2003-06-16 13:45 UTC Visual consumption of dead trees
During my aforementioned trip I read three books, mainly while waiting for planes to get to the airport, take off, and land, and while sitting on the T-bahn.
- Redemption Ark, by Alastair Reynolds
- Good solid science fiction that hangs well together.
- Life, the Universe, and Everything, by Douglas Adams
- This is my sixth reading of this particular DNA book.
- The Dilbert Future, by Scott Adams
- An unfortunately accurate look at the world.
Now I'm back, I will be resuming my careful second reading of The Lord of the Rings, which has been slowly progressing for several months now. When I last read it, I hadn't started LARPing yet. Now that I have that experience to draw on, I'm finding surprisingly many similarities between the ways the parties act in The Lord of the Rings and the ways parties act in LARPs. I don't mean the obvious stuff, like wearing chain mail or having the journey neatly partitioned into encounters, but the subtle ways in which the characters interact — some wanting to hack and slash while others want to sneak past; the way in which information is sometimes ignored by party members, much to their later detriment; the ways that awkward alliances are forged between members of races that are traditionally at war...
Later today I should be getting two Discworld books in exchange for a couple of books I leant out last week. They ought to give me two good sleepless nights!