Welcome to Litsy!

Finished last night with this collection of short stories loved 10 of the stories while the others were okay… I have some great new authors to explore and some amazing authors that I‘ve already read… I can‘t wait to read more by the authors I really enjoyed

I enjoyed all seven stories to some degree, so overall 4⭐

My favourite two were "Bazaar of the Bizarre" by Leiber, with his humorous take, before that was a thing, on a more typically grim genre &; Mazirian the Magician by Vance, which is just classic low fantasy, and makes me regret having let go of his Dying Earth books sometime in my prehistory.
Editor, de Camp's, offering was interesting in his intention of making his story more realistic,⬇️

An exciting night of intrigue, murder & theft for Conan in a desert oasis town inhabited by cannibals & strange cults.

An opportunity for Howard to demonstrate some of his worst racism, with a seasoning of predatory sexism. Apologists say it's of its time: it's still 💩

My 4⭐ rating is based solely on the fantasy/adventure elements I read Howard for, & that while Conan is, famously, savage, he also isn't as thick as he's sometimes portrayed.

The penultimate story is Jack Vance's "Mazirian the Magician", which I read around 1980 in his "The Dying Earth" collection. It's a wonderful story of the Magicians' Duel variety, in an exotic far-future setting. Vance's magic system inspired Gary Gygax's AD&D wizardry, with mages able to memorise a set of spells which they forget as they cast them and have to relearn from grimoirs.
Mazirian is an interesting character of an unpleasant kind ??

#CatsOfLitsy
I am honoured that Skye has chosen to sit next to me while I read (yes, a cat post, but there's a book in the photo so don't @ me! 😏)
She's a rescue cat who is still settling in with us, & while she's sweet she's also excitable & scratchy (her tail is lashing as I write & I'm suppressing my urge to stroke her!). She does like being picked up & held & will allow strokes then, so I wander around the house like a mad cat-person!👨🏻‍🍼

Just finished this and it was okay. There were some really stupid plot points and decisions made but it was tolerable. This and the other two novels following it also seem to be taking place and are the cause of the events in The Out of the Abyss module. (My OOTA campaign is on a hiatus currently, but it's so amusing to me that my characters are unfortunately there to experience all of that mess)

"The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man."

- The Hoard of the Gibbelins, Lord Dunsany

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

The first of the stories is a Fritz Leiber tale of Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, with the added bonus of featuring their wizardly patrons, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes & Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.
In decadent Lankhmar's Plaza of Dark Delights, a gaudy new shop appears overnight. The wizards separately dispatch their protegés to end this extradimensional threat, the Mouser, typically, letting his curiosity & sybaritic tastes get the better of 👇🏻

#Bookreport

Last week was very off for me. I got very little reading done due to fatigue and things out of my control. Made little progress with Archmage, and was too tired for any physical reads. I hope this week will go better.

📚CR:

🎧Archmage
🎧The Witness for the Dead
🎧Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Second edition of this collection of seven sword and sorcery tales. Published 1968, bought 1979, finally made it off Mount TBR 2025. 49 years of well-aged magic and mayhem! 😄

This is a comfort read as I've actually read many of the stories in other collections. Some favourite characters here, including Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric of Melniboné and Conan the Barbarian. Let the swashbuckling begin! ⚔️