YouKneeK’s 2020 SF&F Overdose Part 3

Welcome to part 3 of my 2020 thread! :) Here’s my usual introductory info:

• I read mostly science fiction and fantasy, with a heavier emphasis on fantasy.
  
• I tend to read slightly older books versus the newest releases.
  
• I hate spoilers. Any spoilers in my reviews should be safely hidden behind spoiler tags.
  
• I prefer to read a series after it’s complete, and I read all the books pretty close together.
  
• I’m 44, female, and live in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA in the U.S where I work as a programmer.
  
• My cat’s name is Ernest and he’s a freak.

2020 Reading Index

Clicking on the Date Read will take you to the post containing the review.

   Date Read/
 # Review Link	Title				Author(s)		
 1 2020-01-06	This Alien Shore		C. S. Friedman
 2 2020-01-11	Honored Enemy			Raymond E. Feist and 
						William R. Forstchen
 3 2020-01-15	Murder in LaMut			Raymond E. Feist and 
						Joel Rosenberg
 4 2020-01-19	Jimmy the Hand			Raymond E. Feist and 
						S. M. Stirling
 5 2020-01-25	Jane Eyre			Charlotte Brontë
 6 2020-01-31	Talon of the Silver Hawk	Raymond E. Feist
 7 2020-02-02	King of Foxes			Raymond E. Feist
 8 2020-02-07	Exile's Return			Raymond E. Feist
 9 2020-02-09	Ubik				Philip K. Dick
10 2020-02-15	Flight of the Nighthawks	Raymond E. Feist
11 2020-02-18	Into a Dark Realm		Raymond E. Feist
12 2020-02-23	Wrath of a Mad God		Raymond E. Feist
13 2020-02-25	Memory of Water			Emmi Itäranta
14 2020-03-03	Rides a Dread Legion		Raymond E. Feist
15 2020-03-06	At the Gates of Darkness	Raymond E. Feist
16 2020-03-13	The Diamond Age			Neal Stephenson
17 2020-03-16	A Kingdom Besieged		Raymond E. Feist
18 2020-03-21	A Crown Imperiled		Raymond E. Feist
19 2020-03-29	Magician's End			Raymond E. Feist
20 2020-04-03	Starship Troopers		Robert A. Heinlein
21 2020-04-04	Bunnicula			Deborah Howe and 
						James Howe
22 2020-04-05	Catseye				Andre Norton
23 2020-04-07	The Great Gatsby		F. Scott Fitzgerald
24 2020-04-08	The Comedy of Errors		William Shakespeare
25 2020-04-14	The Bone Witch			Rin Chupeco
26 2020-04-18	Sphere				Michael Crichton
27 2020-04-25	The Snow Queen			Joan D. Vinge
28 2020-04-27	World's End			Joan D. Vinge
29 2020-05-16	The Summer Queen		Joan D. Vinge
30 2020-05-22	Song of the Beast		Carol Berg
31 2020-05-25	Parable of the Sower		Octavia E. Butler
32 2020-05-30	Parable of the Talents		Octavia E. Butler
33 2020-06-03	The Ghost Bride			Yangsze Choo
34 2020-06-17	The Black Prism			Brent Weeks
35 2020-06-23	The Blinding Knife		Brent Weeks
36 2020-06-29	The Broken Eye			Brent Weeks
37 2020-07-05	The Blood Mirror		Brent Weeks
38 2020-07-05	Gunner's Apprentice		Brent Weeks
39 2020-07-17	The Burning White		Brent Weeks
40 2020-07-19	The Memory Police		Yōko Ogawa
41 2020-07-25	The Bear and the Nightingale	Katherine Arden
42 2020-08-07	The Girl in the Tower		Katherine Arden
43 2020-08-11	The Winter of the Witch		Katherine Arden
44 2020-08-15	Dreamsnake			Vonda N. McIntyre
45 2020-08-23	Shadowshaper			Daniel José Older

Review: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler



Parable of the Sower is one of those books that’s kind of a mix of dystopian/apocalyptic themes. I’d say it’s more apocalyptic in feel than dystopian because the government doesn’t play much of a direct role in the story aside from its neglect and its failure to protect its people. Climate change has increased the scarcity of resources, particularly of water. Society hasn’t completely broken down yet, but it’s definitely on the verge with desperate people and drug addicts roaming the streets and taking what they need or want from other people. It’s extremely difficult to find work, and in some places large corporations are essentially bringing back slavery. The story is set in California, told in the epistolary form, written by a teenage girl who’s 15 when the book begins.

