Stratofanatic's Emporium

In my ongoing efforts to support alliterative poets in the Modern Alliterative Revival, I just added online reviews for two more poets: Michael Helsem (aka, "Graywyvern") and Jeff Sypeck. These are below, but if you 'd like to support the revivalist, click on the reviews below and "upvote" them ... it's very handy for the algorithms! Lancelot Schaubert ( The Greenwood Poet ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review  . Adam Bolivar ( Ballads for the Witching Hour ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review  . Amit Majmudar ( Dothead ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review Mary Thaler ( Ulfhidr ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review Zach Weinersmith ( Bea Wolf ): my  Amazon review  and this  Goodreads review Now for Helsem and Sypeck!

It's official: my first review for the Los Angeles Review of Books has just appeared. It's called " Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited " (click link), and it tackles two recent books on Tolkien: The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Nicholas Birns (Routledge, 2024) Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. (McFarland, 2024) I'm a bit nervous about it, honestly, not only because it's such a public forum, but because I share my honest thoughts about the current state of Tolkien criticism. If you're interested, check it out ... and always happy to discuss.

Turns out I had to rewrite this entry significantly -- one of the perils, alas, of doing additional research. (There must be a moral in that somewhere.) Anyway, I originally wanted to read the GOR novels of John Norman  cuz everyone in SFF scholarship knows the common narrative behind them: Norman's the genre's resident evil, the pinnacle of misogynistic assholery, one of the eventual reasons sword-and-sorcery (S&S) died a rapid death in the 1980s. However, since I'm an instinctive iconoclast who always distrusts received opinion, I had to see for myself. So I finally took the plunge into Gor and selected a novel at random from my local Bookman's. This turned out to be  Priest-Kings of Gor  (Ballantine, 1968), and the sheer strength of its writing quality surprised me deeply. I'm not going to make any two bones about it ... this is a good novel of its kind. So you can only imagine how a-quiver with zeal my grubby little paws were to rant against Received Opinion...

 On the first day of ENGL 378: Fantasy Fiction, I asked students to name their three favorite fantasy books . Wonderfully, many of them actually had three favorites. We had 30 students overall, so I tallied up the results, including the few who couldn't resist naming videos games or movies. I should that this is hardly a scientific pool, but the results are still interesting.  The Lord of the Rings was the #1 -- Tolkien's still the king! -- but followed closely by Harry Potter at #2. After that there's a significant drop-off, but several books had multiple votes, including Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, and Sarah J. Maas.  Without further ado, here are the results: