A&E readers will get a more detailed breakdown of exactly how the voting went, but I can safely post the outcome here: I'll be running "An Invitation, if you choose to accept it" and "The Fourth Voyage of Captain Fasaad" over the course of next year. One of these is much more of an experiment than the other, so in some ways I'm happy that I don't have to try to juggle two games with a lot of game theory/table rules/player agency issues at once.

So I shelve the James Bond modules and Mage Rulebook and pull down the CFalk rules and the copy of Conan d20 that drcpunk gave me (to edit me 3E character creation spreadsheets for the low armor rules). Should give me plenty to do for the next month.

I was fighting a cold last week, so I went with some comfort books rather than tackling something new.

103) The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (Reread): Paul Malmot's debut novel held up just as well on a second read. I recommend it to all fans of the pulp era.

104) The Great Train Robbery (reread): To my mind this is the best of Michael Crichton's books. Pulled off the shelf to help with the upcoming CFalk game, I wonder if there's a way to use Mr. Pierce in my plotting....

105) Neither Here Nor There (reread): one of Bill Bryson's travel books, this one recounts his various trips bumming around Europe. Written in 1990 or thereabouts it is interesting to see how much Europe has changed just since then, though some of those changes - his discussion of how lovely Sarajevo is, for example - were not for the better.

100) Einstein: His Life and Universe: Walter Issacson's bio of the great physicist was just as well done as his previous work on Benjamin Franklin (but unlike the Franklin one did not make me feel totally stupid compared to the subject of the biography, since I can imagine that I might have noticed some of the stuff that Franklin did, but know that Einstein's physics are out of my depth by leaps and bounds). It made an interesting counterpoint to Power's _Three Days to Never_, but showed how much of a tissue paper of Einstein's life Powers used as the framework for that book. OK, it is really freaky that Einstein had a daughter that no one knew about until decades after his death that no one knows what happened to, I'll give him that. The book also reminded me how happy I am to be living when I am - I cannot imagine having to avoid my future wife and disappear our daughter just to have enough social respectability to land a job (or being a society that considered that the right thing to do). I also wonder about alternate Einsteins: the one where he hung around Zurich and helped Milena pass her exams (rather than leaving her to take a sound round of classes while pregnant and wondering if her boyfriend would ever land a job), where the two of them might have had a more co-equal 21st century marriage; the one where he accepted his father's offer to head his engineering firm and developed his ideas with more engineering; the one where he and his friends inadvertently spilled the beans about using atomic energy as a weapon to the isolationist, pro-German Charles Lindberg (which they damn near did). Each makes a good starting point for an alternate history. I especially like the idea of Albert, Milena, Liserl and Hans Albert travelling the world ala Johnny Quest.

101) Fables (Reread): Found this on the shelf while re-organizing and reread the whole thing in front of the fire over several nights (though War and Pieces, which, as I said before, is where I consider it done). Holds up well in one go, and I like how the solutions to the problem of the empire were foreshadowed in book 2. Nice forward plotting.

102) Thieves' World Graphic Novel book 3 (reread) this lovely piece of work, where Tim Sale illustrated three short stories from the books, weaving the plots together over the course of a couple of days, is something else that came out during the move. I need to hit amazon to see if I can score any of the other volumes. Tim Sale's art (familiar to you if you watch Heroes, as he did the artwork for Isaac's precongative pictures) is glorious in black and white, and the stories somehow have a lighter touch in this format.

This just got e-mailed out to my players today, but I thought I'd share it with the larger community. If you are part of the invite group, please don't post your votes here, for fear of influencing someone else's decisions.

( Games Prospectus 2010 )

97) Odd and the Frost Giants: I feel a little cheap putting this on here as it really is much more of a short story than a book, but since it was purchased as a bound single volume on it goes. Neil Gamin's little piece about Norse myth is cute and easily worth the short time it takes to read. 

