

Maybe this section can have a "what are you playing" thread like the gaming section does. ;-)
Anyway, first a little me update:
I have been getting into tabletop gaming (board games and card games rather than wargaming) since my vision issues kept me away from PC gaming for over a year now.

It's been a real revelation to discover just how much has been going on in the boardgame space over the past few decades. I'd seen glimpses of it here and there. Now and then I'd wander into the game store, see something that looked interesting, and grab it. So I had a few games in my collection. But I wasn't a hobbyist by any means. Now I am a fully fledged hobbyist boardgamer, with a 30 + game collection, including plenty of mid-to-heavy euros like A Feast For Odin, Brass Burmingham, Food Chain Magnate, and Concordia. ;-) (Just an aside, but gosh, Youtube really has made it easier to get into a new hobby so much faster. Within just a few months I had a pretty good grasp of the landscape of what was out there, and what I wanted to play.)
So, what am I playing?

At the moment, I have a recurring Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion game going with some friends. We are still trying to get through mission 4. We failed on our first attempt, and had to pause our game mid-way through the second. I'm hoping we make it this time. ><
Also, we just had a great 4 player game of Concordia on Saturday. It was my fifth time playing it I think, and it only grows on me more each time. The card system is really quite genius in how it integrates the point scoring multipliers, forcing you engage with this subtle decision matrix from turn one.

Thank you. I've got some 17 SFF books I read in the past year or so that I'd like to review. Let's see if I can catch up to my current reading point. ><
I've finished the first four Earthsea books, as well as the Left Hand of Darkness, but I'd love to read more Le Guin. I'll put that on my list. I just grabbed The Dispossessed a few days ago, so I suppose that's first.

Hello all. ;-) I'm writing a series of book reviews on Good Reads. I thought I could share my reviews here as well.

I want to get into the practice of thinking more about my impressions of a book. I thought that writing down these thoughts can help me to expand the reading experience and deepen my appreciation of good writing. This is a bit of a goal of mine in part because I'm going to need to write a lot in the future for Innkeep.


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I'm going to avoid any plot details in this review, focusing just on my general thoughts on what impressed me so much about A Wizard of Earthsea. Really, this is a review about being surprised. And surprised three times over.


While I enjoy reading SFF, I always start a new book or series with some trepidation. One of the things that makes the genre so special is what can also make it a real chore: the creation of entirely new worlds by the author, with their own geographies, mythologies, languages, societies, histories, politics and so on. Even when a world is artfully deep, cohesive, and organic, the reader still has to move through that initial disconcerting phase of not knowing what the heck is going on. Who are these people? What is this place? What are the rules of magic here? Or what is the kind of technology they are using? Etc.

I find this initial phase of adjustment can make it really hard to enjoy a new SFF book. My mind wants to reject the reality of the names of all the places and people, refusing to take that vital step of suspending disbelief. My internal monologue is something like: "Well, you just made this all up, didn't you? Why should I feel invested in caring about this?" So long as I can get past the initial stage the feeling always passes. I start to "buy in" to the world as I get used to it, and have a good time. But I -do- need to get past that initial stage, and it's usually not easy. This difficulty has made me tend to shy away a bit from reading new SFF.

A Wizard of Earthsea was the first book I had read by Ursula Le Guin. (Somehow I had missed her work entirely as a teenager when I once really plowed through SFF). So I didn't really know what to expect. What first surprised me was that I was already on board after two or three pages. Honestly, I should say that I found that almost shocking. I am used to needing whole chapters of reading before everything feels suitably established for me to suspend my disbelief. I think part of this reason is how economical Le Guin is with deploying lore. She has a laser focus on the beating heart of the story she wants to tell, and dispenses with everything else. The lore is there, but it is strictly contained and doled out only as needed. The focus is always on the situation facing the main character.

Another thing that surprised me about A Wizard of Earthsea was just the pure quality of the prose. I will need to re-read Tolkien to see what I think of him as an adult, but having read a bit more SFF again last year and this year, Le Guin is easily the best. I must admit that there were certain sentences and paragraphs where I had to just put the book down and take a moment, they were so overwhelmingly good. There is a sense of poetry in Le Guin's prose. She can draw on the lyrical feelings of words to really take you beyond mere factual representation and into the sublime. Her accounts of sailing, of the elements of wind and rain, in particular, are as good as I have ever seen (Perhaps you could find similarities here with Homer, Melville, or Patrick O'Brian).

