Platypus of Truth

So, another volume from White Wolf's Age of Sorrows appeared on the shelves of the local used book store.  I loved role playing in this particular world all through grad school and thoughts on the Exalted core rule book can be found here and here .  That said, I have a few preliminary thoughts upon beginning Dragon-Blooded . Dragon-Blooded presents the rules and background necessary for playing one of the Dragon-Blooded, the race of demi-gods that controls much of Creation through the Realm, a sort of mythical Chinese Empire.  My wife and I happen to be reading Johnathan D. Spence's God's Chinese Son right now, and studying late Qing China has only increased my appreciation for the depth and detail of The Age of Sorrow's Dragon-Blooded and their Realm (In fact, one of Spence's other works, Treason by the Book , appears as recommended reading in the Eclipse Caste booklet).  In fact, I can imagine using Spence's account of the Taiping rebellion with very li...

John Knowles A Separate Peace played an instrumental part in helping me understand my high school experience growing up in rural Southern Connecticut.  It's an odd book, but it got into the leaf-mold of my mind.  I think I've only read it twice.  Anyhow, I didn't encounter anything with quite that peculiar flavor for over a decade.  Then, two summers ago, my wife and I were reading for a summer book club .  On the list were Gilead , Hannah Coulter , and Brideshead Revisisted .  I often struggle with the approved cannon of Twentieth (and now twenty-first) Century Lit.  The feel is always something akin to an endlessly boring tea party where over-dressed adults drone on and on about themselves and never really hear what anyone else is saying.  Of course that means that I get to be late to the party when it comes to such geniuses as T.S. Eliot.  So, seeing this book club as a chance to extend my tastes, I plunged in.  While Gilead and Han...

Some time ago I voiced my concern that Tom Shippey's personal convictions may cause him to over-emphasize the more Pagan (in an historical sense) and despairing strands in Tolkien's work at the expense of the dominant Christian, and specifically Roman Catholic, elements.  I then had to admit that, not being a Catholic, there are places at the core of Tolkien's work from which I am also excluded.  That set me to thinking: how might I be warping Tolkien to fit my own beliefs and how can I correct that?  The answer seemed obvious: find works by Catholic writers on Tolkien.  At the top of that list then came Stratford Caldecott's Secret Fire (recently re-released as The Power of the Ring ), Joseph Pearce's Tolkien: Man and Myth , and Tolkien: A Celebration .  Tolkien: A Celebration being the first to find its way into the used bookstore, I began with it. Joseph Pearce's Tolkien: A Celebration , is a series of essays unearthed by the author in the process of writ...

This Christmas season's " wintry read " has been George MacDonald's Lilith .  Written as part of the grieving process for MacDonald's dead daughter, the whole book is suffused with a cold, quiet, strangeness that pairs well with the waning of the year.  It's no small tribute to the eeriness of the work that H.P. Lovecraft singled it out as one of the landmark achievements in the development of the "weird tale."  Paying the book equal homage from the other side of the pond, C.S. Lewis contributed a brilliant forward to one of the reprints (W.H. Auden has the honor of another).  Though I could compare the mesmeric effects of the work to Lovecraft's Dream Quest of Unknown Kaddath , which owes even more to Lord Dunsany, I'd like to focus in on Lilith's legacy to C.S. Lewis. Lewis quite openly referred to George MacDonald as his master and claimed that there was some direct borrowing form MacDonald in everything he wrote.  This comes as lit...