Been a while since I've posted here, but I've been lurking and nabbing enough books from this site these past few years or so that I feel a need to post a recommendation (Despite the fact that there are two (largely) positive reviews of Paradise Logic, a book so miserable that it makes me want to nuke New York more so than I usually do). Also, there's been a lot of booze. Anyway, the Reluctant King trilogy is some Pulp Classic. A novel split into three novellas for the sake of Pulp Economics, but easily downloaded from wherever one generally downloads, it goes down the usual L. Sprague de Camp road of a hero being some dickhead who's second-best at a lot of things and only phenomenal at deceit. From escaping a city-state that demands the head of their kings at the end of their service to weirdly in-depth constructions of ancient clocks (the author did write a book on ancient engineers (called Ancient Engineers, fittingly enough - it's okay!), to finally finding his chubby wife again, dude overcomes bullshit (largely his own) and, unlike your usual Pulp Hero, learns that what he needs to do is ignore all these wizardly and heroic dipshits and spend more time with his family, building clocks. Honing the family craft. There's a lot of light hearted, fun stuff in here (lamias! flying cauldrons! demons that work like computer code and are thus very annoying to work with!) that de Camp couldn't reasonably fit into his historical fiction, and damn if it ain't a good time. If you're looking for something to read in-between bigger things, I honestly can't recommend this more. The best kind of stupid fun.
