Wastrel > Recent Status Updates

Why are former adventurers always laid low specifically by an arrow to the knee? It's not as though an arrow to the thigh would really be less debilitating...

Ugh. Just when I'd been pleasantly surprised by the competence of the first volume... the prologue to the second is shocking. It was bad enough when the prologue to the first tried putting on a Ye Olde Englishe accent, but this one combines that with random modern expressions and a dry use of precise dates that feels completely out of keeping with the style.

Good: I like the fact that there's not only a map at the beginning of the novel (the continent) but also one at the beginning of the story proper (the local country). Sadly, the latter map is virtually illegible.

I also like that Eddings has put time and effort into distances, with a character quoting the average speed of travel by wagon, and then a days-travelled a few pages later. Adds more solidity.

This is... far better than I was expecting/remembering!

The prose of the Tolkien-rip-off prologue is pretty bad. But the prose of the main story is (while old-fashioned, almost Victorian) pretty decent, with some nice turns of phrase, and the characterisation so far is simple but effective. Very little has happened, but it's intriguing.

I still expect it will go downhill...

Slang from this era that we still use today: "shut up!"

Slang from this ear that we don't still use today: "we've done them fairly brown!"

[incidentally, I do like how Ransome lets his "natives" slip into Cumbrian expressions without going full eye-dialect comic relief]

Something I hadn't expected: this is essentially a science fiction book.

Oh, there's no imaginary science in it, of course. It's all completely practical old-world knowledge. But the way the book treats it is SO reminiscent of older sci-fi - the eagerness to stop to explain the technology and concepts, whether it's how to pack a boat efficiently or how to use parallax to steer.

This may be a longshot, and apologies if it seems inappropriate - and I'm not sure how many people will actually even see this update anyway, so I'm not getting my hopes up - but would anyone have any interest in reading a couple of short stories of mine?

Not looking for proofreading, just impressions.

One's about 4-5k words; the other is about 6-7k words.

I guess 'literary SFF', broadly speaking?

Wait, this wasn't on my shelves here? I've had this for years now!

It's actually gotten surprisingly good now that the plot has gotten going.

This isn't a very good book; I knew that even when I first read it, nearly a quarter of a century ago. On the other hand, I... well, oddly, I never loved it exactly, but I did reread it frequently, and Cunningham became one of the authors I've read the most books by, despite my general antipathy for the Forgotten Realms as a setting.

So why am I reading it? Nostalgia, and the need for something unchallenging...

For my own future refence, I'll round off with a brief map of what's in which chapter:

Let me with Sappho and Orinda be
Oh ever sacred Nymph, adorn'd by thee;
And give my Verses Immortality.

Well, that's that finished (from here on is just notes, bibliography and index). Though it'll take me some time to go back through and add some notes for the last 90 pages...

Bulstrode Whitelocke succinctly sums up Aphra's (ex-)boyfriend: "an Atheist, a Sodomite professed, a corruptor of youth, & a Blasphemer of Christ".
[he was also probably a murderer, but that wasn't controversial enough in those days to be worth mentioning]