What are you reading right now (II)?

catsbane said:

Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy by Ian W. Toll. Highly recommended to anyone interested in Naval history or early US history.
Wondering if anyone has visited the Constitution in Boston or for that matter, the HMS Victory?

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Bodhisattva said:

The Maltese Iguana by Tim Dorsey

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OakMtn4Bama said:

IIRC Tim played football at Auburn. He has done well with his writing. Entertaining stuff.

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Bodhisattva said:

Tim Dorsey and Carl Hiaasen are my two favorite comedy authors. Dorsey's Serge and Coleman characters are the most entertaining of odd couples. I've read all 26 if the books in the series and always look forward to the next one. Very entertaining.

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Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs

This is a book I've looked forward to reading for a while. I was a D&D fan during middle school and a little bit into high school in the mid- to late-80s. I didn't play near as much as I wanted to. Very time consuming game, but lots of fun. Free range imagination! It had been ages since I even thought much about the game, but in the recent move to Florida, I had to go through boxes of stuff that have been sealed up for a long time. I recently found the box with all my D&D books, supplies, and notes and campaigns I wrote for my friends to play. A nice bit a nostalgia from a much more innocent time.

Co-created by wargame enthusiasts Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the original Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game released by TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) in 1974 created a radical new medium: the role-playing game. For the next two decades, TSR rocketed to success, producing multiple editions of D&D, numerous settings for the game, magazines, video games, New York Times bestselling novels by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, and R. A. Salvatore, and even a TV show! But by 1997, a series of ruinous choices and failed projects brought TSR to the edge of doom―only to be saved by their fiercest competitor, Wizards of the Coast, the company behind the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering.

Unearthed from Ben Riggs’s own adventurous campaign of in-depth research, interviews with major players, and acquisitions of secret documents, Slaying the Dragon reveals the true story of the rise and fall of TSR. Go behind the scenes of their Lake Geneva headquarters where innovative artists and writers redefined the sword and sorcery genre, managers and executives sabotaged their own success by alienating their top talent, ignoring their customer fanbase, accruing a mountain of debt, and agreeing to deals which, by the end, made them into a publishing company unable to publish so much as a postcard.

As epic and fantastic as the adventures TSR published, Slaying the Dragon is the legendary tale of the rise and fall of the company that created the role-playing game world.

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