I had a lot of mixed feelings about the book, but in general it held my attention well and was a fast read. The first half had a few slow spots, but not many, and it really picked up after Lauren’s community was destroyed and she had to leave. I sometimes get a bit bored with survival stories, and this had many aspects of that, yet I wasn't bored with this one. I was interested in the characters and where the story would go.

I did have some issues with it though. There were a few things that didn’t ring true for me and I was uncomfortable with the main character creating her own religion. I’m going to put more comments on that in spoiler tags so I can type freely without worrying about revealing too much.

I felt like water should have been scarcer than it appeared to be, especially with the talk near the end of surviving by farming and some talk of various fertile areas they saw. Where would the water come from to support crops? Near the beginning of the book, when it rains for a few days, Lauren tells us this is the first time it’s rained more than few drops in 6 years. I don’t think she had walked far enough for the area she settled in to have a significantly different climate than the area she had left. Maybe other areas were getting more rain, but aside from the talk of water vendors who seemed to be selling water of questionable quality on a smaller scale, I don't remember any discussion of water being transported on a large scale from places with a better supply nor any reason to believe that other areas had enough of a surplus to share.

And the Earthseed religion thing… I think I would have liked the story a lot better if that had been left out altogether. I could more or less buy into the idea that a creative teenage girl who grew up as the daughter of a preacher might, after becoming dissatisfied with the answers provided by her father’s religion, choose to come up with a religion of her own, based on what she had experienced in her life. However, Lauren essentially deifies the concept of “change”. I get that she had more foresight than most others in her community about anticipating imminent changes, but had she really experienced that much change in her life so far for it to have become such an all-consuming concept for her? It seemed like her community had been pretty stable for most of her life, with things steadily going downhill so slowly that most of the community was in denial that things could or would change for the worse.

Another issue I had with the Earthseed religion was the way Lauren seemed to think it should become a new way of life, and her desire to build a community based on it. Based on what, exactly? Her religious phrases were mostly just common sense things about dealing with change, so it didn’t strike me as anything that somebody would find profound or life changing or even really a model for day-to-day life.

More than anything else, I wondered what the author was trying to convey by including it in her story. Was she trying to deal with the concept of change herself (which I would find entirely understandable coming from an author who would have been in her mid-40’s at the time) and/or pass on some of her own beliefs about change? Or was she trying to suggest something more subtle that went over my head? One thought I considered based on the reactions of some of the other characters was that the author was putting up for debate the idea that the average person needs a belief system to follow in order to be guided toward making good decisions – would having a religion based on change help people deal with change and prepare for change better than they would otherwise? I’m kind of curious to see where she takes this whole thing in the next book, although I’d be just as happy if it would fizzle out of the story.

So I liked this, it engaged my brain somewhat and held my interest very well, and I intend to continue on and read the sequel. It’s not my favorite book by the author, though. This is the 6th book of hers that I’ve read and my favorites have been her Xenogenesis trilogy.

Next Book
Parable of the Talents, the sequel to the book I just read.

Oh, a new thread! Happy new thread!

>3 YouKneeK: Quote from spoiler section Her religious phrases were mostly just common sense things about dealing with change, so it didn’t strike me as anything that somebody would find profound or life changing or even really a model for day-to-day life.
Such a religion (generalities, not specifics) would suit me more than most. And sad that it doesn't seem realistic. It's been a long time since I read this, but some memories remain.

>4 quondame: Thanks!

I think there were a lot of realistic aspects to the story, but the things I have trouble buying into tend to be the things I write the most about. :) Regarding the religion, I felt like her theories would have been more useful and more influential in a non-religious format, phrased as common-sense suggestions about dealing with and shaping change. By making a religion out of it, she would 1) turn off anybody who already had a religion they believed strongly in, particularly monotheistic religions, and 2) turn off people who avoid religion altogether. It would have a stronger effect on those she did manage to convert I guess, since they would take her teachings to heart and follow them more diligently, in theory anyway, but it seems like those people would be very much in the minority. That's how I would expect it to play out in real life, anyway; I don’t yet know where things will go in this fictional story!

