Category Archives: Article

Monthly Highlights – May 2018

Another month gone by, another month’s worth of reviews to look back on and pick a few highlights to round up. I’ve slightly slowed down in terms of writing and posting reviews on here, but there’s still been plenty of great stories to choose from. In fact, so many of the stories I read in May were genuinely excellent that it was quite a tough decision to pick just one as an overall highlight…but I managed, just about! I’ve also picked out a couple more choices that deserve a mention, as usual, and as with last month all three are from Black Library. It’s perhaps no surprise that two of them are Age of Sigmar stories, as I’ve been making a concerted effort to catch up on stories set in the Mortal Realms.

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Black Library: Where to Start for Younger Readers

I originally wrote this article in 2018, in light of all the discussions regarding the just-announced Warhammer Adventures series of Warhammer books for 8 to 12 year olds, as I had been thinking about where I would suggest younger readers start in terms of the main Black Library range. There had never previously been Warhammer stories published specifically for youngsters (or at least not as far as I’m aware) so the question was whether there’s anything out there in the BL range which would provide a suitable place to start.

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Warhammer Adventures – What’s All the Fuss About?

In a move which seems to be causing quite a stir online, the Warhammer Community site has announced the release of a brand new range of books set in the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar universes and aimed at readers aged 8 to 12 – Warhammer Adventures. They’re not going to be released until 2019, and specifics are still thin on the ground, be we do know various bits of information.

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Monthly Highlights – April 2018

April has come and gone in a flash, so it’s time to look back at another month’s worth of novel, short story and audio drama reviews to pull together my Monthly Highlights. It’s been another excellent month in terms of the standard of stories I’ve been reading and reviewing, but one particular author – and one story especially – stands out as an absolute highlight. As usual I’ve also picked a couple of honourable mentions from among everything else I’ve read, and this month all three of my choices are Black Library stories. With that in mind, let’s crack straight on.

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Black Library Cover Reveals – April 2018

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, right? We all know this – it’s one of those sayings that’s just so obvious that it’s wheeled out in all sorts of situations, whether actual books are involved or not. And yet…we all do it, to at least a certain extent. There’s a reason why publishers invest time and money into commissioning cover artwork, and it’s simple – a really, genuinely great cover will help a book sell. Simple as that. The question of what makes a great cover is an entirely different thing, of course – there’s no secret recipe for success, and a cover which is hugely enticing to one reader might be a massive turn off for another.

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League of Legends Progress – April 2018

It’s been a little over a month since I published my post entitled Something New (for me) – League of Legends, in which I set out to start exploring the fiction that exists around Riot Games’ MEGA popular online game. Have a read of that post if you want to catch up on what I talked about, but essentially the plan was to start reading and reviewing short stories that are available to read for free on the League of Legends Universe website. A month (ish) later, I thought it might be interesting to take stock of what the experience has been like so far.

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Monthly Highlights – March 2018

April is upon us, and we’re more than a quarter of the way through 2018 already! Once again I’m taking a look back through the last month’s worth of books, short stories and audio dramas to pull together my highlights for March; choosing a favourite story out of the eighteen that I reviewed in March was tricky, but I’ve just about managed it. As with the last couple of Monthly Highlights posts I’ve chosen a single story as the main highlight, plus a couple more for notable mentions.

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Eisenhorn, Ravenor and Bequin

This article was originally published in 2018, and since then I’ve written an updated, more comprehensive guide to Dan Abnett’s Inquisition Cycle, which I would recommend you check out instead.

Dan Abnett’s trilogy of Inquisition trilogies – the Eisenhorn, Ravenor and Bequin books – are among the best that Black Library have ever published. With the release of The Magos & The Definitive Casebook of Gregor Eisenhorn – the fourth book in the Eisenhorn trilogy (I’m not calling it a quadrilogy…that just sounds daft) – and increased positivity from Abnett regarding getting the second and third Bequin novels written, I thought it was about time I started to slowly tackle the whole set of stories. The idea of this post is that it will list the recommended reading order for all of these stories, with links out to my reviews as and when they’re posted.

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Warhammer 40,000 Legends Issue Fourteen – Helsreach by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Issue fourteen of the Warhammer 40,000 Legends Collection is Helsreach by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, the second Space Marine Battles novel to be included in this series. This one came fairly early in Dembski-Bowden’s career, and indeed early in the Space Marine Battles series (second, I think, after Rynn’s World), but it’s still largely considered something of a 40k classic. Set on the war-torn world of Armageddon – which, if you’ve read The Beast Arises, now has a little more resonance – it tackles the Black Templars’ defence of Hive Helsreach, headed up by Reclusiarch Grimaldus.

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Something New (for me) – League of Legends

When I started Track of Words I wrote reviews of pretty much everything I read, and blogged about all sort of reading-related topics. Over time I’ve increasingly streamlined what I talk about on Track of Words, and these days there’s no question that I focus predominantly upon Black Library – that’s no surprise, seeing as I’ve been reading Warhammer fiction for well over twenty years! That being said, I’m keen to keep at least a little bit of variety on Track of Words, for my own enjoyment if nothing else. Enter something new (for me) – League of Legends.

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