I’m still wondering what to do with the site. No decision made, so everything will remain uncertain.

For a while I had an idea to open a different, smaller blog site, in my native language, to write about the fantasy books I’m reading. But it went nowhere and sat there.

For now I’ll reopen this site, probably updated sporadically, and when updated only about those fantasy books. So a new theme.

In the last couple of months I almost completely replaced my attention to MMOs with the attention to good ole fantasy book (and there’s a network of blogs comparable to MMOs). I tend to be obsessive with my passions. I quit reading fantasy for almost ten years. Now I’m back and in the meantime so many good things came out. I’m going to ate em all. CHOMP.

On F13 there was a pertinent discussion:

Johny Cee: I think a big issue, in the last 10 or 15 years, is the huge amount of chaff to wade through in fantasy publishing. The scifi chaff (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) has mostly died down. TSR/Wizards of the Coast continues to produce huge amounts of marginal quality work that floods the market, not to mention the look-alike books churned out for the same demographic and the former TSR authors who now churn out medoicre non-branded stuff (Salvatore, the Elminster douchebag).

There are shittons of great quality fantasy. It’s just marketed like shit, packaged like shit, and promoted like shit.

HRose: That’s why we have the internet ;)

I stopped reading fantasy for that reason. I couldn’t read through 500 books to find 5 great ones. That’s a problem with books in general because it’s hard to have a decent idea of what you are going to find.

The internet is the reason why I’m now back into fantasy. In about a month I gathered a wish list of quality stuff. I know what to expect and I’m sure that I’ll enjoy it. I can adjust my expectations quite well.

It works. There was a time when I read fantasy along with two other friends. Our entire knowledge was what we aggregated from our experiences, and the books we read were just those we saw in the library and picked randomly (because of a cover, or the name of a series, or the synopsis).

Today you don’t have to read *everything* if you want to find something worthy. The internet is incredibly useful when you need to prune an infinite list of books. Pick the best. There’s not enough time in the world to wade through crap and figure out by yourself it’s crap. While official reviewers aren’t trustable (same way of game reviews) there’s a big network of specialized blogs and forums where there are people who read just everything, for you, and help you avoid that crap and handpick the gems.

I gathered enough knowledge during this month that I can now talk pertinently and competently about some books without having read one line of them. (and I’ll demonstrate this shortly)