Catching up

Soooo... what have I been doing for the last year? Well besides the before mentioned life duties I have managed to squeeze in some reading and listening, just not a whole lot of writing. So lets see what I did get to.

Reading well I masochistically decided to read some old Dungeons & Dragons based novels to see if they are as bad as I thought they'd be. I read the Icewind Dale Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore. Not horrible but obviously written as if it were a campaign journal from a D&D campaign. I've also read the first two books and am finishing the third of Douglas Niles' Moonshae trilogy. This trilogy feels a little more like a story than a game recap but still not exactly Hugo material. Also read the City of Towers the first novel in the Eberron setting. Again readable and somewhat enjoyable.

Listening: Haven't done as much of this as I'd have liked. I listened the the Chronicles of Narnia. Since they started making the movies I thought I should at least know of them. Pretty decent young adult fare, can't believe I didn't read them when I was younger. I also listened to the first three books of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea cycle and thought they were wonderful. The writing is so evocative that it paints clearly on the minds canvas, even when sitting in traffic). Since they are audiobooks I should comment on the narrators as well. "A Wizard of Earthsea " was narrated by Harlan Ellison who I did not care for one bit and manage to detract something from the inherent beauty of the written narrative. The The Tombs of Atuan was read by Gabrielle DeCuir and was considerably better than Ellison's reading. The The Farthest Shore was read by Scott Brick, enough said. (Just in case it isn't enough said, Scott Brick is fantastic).

Enough of an update for now but I will have a few more things to add later.

Oh where has the time gone

I'd love to say I was in a coma the last year or so or perhaps on a top secret government mission but I haven't been. I mostly been working, playing and trying to raise two young kids. So time to read started to dwindle and listening time in the car for audio books dwindled as well as I didn't want my four year old listening to most of what I was listening to. In that time there was little to write and so the blog fell by the wayside and for that I'm sorry.

Well anyways I'm going to take another run at it and hopefully my attempt and blog rebirth isn't snuffed out by piles of poopy diapers.