I’m somewhat familiar with the Gumshoe RPG system: I’ve played a short campaign of Trail of Cthulhu, and skimmed several core rulebooks using the system—Trail of Cthulhu, Nights Black Agents, Ashen Stars, and Cthulhu Confidential, all of which I own copies—but I haven’t had a chance to read any of those rulebooks in full or run a Gumshoe system game. In fact, until recently the only Gumshoe gamebook I’d actually read in full was Gareth Ryder Hanrahan’s Lorefinder book, which essentially is an extended Gumshoe hack designed to be bolted onto Pathfinder (and other D&D-styled traditional RPGs), in order to …
Month: December 2018
Recent Books (Icelandic Edition)
So this is going to be short: it’s just three books. The first is Powers of Darkness, which, yes, is that “Icelandic Dracula” translation that was in the media last year—and yeah, it’s very different from our Dracula—and the others are old Penguin editions of a Icelandic texts titled Eyrbyggja Saga, and an Icelandic murder-mystery titled Snowblind: A Thriller by Ragnar Jónasson (translated by Quentin Bates). The Icelandic Dracula and the murder mystery are from the library, while the two sagas are books I’ve had on the shelf for literally decades and never read, but finally decided to check out.
The Middle Passage
A word of warning: though this post is titled “The Middle Passage,” it’s not about African slave transportation routes. It’s titled after the book it discusses, which is a psychologist’s account of midlife crisis. Just in case someone thought it would be something else. When the Incomparable Mrs. Jiwaku talked about James Hollis’ The Middle Passage—she’d been reading a Korean translation of the book—she was quite passionate about it, but I found myself skeptical: a self-help book about the midlife crisis, by a Jungian psychologist? Three sets of alarm sirens went off in my head, which you can guess from …