A rambling post about a new book by Steven Erikson

Over the past few years I have developed a love of fantasy books. I always thought fantasy was a little too, well, nerdy, but a friend recommended a book for me to read and I enjoyed it enough to try more fantasy (Side Note: after reading more fantasy I realized that that first trilogy I read is really pretty mediocre). I fell in love with the genre after reading people such as Robert Jordan and George RR Martin, who both write huge, ambitious works spanning multiple volumes that are highly original and aren’t just rehashes of Tolkien. Unfortunately, Jordan died last year before he finished the 12th and final book of his series, and Martin seems to spend all of his time playing with little toy figurines of his characters and attending comic book conferences rather than writing (his upcoming book was supposed to be finished 2.5 years ago).

Luckily, I came across another master of epic fantasy: Steven Erikson’s “A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen“, mixes fantasy, military fiction, and political intrigue in an incredibly detailed and well thought out world. And, unlike Jordan or Martin, Erikson is neither dead nor lazy. In fact, he churns out almost one book a year in the main series, and still has had time to write some smaller novels set in the same world.

Erikson’s eighth book, Toll the Hounds, has just been released in the UK and Australia; for some reason it won’t be released in Canada until August, and the US has to wait until the middle of September. This is the UK, Canadian, and Australian cover:

The US cover follows the fantasy tradition of being really lame and embarrassing:

Anyway, I knew I had to buy this book, but looking at some Australian booksellers showed it was going to cost $65 + shipping! Australia was founded by criminals from the UK – I guess they still want to rob everyone, because I was able to buy it from amazon.co.uk for $22+15 shipping. Before I read it though, I need to finish rereading the previous seven books – I am 200 pages into book six now, so I only have about another 1800pp to go

I need to learn to like lemonade

I have a lot of lemons. This is just one part of my lemon tree.

Lemon Tree

Letter opener

If I got a lot of mail, I would want one of these.

Back from Cairns

I’m back from Cairns. Had a great trip up there. The rainforest is beautiful, the weather great (the last few days were sunny and ~27C), and lots of good bugs. We met lots of ‘interesting’ people up there – northern Queensland has a bit of a frontier land mentality, and we had more than one person ask us if we were from ‘one of those f**king government agencies’. Being from a university was only slightly less appalling to them. On the most part, everyone was nice, however.

I’m still sorting through my pictures, but I don’t know how many more I will have to post up here. Most are of collecting sites, which isn’t likely to interest many people. People get frustrated with me because I don’t take the time to visit the tourist sites when I’m out on these trips, but there just isn’t enough time. I will be going up there in October with my parents, however, and will be able to do things more photo friendly, hopefully.

Now maybe we won’t have to watch those stupid games on TV

You know what I think is really silly? Watching poker on TV. Poker seems to have become really popular over the past few years, at least in North America. Whether its popular because of all the poker on TV or it’s on TV all the time because it became popular, I don’t know, but either way it just seems stupid to watch it all the time. Well, I just read that the University of Alberta has produced a computer that can beat champion poker players. It’s probably wishful thinking, but maybe now people will find poker less cool and won’t want to watch it on TV anymore.