PRINCE Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all eternity. What a way to start a novel. As a reader, I don’t think about the first words of a book when I first dive in. Ultimately, they’re not that important. It’s just … Continue reading →

In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life. It seemed you would be forever … Continue reading →

If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net—what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, … Continue reading →

Kings, they explained, do not walk like beggars for hundreds of miles. My response was that if a beggar could manage the feat, then why not a king? Did they think me less capable than a beggar? A couple of years back, I picked up a paperback copy of The … Continue reading →

The gods made the earth for all men t’ share. Only when the kings come with their crowns and steel swords, they claimed it was all theirs. My trees, they said, you can’t eat them apples. My stream, you can’t fish here. My wood, you’re not t’ hunt. My earth, … Continue reading →

What a ride. I began my Mistborn journey at the end of this past December. In its review gave the first book credit for getting me back into the habit of turning the page rather than turning the channel. Now that I’ve finished the final book in the trilogy, The … Continue reading →

“Is this the be-all and end-all of your ambition? What are you that this little corner of the great world is all you want?” I’d had Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series on my to-read list for a while. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to jump into a dragon-related … Continue reading →

One of the things I like to do between epic reads is to cleanse the mental palate for a day or so before diving back into a deeper work of fiction. Sometimes that’s with shorter, adult-level fiction. Other times, I like to pretend I’m a kid and simply enjoy a … Continue reading →

Oh, to be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem … but in … Continue reading →

What can be said that has not already been said about A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin’s opening volume of his A Song of Fire and Ice epic? The books and the television series that it has spawned have permeated American pop culture. At least half the people I … Continue reading →