Updates: Formatting and Active Reading comments

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Brief Snapshot of Current Reading...

Meditations on Middle Earth

I'm quite enjoying Meditations on Middle Earth - it is interesting to read what a wide variety of fantasy and sci-fi authors we've all read have to say about Tolkien's influence in their submitted essays (this is an anthology of those essays). I'm working through Poul Anderson's comments after reading Raymond E. Feist's.

I learned that Feist's fantasy world was actually the D&D world that he and his college friends played in, transformed into the home for his novels and inspired by Fritz Lieber in some significant senses. Fiest calls Tolkien not the Father but the Grandfather of modern Sci-fi and Fantasy, spawning a generation of other great authors in the interim.

Each author mentions his own influences and the sort of historical context Tolkien existed in. In discussing this, the authors name a very large group of older sci-fi, fantasy and horror authors whose works I am unfamiliar with. I'm compiling a list to include here and to link to their works (those I can find in some available format). I always enjoy reading the works of the earlier pioneers and of those that authors I like have found influential and informative in their own development.

Nelson's Battles

Nelson's Battles is proving a good read, but my aging eyes are having trouble with the text. The base font size is not terribly large, I believe is a serif font, and any embedded block quotes are in an even smaller font size. All this is doing is slowing me down slightly, certainly the text is absorbing, being written in a somewhat archaic style and quoting from even more archaic sources such as Nelson's own writings.

I've just read about the Battle of the Nile. Interesting in its historical context, with Napoleon on his Egyptian adventure.

I also read in this book about Nelson's loss of an eye and his loss of his arm. Interestingly, and contrary to what I always uknowingly believed, both of these injuries were sustained ashore leading landing parties of Marines or British Regulars.

The eye was damaged when his shore battery came under artillery fire and the artillery chipped loose stone fragments from the battlement his unit was using for cover, one of which damaged his eye and cost him the sight in it. The arm was lost to a musket ball in a most inauspicious landing attempt while trying to take a rumoured treasure ship. His son applied a tourniquet and got him back aboard his ship to the surgeon or else he likely would have died.

I look forward to finishing this, although progress is a bit slow due to the reading challenges.