Happy new thread.

>6 PaulCranswick: Thank you.

Review: Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler



Parable of the Talents is the second and final book in Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed duology. I have learned this was initially intended to be a longer series. Each of the two published books end with relatively satisfying conclusions though, providing a sense of both closure and of more possibilities ahead. It didn’t feel unfinished, although I do think I would have enjoyed the direction further books would have taken.

I don’t think I can say what this book is about without spoiling the first one, so I’m going to put that in spoiler tags. I tried not to go into enough detail to spoil this book. The group that decided to settle on Bankole’s land at the end of the previous book makes a home for themselves there and their group continues to grow. Meanwhile, a growing religious faction that refers to itself as “Christian America” takes extreme measures against people who don’t share their beliefs, ranging from petty criminals to annoying homeless people, and most especially cults. Of course, as we saw in the previous book, Lauren is starting a fledgling cult of her own, so you can imagine where the story might go from there.

I liked the first book better than this one, mainly because the story went in a direction I found less interesting. I think Butler was a great writer. Her writing consistently draws me into her stories quickly, holds my attention, and has depth and usually gives me things to think about. She has a way of writing challenging sorts of characters who I care about but whose choices I don’t always agree with. The main problem I had with the story was that it continues in a big way with one of the themes I particularly didn’t care for in the first book. So it’s more clear now where the author was going with that, but it led to a lot of content that I tend not to enjoy very much in stories in general and which I occasionally got tired of in this book. Despite that, there were still several aspects of the story I found more interesting and my desire to find out what would happen to the characters helped hold my interest.

I’m rating this at 3.5 stars but rounding down to 3 on Goodreads.

Next Book
The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo. This was the June fantasy pick in the group I’m a member of over on GR. Since it’s a standalone work, I decided to fit it in to read with the group. I don’t know anything about it, but the “Bride” leads me to fear it might be too romancey for my tastes while the “Ghost” makes me curious.

>8 YouKneeK: I felt the same way. I just did not enjoy it as much as the first one. I found my two sentence review from my 2014 thread, and it seems I found it more depressing than Sower.

>9 clamairy: I found both books very bleak, but I think I agree with you that the second one was more depressing than the first. I looked up the review on your thread and I also agree with you that the author was brilliant.

>8 YouKneeK:, >9 clamairy: Uh oh. I have never read anything by Octavia Butler and was intending to rectify the omission;. but I am really not up for anything depressing at the moment.

Is it only these particular books, or should I hold off from this author for a while?

>11 -pilgrim-: Octavia Butler is in my personal top 5 authors. The Parable books are, IMO, Butler at her most bleak, brutal, and depressing. She explored human power dynamics in nearly all her writing but these 2 books are very grim in places.

Kindred was my personal favorite but the Xenogenesis trilogy, (a.k.a., Lilith's Brood), was the first of her works that I read. I think that trilogy is a great place to start.

>11 -pilgrim-: Of the 7 books I’ve read by Octavia Butler, I have thought all of them were pretty bleak. Slavery/freedom has shown up as a theme in all her works that I've read, and she usually paints a pretty bleak picture of humanity in general. I think these Earthseed books come across as more depressing because of their real-world dystopian/apocalyptic nature, which ties a little more obviously to our real world and one possible unpleasant path that humanity could take. Her Xenogenesis trilogy starts off as more of an alien invasion type story set in the distant future, so it’s easier to distance oneself from some of the parallels.

Like >12 ScoLgo:, my first experience with Octavia Butler was her Xenogenesis trilogy. I was really impressed by it and it’s still my favorite, although I did like Kindred a lot too. I’m not sure I’d use the word depressing in relation to those books, but they’re definitely on the dark and bleak side, so I would recommend waiting if you’re trying to stick with lighter books right now.

>12 ScoLgo:, >13 YouKneeK: Thank you both for the explanations. As a lover of Russian fiction, I am often enjoying the "bleak but brilliant". But at the moment, feeling without hope myself, I am not looking for a read that will affirm such an outlook.

