THE STEEL REMAINS by Richard K. Morgan review

This Richard K. Morgan book is the opening volley of a trilogy. In it we are introduced to Ringil the Eskiath warrior; with some unseemly personal habits. But boy can he swing a sword. Ravensfriend, Ringil's sword, is of fine Kiriath steel, of which there are scant remains. He is the hero of Gallows Gap and the much vaunted blade slinger of his village. He is sent away on a mission by his mother, to rescue his cousin. This novel is the recounting of his mishaps along the way. The novel also tracks two other characters: Egar the Dragonbane, is one of Ringil's former comrades in arms and a leader of his clan. He has made one too many enemies, his brothers, and finds it best to leave when magical forces rescue him, by killing his brothers. The third member of Ringil's troika is Archeth, a female Kiriath half-breed. All are united in the end for a fending off of the dreaded Dwenda, a humanoid alien race of dimension jumping, half-crazed, would-be world conquerors.

This book is best during the action sequences, of which there are many. Morgan's forte is in recounting the violent exploits of his more misogynous characters such as Ringil, and Takeshi Kovacs. I found some of the early sequences so unfamiliar that I could not easily track the story. And it took me about half of the book to latch onto the plot. But once it got going it was quite good. It is difficult to judge this novel since it is clearly just the introduction to a broader story. My opinion of it will either be elevated by the sequels or lowered by them. I could recommend it to you if you like Sword-and-Sorcery books like Conan. But if you are looking for Tolkien, beware. This book is rated NC-17. So, as it stands after reading only the first, THE STEEL REMAINS gets an OPTCS rating of 65567.

Word Counts

Since we are currently reading a very weighty tome, I decided it was time to calculate just how long this book, THE GLORY AND THE DREAM, really is. I will also calculate some other books for comparison.

The Method:
[Number of Pages] x [Lines per page] x [Words per line] = Total words.

The number of pages does not include the index, but does include all appendixes.
Words per page are calculated by
(1) Counting the number of lines per page.
(2) Finding the average number of words per line by counting at least 100 words and dividing that number by the number of lines containing those 100+ words.
(3) The calculated number should be considered a maximum (+ zero, - 5%). It does not try to account for illustrations, chapter breaks. I do try to choose a representative page when I count the 100 words. For example, Gene Wolfe utilizes a lot of dialog in his fiction. And since many of the conversations contain short sentences I try to include them in the count so as not to overestimate too greatly. This also means, that for books containing a lot of prose, like a Manchester or Churchill, I will look for a page that is typical for that type of work.

The results indicate that not only is THE GLORY AND THE DREAM the longest (mundane) book we have read, it is the longest book we currently plan to read. Note that the King James Bible is the longest book I have ever read. An interesting thought is that we will be reading a THE GLORY AND THE DREAM in 3-5 months. Could we read the Bible that quickly?



Kings James Bible - 788280 words. See King James Bible Statistics.

Manchester - Glory and the Dream - 1302 pages / 744449 words

Tolkein - Lord of the Rings - 1191 / 652965

Calvin - Institutes - 1521 / 648084

Wolfe - Book of the Long Sun - 1450 / 581318

Rothbard - Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought - 1039 / 523656

Wolfe - Book of the New Sun - 950 / 503737

Churchill - Memoirs of the Second World War - 1016 / 489021

Rothbard - Man Economy and State - 1369 / 479150

Shirrer - Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - 1147 / 461719

Durant - Reformation - 940 / 451826

Manchester - Last Lion - 883 / 436005

Manchester - Arms of Krupp - 833 / 427606

von Mises - Human Action - 881 / 419355

Brown - In the Beginning - 432 / 404509

Tooze - Wages of Destruction - 676 / 268912

Black - IBM and the Holocaust - 454 / 198700

Wolfe - An Evil Guest - 301 / 127444

Is there a one million word book out there? We should read it.

Update 04/24/09
I did a little research. Apparantly there is a 17 million word novel listed on Wikipedia.
Many of these books listed are series. I have only included books that I consider to be one book or novel, even though some are spread over more than one volume; such a LOTR and TBNS.

Here is one man's list of some very long books. The quest is on for the mangest tome on the planet.

Austrian Curricula Approved

We have officially altered the HMTP to include several Austrian Economics books.