98) Sin City - A Dame To Kill For (reread): Having reread Big Fat Kill I was compelled to pull this off the shelf. Just as good as I remembered. For all that I prefer Dwight, Marv is pretty damn funny in this book. 

99) Voyage of the Space Beagle (reread): some calculation tells me that I have owned 5 copies of this book during my life. I currently have 2, which means that when someone inevitably steals my reading copy I will have a backup. This reread brought home exactly how much of a Star Trek precursor this was, and several of the tales within can be readily repurposed to that end (although not the Scarlet Devil one, as it is now much too well known as a basis for Alien). 

 95) For Your Eyes Only: my last Bond book out of the house clean-out, this one is a collection of short stories, two of which were mushed together to make the movie of that name and one of which, Quantum of Solace, was used as the title for the latest Bond movie. The short story actually used the title term in a sensible way (it is the minimum amount of compassion required for a marriage to survive); the movie isn't based on that story at all. All 5 of the stories were very enjoyable - to my mind Bond works a little better as a short story hero than in the novels, where copious time is spent discussing what he's eating and wearing. 

96) Sin City: The Big Fat Kill: (Reread) Pulled this off the shelf to kill a little time. The beginning is a little slow, but the scene with Dwight and Jackie-Boy in the car is frikin' hysterical. I've always preferred Dwight over Marv as a hero - I like my protagonists a little more cerebral - and while this isn't as good as Dame to Kill For it was miles better than Family Values. 

93) Thunderball: as promised, I gave Ian Fleming one more try, and this one was better - it wasn't against American mobsters, so the espionage worked a little better. Plus I liked the facts that a) Bond spent a chunk of the book second guessing his instincts and not reporting up the chain for fear of looking like an idiot and b) that he was often utter exhausted from his activities. Both made him feel more human.

I have a strong urge to run a James Bond game, not just because I have several of Victory Games well done modules that haven't seen use in decades, but also because the opening single of the new Michael Buble album makes "Cry Me a River" sound like a JB movie title track and because I now have not one but two good names for Femme Fatale's in the Bond idiom. If I do pitch one I will likely give the player a choice between being a team of equals or a hero and backup - the former is more common in gaming, but I'm sure i could extrapolate parts of the Buffy rulebook to make the latter work. I might also ratchet up some of the scenarios to give things a bit more of a "Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD" sense, but I'm not sure if that would break the Bond idiom too much, or just enough to make the campaign distinct. 

94) Methuselah's Children: I was surprised by how little of the book's content matched the back cover text (which was all about the protagonists being forced to wander the starts; in actuality they don't leave Earth until about the final 3rd of the book and, in so doing, visit a total of 2 other planets). I have little issue with the content, which was classic Heinlein, just the ad copy. At least the image on the cover could be extrapolated to attach to concepts in the book, which puts it ahead of a lot of books produced around its publication date.

There will be a slight delay while we move into a new house.

89) We Have Always Lived in the Castle: More Shirley Jackson, well worth reading. She does great POV of Crazy People. 

90) Hollywood Station: a Joseph Wambaugh novel about the Hollywood police precinct, it's kind of a police procedural, but not really. More like a slice of life story about police officers that also follows the participants of a single crime as POV characters. It was OK, but not thrilling. 

91) The Bielski Brothers: Peter Duffy's account of the three brothers who lead a partisan movement against the Nazis and set up a Jewish community in the woods of Belarus. Another account of these events was recently made into the movie Defiance. I don't know how good the other account was, but Duffy's book was gripping and honest, showing what ordinary people can do in the face of evil. 

92) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: John Brendt's true crime novel about both a murder in Savannah and the city itself during the 1970's to 1980s. I had seen the movie, but had forgotten enough to keep the book fresh. Recommended. 

I've already finished another novel this week, so it's looking very likely that I will hit my 100 book goal for the year. Now I just have to find my gaming supplies, as I really want to reread the MAGE rulebook, as well as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG. They're in a box somewhere labeled "Books". We don't have too many of those around the new house....