Your remarks have not at all discouraged my intention to read her - just not now.

>14 -pilgrim-: I’ll be interested to read what you think once you’re in a better position to give her work a try. I think it makes sense to put her off until you’re more likely to be able to appreciate her better.

Review: The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo



The Ghost Bride was pretty different from anything I’ve read lately. I can’t remember the last time I read any sort of ghost story. There were things I both liked and disliked about it, but the fun of reading a ghost story pushed it more to the “like” side.

The main character is a seventeen-year-old girl named Li Lan, and the book starts off with her father asking her half-jokingly if she wants to be a ghost bride – to marry a boy who recently died. A ghost marriage is a real Chinese tradition, and this is sort of based on that. Li Lan of course has dreams of falling in love and having a real marriage and has no interest in this proposal. However, the “ghost” aspect of the proposed ghost marriage is a bit more literal than anybody realizes at first and the dead boy in question is more willful than the average dead person. It may not be as simple as saying no.

One aspect of this story that I really liked was the Chinese mythology, particularly surrounding the afterlife. I learned a lot of things I didn’t know, such as the idea of burning things for the dead so they could have those things in the afterlife. There’s a brief but somewhat interesting section at the end of the book, at least in my edition, where the author talks a little bit more about what parts of the story were based on real mythology and what parts were artistic license.

I wasn’t crazy for the main character, though. She was too wimpy and weepy for me. She often neglected to take or delayed taking what seemed like obvious steps and her successes seemed to rely over-much on luck and on ending up in the right place at the right time. I know much of her behavior was probably realistic based on the sheltered life she had led, and I think the author tries to give us the sense that Li Lan is stepping out of her comfort zone and being more assertive because she knows she has to, but her character type is one that I typically find frustrating and there was nothing that really made her rise above that for me. There was also an annoying fairy-tale-like trend that beautiful/handsome characters were usually good while ugly characters were usually bad. Romance is also pretty much a constant thread running through the story in various forms, although I expected that would probably be the case based on the title. That was a little tiresome at times, but I’ve definitely read worse.

In general, I did enjoy the story quite a bit. I think I probably enjoyed it more than I might have if I read ghost stories more often and/or if I was more familiar with Chinese mythology. The story was a bit predictable because things were telegraphed far enough ahead to prevent much surprise as the story took various turns. However, the story didn’t go where I had expected it to go when I first started reading it and I probably would have been more surprised by some aspects of it if not for the foreshadowing.

I feel comfortable giving this a 3.5 star rating, but it was really difficult to decide which way to round for Goodreads. I enjoyed this quite a bit more than a 3-star read, but 4 stars also seems too high. In the end, I decided to be generous and round up to 4 because I did mostly enjoy reading it, I learned some new things, and it reminded me that ghost stories can be fun reads.

Next Book
The Black Prism by Brent Weeks, the first book in his Lightbringer series. I expect this to be the kind of series I’ll enjoy and I’ve been looking forward to reading it for quite a while, but I’ve also seen a lot of mixed reviews about this first book so I’m trying to keep my expectations lowered a bit. I read Weeks’ Night Angel trilogy many years ago and enjoyed it a lot.

>16 YouKneeK: I'm desperately trying to think of something to say that relates to Ghost Bride, because all I really want to say has to do with the next book, hahahahaha. I'm sure that comes as a huge surprise to you. I am glad that the romance wasn't too much. Sometimes romance can be done "just right" and it works, but for me, most of the time it isn't done right and it doesn't work for me. There, obligatory "recent book"comment out of the way! :-D

I hope you enjoy the Black Prism. If you enjoyed his Night Angel stuff you'll definitely enjoy this. I found it very different, and I was kind of expecting Night Angel 2.0 when I went into it, but once I got over that it was very good. I did find though, that for every single book (and I do mean every single one in the series), that it took me a while to really get into the story. By the 3rd book I realized what was going on and sure enough, bam, once I got past either a page/percentage limit, my interest just took off and I raced through. So all of that to say that if the beginning doesn't immediately catch your interest, persevere and stick it out. And be prepared for gross biological stuff.

