cobainwasmurdered

RIP Dean. Haven't posted in a long time but I remember Dean both here and from elsewhere as a great guy and his contributions to the "IWC" were tremendous and he'll be greatly missed. It's wonderful seeing how many lives he has touched.

I really enjoyed the Chain of Dogs parts of Deadhouse Gates and the rest I'd use wiki or get a summary if I couldn't make it through, but I'd definetly make an effort to read the Chain of Dogs parts.

I'm a really big fan of Gemmell. I have all of his books as far as I know, which took quite a while since he has more than 30. The Drenai books are my favourite (Druss is an all-time great character) but most of his work was pretty solid and it was a real shame that he died so young. I know his wife is writing now and she was supposedly quite involved in his process so I might try her book and see how it is. Really enjoying Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series so far, it's his most "epic" series yet, although I think he could stand to slim the books down a bit. You don't need to write the max size every time. I don't mind it that much because the books are still good and I'm getting a lot for my money but I think if you can tell a tighter story in 2/3rds the words you probably should.

I'm not sure what the policy on plugging things is but our site did a QnA with Prince Devitt http://culturecrossfire.com/wrestling/qa-with-prince-devitt so I thought I would share the link here. We're also going to be doing one with Tama Tonga in the future.

Malazan books. WOT falls apart somewhere part way in and doesn't come back together until Jordan died and Sanderson came in. It came together for a satisfying conclusion but there is some serious heavygoing in between. Malazan series despite being just as long if not longer didn't feel like it was being stretched out to me and because the universe that Erikson built was so huge he left a ton of room for himself and his co-creator to explore in further series.

Midnight Tides is one of my favourite books in the series. I can see why it throws a lot of people off since it's a huge departure from what had came before but I loved Tehol and Bugg and there was a lot of really good stuff in there. Erikson writes some of the best battle scenes I've ever read. The Chain of Dogs parts of Deadhouse Gates are some of the best fantasy I've read. Other Epic/High fantasy that I haven't seen mentioned that I enjoyed are the "Prince of Nothing" series by R Scott Bakker which are the first triliogy of the Second Apoclypse series. Jim Butcher's "Codex Alera" isn't as good as his Dresden books but aren't bad either. David Gemmell is also really fun if you think of him in this category.