87) Confections of a Closet Master Baker: a lightweight little memoir from Gesine Bullock-Prado, who went from being the lawyer for her sister Sandra's production company in Hollywood to being a baker, shopkeeper and macaroon mail order guru in Montpelier. She's got an engaging enough style, and each chapter is, by tradition in cooking memoirs, bracketed by a recipe. It was frothy and fun, but I suspect would mean more to people who actually, ya'know, baked. Rachel enjoyed it as well.

88) The Selected Works of T.S. Spivit: Rief Larson's book about a 12 year old boy who compulsively maps making his way from Montana to Washington DC to accept a prize from the Smithsonian, the book has glorious marginialia that maps various aspects of Spivit's family life and journey. I got a little concerned when the book started following the standard 'novel' tropes (or hero has a metaphorical descent into the underworld rough 3/5ths of the way through, and gains knowledge that will make it hard for him to return to his old life), but it righted itself well enough in the end.

Several people in A&E have suggested that I write a game supplement on how to mirror serial fiction from other media in gaming. it's a topic that is near and dear to my heart, so I am seriously considering it. For examples from existing media I can readily draw on

Super-Hero Comic Books: Chris Clairmont's first few years on X-Men (for an example of a good extended arc, devolving into subplot kudzu); Paul Levitz's last few years on Legion of Super-Heroes (likely the best example of braided plot structures in the genre), and Grant Morrison's run on Justice League (to show the transition from the 12 issue annual story to the more recent 8 issue story better suited to trade paperbacks), plus a few others.

Television: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (for seasonal length stories with asides to the villains); X-Files (for an ongoing story with no asides); Star trek: The Next Generation (for episodic stories linked by repeating subplots [Borg; Lore; Worf's Family Honor])

Movies:  Star Wars (The original trilogy, which breaks down neatly into 12 sessions, counting the preludes for the main PCs)

Books: The 87th Precinct novels; Various Diskworld series (the watch books and the Lancre books).

Obviously I want more in the movie and book departments, but I don't know what to add. I want the examples to be well know, well done and still accessible to the reader. They should also lean to what people consider 'gameable' 

I suppose I could include the Harry Potter books, but I also wanted something currently ongoing that didn't have as strong an end point (likewise, no Amber). Are the Dresden Files worth reading in this regard? The Anita Blake books? I don't want to start something that everyone acknowledges turns to trash in book 3+. I'd consider the Vlad Taltos books, but the achronological order of them makes it harder to examine beat structures and character growth over time. 

As for the movies, I don't want things that were one successful movie followed by a couple of unprepared for sequels (such as the Indiana Jones films), and I obviously want to avoid things like the LotR adaptation. 

Any advice or suggestions of where I should apply my analytical skilz would be appreciated. 

85) Stone's Fall: The new Iain Pears novel this one is intended to be structrually similar to his very impressive an Instance of the Fingerpost, but while that one had overlapping views of the same event, each providing additional details to both deepen and clarify, Stone's Fall is chronological, with three accounts providing additional detail on a particular family working back through time. As such it isn't quite as satisfying, because the rules of the nartrative made it easier to determine the mysteries and the endgame then it was in Fingerpost. Still, it was very good, and the detail it gives on finance, the military industrail complex and espionage in the Victorian era is fascinating.

86) The Haunting of Hill House: Shirley Jackson's classic (well, one of them), I was reminded that this was a gap in my reading by some recent discussion in A&E. Creeeeeeepy.

Finally hit a week when I didn't finish a book.

We did move out of the old house, however, and signed all the paperwork to finish the sale assuming the buyer can get their act together to close the deal - it was supposed to happen Friday but now we're looking at Tuesday.  We're now in a short time apartment for 3 weeks. Nice enough, in a very big, very crowded complex in Tarrytown NY. I am looking forward to getting a new house, however, and just finishing this whole process. 

