Hello, nice to meet you! :-)

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  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Of course I do.

    I go through several phases: sometimes I am busy reading new books, and other times I am in “reread” mode. This happens for novels and essays as well. I have always been doing that, since I was a kid, and there are books that I have been re-reading since then.

    And this is without even mentioning poetry which, in my experience, expects to be read multiple times (in no small part due to the same processes by which we enjoy music - based on repetition and familiarity).



  • Several of my bookshelves are devoted to a single (Italian) publisher, namely Adelphi. They have a strong esthetic coherence (Google them and you will see what I mean) and within that publisher I sort by series and then by number.

    Otherwise I sort by genre/category (e.g. Tolkien, scifi, photography, fiction, history,…) And within it alphabetically (by author and then by title). When I have some other cases like Adelphi (e.g. Sellerio with its blue books or Penguin classics paperbacks) I strive to achieve adjacency.

    Any other approach is clearly madness and nonsense! (I move books around every few weeks :-P )


  • Snow crash was great back in the days! I recall 14 years old-me being upset at the "wrong acronym* but I remember it as great fun. I was coming from the darker novels and short stories by Gibson and Sterling and the lighter touch by Neal Stephenson (and others, like … Rudy Rucker if I am not mistaken) felt nice, while at the same time did not drop the expectations on being engaged on the same kind of reflections/analyses on the human nature like the previous cyberpunk novels.

    Those were the times! Plus, I was playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2020 (the tabletop rpg)… :-)


  • I just completed The Terror by Dan Simmons and I am currently reading the second book in the Malazan series by Erikson, Deadhouse Gates.

    Malazan is amazing.

    I found quite difficult to assess the Terror. It was quite a long read for the first 700 pages, then I really enjoyed the last 2 hundreds. But in retrospect I appreciate this slow pace so … I am not sure about my judgement. In the end I am glad to have read it. I also learned a lot about people and cultures of the Artic circle.

    After the Malazan novel I will probably follow upon the third one, but I could also switch back to (re) reading Iain M. Banks or reading Peake’s Ghormenghast for the first time.


  • I understand. Just keep in mind that you don’t need to “do the voices” or to treat it like an “improv theatre”, a perfectly fine way to play is to refer to your character in third person: “so and so knocks quietly on the door and asksis anybody in there?Before kicking the door open with a roaring laughter”… And another player could sigh in first person, rolling her eyes: “oh no! Not again!”.

    As for knowing what to do, that’s the job of the GM, to set up interesting scenes for the table!