Books, glorious books!
Thanks for the recommendations! I'm always looking for new authors and books to try. Sadly most of what I've been reading myself lately is junk from the bottom of the Kindle Unlimited slushpile -- look, I enjoy it, but I'm not gonna claim it has a lot of literary value -- but there are two things of better quality I can recommend:
- After seeing a mention of it on Adam Warren's Twitter -- this was before I realized that Twitter was a vile blight on humanity and bailed, of course -- I picked up a copy of the first "Valerian and Laureline" comic, The City of Shifting Waters. This is a French bandes dessinés sort of thing that started in 1976, and is supposedly one of the progenitors of that era of adventure comics. I'd never heard of it, but it sounded appealing (straight up sci-fi/time travel adventure) so I decided to give it a shot. And you know what? It's pretty great! I'm going to have to get more of these.
- I've occasionally read some blog posts from Tom Simon a.k.a. "The Superversive" over the past several years; he has an overstuffed, old-fashioned style that I enjoy in nonfiction format. I hadn't thought of him in quite a while, but then I saw his name again and discovered he's actually written two high fantasy books since then, including the first of a series he was threatening for ages. Those are on my menu to try out, but in the meantime I picked up Death Carries a Camcorder, a compilation of his essays on fantasy writing on Kindle, and quite enjoyed it. I'm not entirely certain I'd go along with what he has to say but even if you disagree he's the sort of author it's fun to mentally argue with.