And that is enough from me :-)

>17 BookstoogeLT: As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfectly acceptable to only comment on the next book and completely ignore the review. Especially since it's a book that I’m pretty sure wouldn't be in even the same country as your alley! ;)

LOL, thanks for the warning on the gross biological stuff. I’ve barely had a chance to crack the e-book open today, but I’m about to go start reading soon. I suspect I might be extra slow about finishing it even if I’m loving it. I have a lot of stuff to get done over the next several days. Hopefully I won't be as slow as I was with The Summer Queen last month, though!

I too hope you enjoy The Black Prism because if you don't then I suspect I probably won't either, and I already bought this one.

>19 clamairy: Haha, here’s hoping we both enjoy it then! So far so good with what little I’ve read. I’m definitely interested in the world and the characters introduced so far and look forward to learning how it all fits together.

>16 YouKneeK: You made that sound actually rather tempting.

Although I do loathe the ugly means evil trope, it does seem to be very much a standard in Chinese cinema/literature.

It does seem to be a legacy from cultures where facial mutilation was used as a punishment for criminals - the more recent that such legislation was in force, the stronger the equation of ugliness of appearance to ugliness of soul.

>21 -pilgrim-: That’s interesting to know that it’s a common Chinese trope, and a possible reason for it.

>22 YouKneeK: I find that if you watch old Hong Kong movies (fifties or earlier), when the villain enters for the first time, the camera will often zoom in on a large hairy wart on his face.

In a situation where a studio is using a relatively small pool of martial arts-skilled actors, it is a signal saying, "Hi, I'm playing the bad guy this time!"

It serves the same function as the black hats (and white hats) do in early cowboy films (signalling who to root for in gun battles filmed in long shot where you can't see the actors faces clearly).

Note: English law was never heavily into facial mutilation. But cropping the ears of thieves (and some other crimes) was still standard in Tudor times.

And then in the nineteenth century, we have criminologists expounding that "no lobe to the ear is a sign of criminality".

Same pattern.

>23 -pilgrim-: Huh, that is interesting! I have never watched many westerns, so the whole black hat, white hat thing would have escaped me entirely, but it sure does make sense.

Hi all, just a quick post to note that I had my surgery (per my previous thread) on Thursday and it went really well. I got discharged Friday late afternoon and am happy to be home.

I'm in much less pain than I expected to be in and am pretty mobile. Mostly just tired. I ventured upstairs and spent about 30 minutes on my desktop computer this afternoon and that left me surprisingly exhausted, more so than the more physical things I've done.

I'm typing this on my mobile phone, which is a thing I don't normally do because it's so slow typing. I have a laptop near me, but haven't really felt like juggling my stuff around to get settled with it. So it may be a day or two before I make it back on and start to post and catch up on things, but I wanted to drop a quick note at least.

>25 YouKneeK: Glad to hear it went ok and that you are on the mend! Take your time, we're not going anywhere :-)

>25 YouKneeK: Good to hear that you're reasonably OK. Go easy on yourself. The world will (hopefully) still be there!

>25 YouKneeK: I happy to hear it went well and you are healing. May you recover quickly and get all your energy back!

>25 YouKneeK: Happy to hear it went well and you are recovering. Take it easy!

>25 YouKneeK: So glad to hear all went well. Take the opportunity to read to your heart's content. I do hope Ernest is keeping you company and not stepping on your stomach.

>25 YouKneeK: Glad to hear it went well! I hope the recovery goes well and you are comfortable enough to read too much.

>25 YouKneeK: Glad to hear the surgery went well and you’re back home. Take it easy while you’re recovering.

Good on you! Glad to know it all went well. Take care of yourself now for a bit.

Good news! Great that you're home already. Get well soon!

>25 YouKneeK: Great news! Hope you continue to have a quick recovery.

Thank you very much >26 BookstoogeLT:, >27 Busifer:, >28 quondame:, >29 Narilka:, >30 clamairy:, >31 Karlstar:, >32 Maddz:, >33 haydninvienna:, >34 hfglen:, and >35 ScoLgo:!

>30 clamairy: Haha, yes, Ernest has been keeping me company without walking on my stomach! He’s never been one to jump directly on me, he likes to take more round-about approaches, so I always have plenty of time to cover up sensitive tummy areas before he ventures onto my lap and we haven’t had any mishaps yet.