And for getting more gaming time, obviously. 

We should be selling our house on the 25th, then spending 3 weeks in a corporate apartment before taking possession of the new house on 10/13.

Life is change. The trick is workign through it.

 83) Evolution, the Triumph of an Idea: Car Zimmer's companion work to his PBS series, this was an interesting account of evolutionary theory and the resistance to it, though I felt it strayed afield in the end with discussion of computer programming leading to the evolution of an AI. The most interesting thing about it was how it highlighted the inherent Anti-Darwinian bias in the Call of Cthulhu Sanity mechanic, which I discuss a little in this month's A&E. 

84) Bring The Jubilee: Ward Moore's time travel classic, this had been on my shelf for decades before I finally pulled it down. It was very good, but somehow I had built the image of it being a very different book in my head - one that I was less enthused to read than the one n that actually existed. Maybe the one I was thinking of was written in a previous timeline....

79) Swamp Thing, volumes 6-11 (reread): Why yes, I am missing volume 5, with the first John Constantine story. I've read it before, but don't own it. This set of volumes covers through American Gothic and the Outer Space arc, and is very, very good stuff. Got me thinking about the prevlanace of space opera/SF sequences in ongoing comic books - almost everyone has their voyage into space arc, given a long enough run from single writer.

80) The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee: Pulled this off the shelf because Mylescorcoran and his group just ran a Judge Dee game. I'm wondering how the hell Chinese detective stories setting has not been made into a professional game system! The characters have a high degree of authroity and autonomy, the genere has reliable small groups (Jidge Dee is the judge, his sherrif/watson type, along with two martial artists and a con man for his deputies), and it's an interesting social setting. I will almost certainly pitch something on this soon.

81) The Ballad of Halo Jones: one of Alan Moore's unfinished works, this 2000 AD series with Ian Gibson is a fascinating, if depressing, analysis on the need to break out of decaying soceital niches. Moore fortunately completed enough to feel like the series has a resolution, but there's clear that there's more story for Halo.

82) The Complete DR and Quinch: I'm clearly on a Moore kick here, since his books just got shelved to the front. This violent, juvenile farce done with Alan Davis was one of my first exposures to his work, and it's quite a bit of mental whiplash between this and Halo Jones, which he was writing concurrently. Not quite as funny to me as it was 22 years ago, but still funny.

Vacation Week, got me some reading done

 73) Swamp Thing Volumes 1-4 (Reread): This just got reshelved in a more accessible location when we prepped the house for sale, so I started working my way through the Alan Moore work. This covers everything fromt he Anatomy Lesson through the Nukeface Papers, and remains a high water mark in the comics field, even if it is the unusual blend of horror and supers. The degree to which Moore foreshadows things, the clever symbolism and wordplay (which sometimes does verge on the "I'm so clever!" level) and the gradual discovery of the character's potential make this one of the must reads for my analysis of beat structures in serial fiction for replication in gaming. 

74) The Innocence of Father Brown: drcpunk was kind enough to pass along her Complete Father Brown a month or so back, and I finished the first book of it while in New Hampshire. I found the stories charming reads, but could only manage one or two at a sitting - like Asimov's Black Widower stories or the works of Damon Runyon, G.K. Chesterton's tales are wonderful taken individually but develop a staleness if read all at once. Still, I look forward to picking my way through the other 4 volumes. 

75) Adventure! (reread): This 2005 Anthology was an attempt to start up a regular "all genre, all action pump anthology for the new mellinium". I have no idea if it worked, because I only have volume 1. The qualtiy fo the stories, as in all anthologies, is a bit spotty. I'm frustrated with the editor's selection of 5 different stories where outside forces generate flashbacks in the hero to explain their backstory - surely som eother stories might have been submitted that didn't all rely on the same trick. Still, editor Chris Roberson's contribution of a young Von Helsing meeting an equally young Captain Nemo in the court of the White Raja on Sarawak was interesting enough to make me want to find more of his works. 

