Books Read 2025: January–February

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This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Books Read 2025

Well, with a new year comes a new books-read series. This series will include all the books I read in 2025. It’s been a busy couple of months, between teaching a winter class and my wife and I finishing up a big translation project, but I got some solid reading done too.  Here’s what I read in January and February of this year: Rimbaud Complete is what it says on the tin: the complete verse and prose poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Wyatt Mason. My first encounter with Rimbaud was the poem “Roman” (“Novel”) which was handed to me during a …

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Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 1: Overview

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This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series Revisiting Wraith the Oblivion

In 2017, I undertook the project of reading and reviewing all of my Wraith: The Oblivion RPG books. I dutifully read everything I had on hand and wrote up a series of blog posts about the books… and then, for some reason, I never posted them.  Stumbling onto those posts now, I am baffled that I did so much work but never published it, and figured I might as well go ahead and do it. That’s what this series is about. If you think the last thing the world needs is a discussion of the books released as part of …

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Series: Paranoia XP Reviews, Book-by-Book

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This entry is part 1 of 21 in the series Reading Paranoia XP

A while back, I became fascinated with the classic RPG Paranoia. I’d seen advertisements for it in Dragon as a kid, and been curious, but of course it’d never been easily available where I lived as a kid. Well, in 2017, I ended up picking up everything in the “XP” line while it was still available—barely—through various online sellers. (The core book had gone way up in price, and a few supplements were so rare it took me a while to track down copies. Indeed, I was only able to get the Little Red Book by trading a module with …

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WIP: Unnamed Verses IV

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One more update on my WIP—another accountability post. I’m proud to say I maintained my pace of drafting one poem a day, and have what I think might be a complete draft. I’m not 100% sure it’s complete: there might still be room for a few more little singlet poems in there among the several linked-long-poems.  I have some revising and editing to do, of course, but right now I’m just happy at having finally competed a creative writing project of this scope. In the end, it took 70 individual poems to explore what I wanted to. Some are narrative, …

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WIP: Unnamed Verses III

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This is another update on my WIP, mostly intended as an accountability post. I’ve kept up my work on the project, and have hit 58 poems. I thought I would be finished in a couple of weeks, but one of the poems I thought would be shorter ended up being a very formal experiment in internal rhymes, which is very tricky, and also ended up unexpectedly expanding into a long poem with multiple parts: of my 58 pieces, six are sections of this newly-extended poem.  So… if I keep up my current pace, I probably have ten days more of …

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