Flash of Steel Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Sitrep Hex and Violence Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Ravens N’ Pennies Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsThe Ottoman Empire lasted a shade over six centuries, and Lord Kinross covers its history in a bit over 600 pages. 600 quite good pages, with a fair number of full-page images (mostly period portraits or landscapes) and a small[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief is set in some sort of post-Ancient-Greek fantasyland. I imagine the references to megarons and peplos are lost on a lot of people, and I recommend reading up a little on Greek myths and the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Being something of a fan of warring states Japan (you can largely thank Nobunaga’s Ambition II for that), I’ve been aware for some time that at the end of the era, there was a Japanese invasion of Korea. But not[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Jessica Day George’s final Westfalin book does not drop the idea of being a fairy tale retelling—except as a practical matter. Technically, this is a Little Red Riding Hood retelling, and there’s enough elements that you can see the relationship,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Everyone knows of the Age of Exploration, and the Portuguese efforts to find a sea-route around Africa to India. If you know a little more history, you know something of their efforts related to controlling trade in India and the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is the second book I’ve read recently about the Thirty Years War, both of which have the same informative, if unimaginative, title of The Thirty Years War. Cicely Veronica Wedgwood’s history is considered a classic English-language history of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Jessica Day George’s sequel to Princess of the Midnight Ball is every bit as good as the original, and in some ways more interesting. The book successfully juggles two main point-of-view characters, Poppy (the ‘roughest’ of the twelve princesses), and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I actually don’t know much of fairy tales past the ones that Disney has engraved on popular culture, but I actually ran into “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” in the webcomic Erstwhile a year or so ago, which was just long[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Sir Jens’ (‘Sir’ seems to be his first name…) In the Shadow of Empires is an amateur history book about Vlad Dracula (as opposed to a sensational book about the fictional ‘Dracula’). It shows its amateur status in some uneven[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Danielle Jensen’s first novel reads fast, but has quite a bit going on in it. At the start of the story, the main character (Cécile) is kidnapped, and taken to a hidden city of trolls, where she is ‘bonded’ to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…