Brak the Barbarian by John Jakes. A collection of a few short stories with Jakes's Conan rip-off, Brak, published according to story chronology, so there are newer stories surrounding the older ones. Jakes has a brief intro in which he's very honest that he wrote the Brak stories because he liked Conan and just wanted to have more of it, so he tried writing his own.

Brak is actually a little more chilled out than Conan, although he's still a tough barbarian guy. What little we know about him is that he was exiled from his northern tribe, so he's travelling far (very far, it seems) south to find his fortune in the city of Khurdisan. Along the way he runs into all sorts of weird stuff. He's blond and keeps his hair very long and tied in a braid, and he wears a lion-skin loincloth. He wields a simple broadsword. He's a classic "doesn't officially join any faiths but keeps an open mind" agnostic. That's about it.

It's really not bad for a simple Conan knockoff. Jakes has a smooth, readable style and Brak is a likable hero. Some of Jakes's fantasy ideas are interesting, like the creepy demon kids that shoot "darts" out of their fingertips. Some, like his Lovecraftian elements, are less interesting. He likes to put Brak up against giant monsters and one of his go-to moves is to give the monsters lots of extra pairs of legs, which makes me imagine them as being awkward and ungainly instead of scary. I don't know much about Jakes as a person but he seems at some point in his life to have found Jesus because there are Christian themes implicit in some of the stories, particularly in the use of temptation as a conflict.

The one story in the book that I would say is an outright dud is the last one, which involves Brak falling afoul of a country with idiotic religious practices, a confusing fight scene on a giant funeral barge, and Brak getting into a hilariously goofy tussle with a dead queen's ghost. That's one of the newer stories, IIRC. The others are at least tolerable, the older 1960s ones being best, and the book generally lives up to its humble promise of providing more of the same (although not as good) if you get an itch to read more sword-and-sorcery fiction after exhausting the classics.

Telzey & Trigger, (Telzey Compilation #2) Baen Books. Very Good in places. 7/10.

It has the precursor to the Internet in it, and I like how the characters don't try to explain how future tech works, it is normal for them so it just does.

Levon's Trade by Chuck Dixon. Dixon is a comics writer who's particularly well-known for writing the Punisher and Batman (I believe he's actually the most prolific Batman writer of all time). He's now transitioned over to prose fiction, and started a series about a guy named Levon Cade, of which this is the first. Levon is a security guard for a Florida construction company. He's a widower with a cute 9-year-old daughter and he's caught in a custody battle with his father-in-law, a snooty surgeon who blames Levon for his daughter's death. Levon is also an ex-Marine who has "a special set of skills" that he's called to use when the daughter of his boss vanishes. While investigating, Levon finds that Ukrainian gangsters were involved, and then the body count starts rising rapidly as Levon tries to figure out what happened to her.

Many would say it's like Taken or John Wick, but it's really more like Dixon's Punisher stories in that it's very hard-boiled and nasty (a lot of comics readers tend to credit Garth Ennis with doing things with the Punisher that Dixon and Mike Baron were already doing back in the late 80s/early 90s). It's less about showy action setpieces and more about a guy whose way of finding things out often involves him beating the crap out of people and then shooting them with untraceable weapons after they've told him what little they know (and their friends and family can't even call the cops because they're all crooks). Dixon's style is very lean and a bit like Richard Stark's Parker novels and tends to work pretty well. I wouldn't say Levon is particularly likable, but you don't read stories like this because you like everyone so much. You read them to see a bunch of nasty people get increasingly nasty toward each other. I think Dixon is already up to like book 10 of the series, so I have a bit of catching up to do.

Podkayne of Mars (1962) by Robert A. Heinlein: 1/5

Heinlein wrote the ultimate time travel and generation ship stories. But it irked him that Judith Merril, that upstart woman, should have written the ultimate steaming-wet-diaper story. The result was this steaming wet pile of metabolism discharge matter. OK, I don't know if this really was Heinlein's motivation, but it could be.

Heinlein had stopped writing "juveniles", at least for the book market. But for some reason this drivel was deemed worthy of being published by Fred Pohl in IF. Podkayne is a precocious nine year old (in Mars years, which would make her 16-17), who dreams of being an astrogator and captain of a ship exploring space. She and her family has of course very high IQs. So it's recirculated characters from previous Heinlein juveniles.

There's very little plot, and the most exciting part is the cover illustration which does not really illustrate any part of the book. Apart from someone producing a telephone from his shirt pocket, it feels very old fashioned, with Mars and Venus being colonized. Mars is the superior freedom loving Heinlein colonists, of course, while Venus is Las Vegas in space. The Venerians' (clever) capitol is Venusberg (oh, how naughty).

The only good thing about this tedious novel is that it's a short and easy read.