Finally, I was surprised at how Le Guin's story was so thematically deep. Superficially, it is a coming of age story, of a young man becoming a powerful wizard. But really, it is so much more than this. We should be very wary of analyzing literature in the sense of trying to "discover the underlying meaning" that the author secretly wants to tell us. Literature is not when an author dresses up an abstract position in pretty language, with the reader then tasked to undress it. The prose and the story already is the meaning. And yet, you can detect here so many interesting influences and ideas, that we can call this book philosophical in a broad sense. There is some Nietzsche perhaps. Some Heidegger. There is some Taoism. And it comes across through the language. It is a whole experience.

A Wizard of Earthsea immediately placed Le Guin as one of my very favorite authors. It is a must-read for anyone who enjoys good prose, let alone for fans of SFF. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5615207066

Thanks for sharing this Jubal. I had actually felt a pang of nostalgia for IWD recently, and had even contemplated playing it (although I have distinct memories of NOT liking it that much at the time compared with BG1+2). Now I think I'll focus instead of getting into the Pillars of Eternity games.

This was interesting. It was a bit of a psychological shock for many in the professional go world when Lee Sedol lost to AlphaGo. And then the broader reporting was filled with hyperbolic statements about the rise of the machines. But this kind of trick to defeating AI shows how limited this so-called "intelligence" is. We created Go, and we created AlphaGo. We -understand- that we are playing Go, when we play it.

I wrote an article last week on how to improve your pixel art characters. It's quite an in-depth analysis of improvements done to my own work by Ben Chandler, a professional in the game art world from my local area.

It's unlocked now for non-Patreon supporters, so please do go take a look!

I've had an eye on this on Twitter. Looking forward to seeing more! Great concept.

That's a nice metaphor.

I think the setting can be distinguished from the lore in some way. For example, Dark Souls has a very evocative setting, but lore in terms of actually conveyed details about the history of the world is limited to mostly item descriptions and a few choice dialogue lines.

Yes, I really enjoyed what I saw of NORCO, although I got stuck around the elevator / office section.

Haha, yeah that is Doc for you. ;-)
"I'd generally say that more people will connect with an interesting, relatable character in a tired, cliche setting than with a boring trope-heavy character in a unique setting. The setting may be fascinating for a writer, but it can rarely deliver a punch."
That's a really good way of putting it.

Thanks Jubal,
I've still got a lot of work to do to get my nervous system happy with me again (so I need to take it a little slow and steady with getting back to work), but I'm really enjoying being able to use my eyes and ears more or less properly. ;-)
Psychosomatic symptoms are pretty incredible. I worked myself a bit hard last week, and combined with poor sleep and a bit too much visual stress from playing UnReal world on Sunday, I woke up  Monday with some visual issues returned (pattern sensitivity and photo sensitivity). But, some exercise, regulating exercises (feet up wall), cold showers and things, and already within days I'm able to read books again and watch a bit of TV / use my computer a bit.

The nervous system can have an impact on so many of our systems, including vision, heart, etc. that we can easily mistake anxiety for all kinds of problems. ><

Beautiful animation. That must have taken a lot of work. The color of the art has a lovely warmth to it too.

Aure, it's really interesting to hear you speak about growing as a writer, and the challenge of delivering lore in an organic, unforced way.

Roadwarden does this very well I think. I was already primed to think about it while playing because of Doc's article on the subject. So I really noticed how the lore functioned to help the character driven story along, as the "salt" in good proportion to the meat, using Doc's analogy.

I'm moving into the writing phase of Innkeep as well now, and I am trying to actively remind myself of this as I re-work bits of dialogue, or plan out narrative stuff more.

Oh heck I don't think I even realised that you were here on Exilian too!
Hope everybody has had a chance to play Roadwarden by now. I just finished it last week as my first game to play after my health and vision had recovered enough. A real treat.

What with Citizen Sleeper as well last year, it feels like the future of text based games is very bright. ;-)