76) When the King Comes Home (reread): Caroline Stevermer's second book in the world of College of Magics is drastically different from the first and third, which is likely why it sank without a trace. (another reason might be the author's decision to stick with the viewpoint character while she's confined and other people are off doing the swashbucklery things that most people expect in fantasy) That's a pity, because it's a solid work. 

77) Lyoness volume 1 - Suldrun's Garden: I have had a long fascination with Vance's Lyonesse series that, until recently, never included cracking the cover on one of the books. Now that I have read the first I wonder why I stayed away so long. It is a lovely fairly tale with the dark bits included but lots of light touches and discoveries that you aren't quite in the type of tale you expected. I now have to track down the other two volumes. 

78) Not So Big Solutions for Your Home: I've long been a fan of Sarah Susanka's design aesthetic, so knowing that we were going to have to move to a new house I snatched this up at the Innisfree book store in NH. It's a collection of articles on ways to change the layout and functionality of your home to maximize the use and livability of the space you have, and I suspect it will see some use once we find a new place. 

72) Beowulf (reread): I listened to the audiobook of the Seamus Healey translation. This is my third translation of the text, and I like Healey's quite a bit. Mush as with reading Homer and Tacitus I spent time in the car thinking of how to translate the 'rules' of the story into a game setting. More things I haven't the time for, alas.

If anyone is interested in a lovely little place in northern CT, now's your chance!

http://ctmls.mlxchange.com/Pub/EmailView.asp?r=1024099117&s=HFD&t=HFD

 69) If I Ever Return Pretty Peggy-O: I was very favorably impressed by Sharon McCrumb's submission to Ed McBain's _Transgressions_ so I decided to give one of her actual books a go. Much like her novella, _Peggy-O_ is billed as a thriller but really isn't: it's a character study of small town appalachia. This book purported to be about a folk singer, freshly moved to a small town, being stalked by a killer. it's actually about the impact of the Veit Nam war on Appalachia's baby boomers. That doesn't make it a bad book, but it does suffer from some usual boomer angst and misconceptions, but at least the author acknwoeldges the inanity of some fo the ideas her characters are spouting. I'll likely read more of her, but I won't look to buy the next one. 

70) Cauldron: Quite likely the last of Jack McDevit's _Patricia Hutchens_ novels this one is fully of his usual big idea science fiction and depressingly realisitic view of human nature and politics. I really enjoyed it, and accepted the resolution of the Omega cloud myster that has been central to the stories. I still haven't read his _Talent for War_ books, but I should try them. 

71) Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones: New Girl Genius! Yea! They've started roping some of the older supporting cast back into the story, and the younger generation is beginning to coalesce into their new political model, so the book is an absolute joy on many levels. One thing that continues to amaze me is that the Foglio's have developed dozens of very interesting characters and manage to give each of them chances to shine in every book - no mean feat. 

 67) Rolemaster Arabian Nights: I am lucky enough to be friends with the author, who handed along a copy of this long lost gem upon hearing that I was working on an Arabian Nights game. it is head and shoulders better than the GURPS Arabian Nights sourcebook because it keeps the focus where it should be  - on the time of Haroul al-Rasheed and the setting of the Arabian Nights stories - while giving enough information on how things got to that point, what is going on elsewhere and what happens after for you to get a grounding on things. Even outside of the Arabain Nights genre this is one of the better sourcebooks I've read due to its relentless focus on gamable facts rather than pointless detail or just making up stuff for your famtasy world. The main sample adventure needs a little work in toning down the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" aspect of the plot, but otherwise I have no complaints. 

68) Bellweather: Connnie Willis' mid 90's confection of chaos theory and trend analysis, it's a pleasing little diversion. it's very reminiscent of her early _Blued Moon_ in style and strcuture, but that's not a bad thing. Plowed through it in a couple of hours, as it's really more of a puffed up novella than a novel, but it's hard to find bad Willis.