Christopher Rush

Hello, friends.  Welcome to Volume 5!  Pretty exciting stuff.  As indicated the last time we were together, a good deal of the past summer was spent board-gaming and not much of it was spent reading.  Caverna, Le Havre, Lords of Waterdeep, Bohnanza, Mage Wars, Keyflower, Nations: The Dice Game, Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, Chinatown, and probably a few others were played for the first time and several more times after that.  In this sense, it was a good summer.  I even got to take a day to play a four-person game of Through the Ages, currently my favorite board game.  Part of the fun of that day was listening to some ’70s-era Beach Boys albums  all the while, which was part of the inspiration for a forthcoming article this season.

Even so, I did manage to squeeze in some time for a few books here and there — almost none of them on my proposed reading list or the books I started years ago and really need to get back to someday.  Since a lot of you are, understandably and correctly, eager to know my reactions to every book I read, I added a few books I read before the summer began, just for giggles.

• Six Nero Wolfe Offerings, Rex Stout
• Three Children’s Fantasy “Classics,” Barrie and Baum
• Eight Fantasy Works on Four Different Worlds, Jordan, Pratchett, and More
• Three Books Purporting to be Christian Scholarship, Noll, Shannon/Blum, and Piper
• Two Books that Have Nothing In Common, Safire and Fleming

There you have it — a good deal of my summer reading (with a bit of springtime reading sprinkled in for fun).  I read a few Star Wars books I will include next issue, and I finally got the gumption up to read the Chronicles of Prydain again for the first time in donkey’s years, and they have held up unsurprisingly well.  I will also include my reviews for them next issue.  They certainly deserve more than just terse book reviews, possibly a series of papers, but we’ll see how the time goes in the months ahead.  You never know what the kids are going to write about, or what analytical mood will strike me in the close of 2015.

Certainly some more intentional discussion should be given to many of the fine games we have been playing this year, especially the games mentioned at the outset of this collection of reviews.  I did play some wargames with Dad over the summer, don’t get me wrong: we worked through the Battles of the Ardennes quadrigame, and we had a nice time dabbling with the Crimean War during their visit in late July.  Recently we have reenacted the battle of Raphia as well.  Naturally, I lost most of those games, but a decent amount of good times were had all in all.  I don’t mean to give you the impression I’m losing the fire for historical conflict simulations — that’s not the case, indeed, but boardgames have come along way since Milton Bradley’s heyday (where, apparently, most of the population of Summit Christian Academy still resides), so it’s time you were made aware of the delights out there.

Anyway, that’s all another story.  Enjoy those pumpkin-spice flavored everythings for a few more weeks, friends.  Christmas bells are on the horizon!  Until then!