The Tower of Fools

Not counting the prologue, which mainly consisted of a list of names that I couldn't keep track of, the first few chapters were quite a joy to read, with good writing and humor. However, after a while it became a matter of pushing through, at least until chapter 25, which was when the author seemed to remember where he wanted the book to go and how to take it there, and also the importance of meaningful character interaction and development. Even that chapter's crazy, jarring start is worth mentioning, probably being just what was needed to make the reader know that it's actually worth paying closer attention again. And the level seemed to remain somewhat higher after that chapter, though I don't know whether that's objectively the case or it's a result of the lasting impression it left.
But most of the book tends to drag on, getting bogged down in a small scope and mundane matters, the greater and supernatural events it hints at taking too long to arrive and not being sufficiently emphasized even when they finally do. And with a fool as the lead, an asshole as his main companion and all kinds of rottenness in most other characters, it's hard to like or cheer for them. Also, if for a while I was thinking that the book was originally written for a Polish audience, in Polish, so the fact that I couldn't keep track of the names, and even of some of the events that were being mentioned, was my problem, as I continued reading I got an ever stronger impression that, assuming he wasn't just making things up, since I didn't care to check, the author was showing off his knowledge of the period at the expense of the book's actual story and characters. And he's definitely showing off and making it hard for the reader by adding all those parts in Latin, and occasionally in other languages as well, and not translating them except on rare occasions, mainly towards the end. Admittedly, this is something that the publisher could have fixed.

Rating: 3/5

And while I'm here, also taking the opportunity to let anyone interested know of The StoryGraph. Let's see where it'll go, and if it won't die out like nearly all other attempts at alternatives to Goodreads. With the lengthy list of current GR feature removals (details about owned books, trivia, quizzes, creative writing, recommendation section from reviews, favorite authors, friend stories, adding photos to book pages (granted, didn't know you could do this last one so far)) something is desperately needed, at least... Not that this isn't the case in every other field (*ahem*), one place that used to be quite good getting worse and worse for many years but users being forced to stay there as no alternatives are available.

Xeelee An Omnibus by Stephen Baxter

A volume containing previously published novels. They are:
Raft- Technically impressive but depressing, I feel that humanity is dangling close to extinction.
Timelike Infinity
Flux- this takes place inside a neutron star with a tribe of human analogues eking out survival.
Ring- Previously read this one before years ago.

A decent book if you're starting out with Stephen Baxter.

Nightblood, by T. Chris Martindale. Basically take Salem's Lot, move it to Indiana, and dump the typical Stephen King dork protagonist and replace him with RAMBO. There's a master vampire trying to convert an entire small town into his servants, but a Vietnam vet with a connection to the supernatural is drawn to the town and uses his training and weapons to fight back.

It's an enjoyable story, although like so many modern novels it's held back a bit by being a tad overwritten. There's a lot of extra detail and internal monologuing that doesn't really move the story forward, just eats up pages, and the plot isn't really anything special. But the characters are likable enough and it's particularly fun to see a cocky vampire repeatedly get his ass kicked while still somehow hanging on just enough to be a real threat. I like Martindale's handle on vampires in that what makes the main one special is that he's powerful enough to possess actual faculties, while his "offspring" are effectively mindless and what passes for their personalities are more like distant echoes of the people they used to be. I can't stand modern takes where being undead basically makes someone a superhero who simply can't go out on a sunny day.

Vatta's War book 1, Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon (audiobook by Graphic Audio) 9/10

Great book. Scifi/space opera, I was never bored. I like the personal development of Kylara, the small twist at the end, and i really really liked the audio dramatization (complete with sound effects and more).

Just asking everyone who posted in this thread without also creating a list post and/or mentioning "include me" if they'd like to make one and be included in the OP :)

Not interested in making a list and I do not even post every book I read, just some I think may be of interest.

Sadly cannot read right now. Looking forward to next month when it should be possible again.

I'll go on ahead and ask that you include me, please.

Added. Linked to the two posts where you wrote about what you had read recently. If you'd like me to link to something else, or to make this post into a list and have me link to it, let me know :)

That's good for me, thanks very much. I appreciate it.

Same here. On the other hand, a story about a roguis character (and a master of disguise too) has stayed in memory for years: Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, by Samuel R. Delany. Really good.

The Steel Remains

The combat scenes may initially be the one source of excitement, but you’ll eventually realize that much more thought and planning went into the world and characters than it first appears, and that you should have paid closer attention than you probably did. While never massive, the battle scenes become even more exciting, but there are also hints of depth in character development, glimpses of worldbuilding on a massive scale and some reasons to care about it all… And there may even be some traces of emotion in some sex scenes, albeit just those of the gay male variety.
All of that comes rather late, however, for much of the book the author seeming to try too hard in various wrong ways, not just oversexualizing everything but being crass and making the characters, with the possible exception of Archeth, particularly difficult to like, with the rare glimpses of depth and connections seeming scattered haphazardly around. And even after those aspects improve to some extent, descriptions continue to be written in ways that seem to string together the sort of “beautiful expressions” that I recall having to keep lists of in early years of school, while at the same time f-words are overused in a manner that seems to betray a lack of creativity, all of these making it harder to get clear mental images. And then there are all the instances of hero’s luck, though that’s pretty much the norm. And yes, there’s plenty of sex and most of it is just plain fucking, and if women are involved then they’re just used for pleasure.

Rating: 3/5