I’m getting fairly close to done with the book I had started before my surgery. I’m enjoying it, but I wasn’t reading much before my surgery as I was busy getting everything prepared and just not focusing well even when I did have time to read. I’m only just now getting to the point where I’m reading a bit more normally. I had trouble focusing on my book (and trouble sleeping for that matter) in the hospital with people in and out all the time and the various noises out in the hallway and neighboring rooms, and just feeling so tired. I could stare at the same paragraph for an hour, which usually included a few dozes! My reading time has started to improve now that I’m finally catching up on my sleep, though.

I found it kind of amusing that I even kept getting woken up by the compression cuff things they had on my legs to ensure I didn’t get blood clots while I was still confined to the bed. They felt kind of nice, and you’d think I would have gotten used to them after a couple hours at least, but in my fuzzy half-asleep state I would feel them go off and at first I would think I was at home and the cat was shifting positions against my ankles, then the pressure would increase beyond what a cat could cause, and I’d startle awake to remember “compression cuffs, hospital, right”. And of course this happened like every 5 minutes.

Although I’ve been pretty tired, I’ve been in strangely little pain from the moment I woke up from surgery. I never used the pain pump at the hospital, and I haven’t used either of my pain prescriptions at home – not even the simple Ibuprofen which I would be perfectly comfortable taking if I needed to. There is pain to be sure, and it’s more significant when I sit/stand/recline/cough/laugh/etc, but it’s very tolerable, certainly more mild than the typical monthly cramps I had. It’s just enough pain to remind me that I’ve had a major surgery and should be careful what I do without being a constant distraction, and I don’t want to mask that pain because otherwise I might forget not to overdo it and slow my recovery. My mobility is also good – no problems with walking, stairs, etc. Mostly I’m just tired, but that’s improving as I catch up on my sleep.

I'm glad everything went well and that you're not in too much pain. I hope you continue to make a good recovery.

>36 YouKneeK: Thinking of the compression cuffs, I don't know if this helps, but it's meant to indicate at least a fellow feeling. When I had a hear problem a couple of years ago, the cardiologist decreed that I should be tethered to an automatic blood-pressure recorder that made just enough noise every half hour as the cuff inflated to wake me. He was not over pleased when I complained of lack of sleep the next morning, but at least he listened.

>36 YouKneeK: Glad to hear all of this, but especially the lack of pain. Was this laparoscopic surgery? That would at least partially explain the lack of major discomfort. (When it's done correctly, anyway!)

I hated those pressure cuffs... And there is always constant noise at a hospital. I think I even brought ear plugs along, but they didn't help much.

As far as the fatigue goes, I've been told it takes a very long time for all of the anesthesia to be flushed from the body. Like hours/days if you're younger and days/weeks if you're not.

Enjoy the reading!

>39 clamairy: Aged Mother used to say (I nearly said "suggest", but with her it was more laying down the law) that it took two weeks to get over an anaesthetic. My severely limited (thank goodness!) experience suggests that she was right this time.

>37 Sakerfalcon: Thank you!

>38 hfglen: Haha, a blood pressure cuff going off every 30 minutes most definitely would make sleep difficult! Also, those doctors and nurses do enjoy tethering their patients to things. I was attached to 4 different things (an IV, a vital signs monitor, a catheter, and the compression cuffs), which made my first attempt to get out of bed quite a production and also necessitated a cart to come along with me and the nurse on my first walk.

>39 clamairy: It was actually an abdominal surgery, but one thing I never thought to ask people who’d had the same type of surgery was what type of incision they had. My surgeon was able to accomplish mine with a horizontal bikini cut. Now that I have some practical experience with having an incision in one’s body, I’m thinking I would probably be having a lot more difficulty if she’d had to do the vertical incision starting just below my belly button. My incision doesn’t interfere with the way my body needs to bend when I move around.

>39 clamairy:, >40 hfglen: Interesting about the anesthesia! My aunt has had a few surgeries and says she always has “anesthesia brain” for a few weeks afterwards during which she blames any mistakes on the anesthesia. So I intend to use that excuse as well, if needed. ;)

My energy today has been better. I’ve caught up on the last of the personal-computer-related stuff I was behind on, and I’m very close to finishing my book. I’m not sure how much reading I’ll get in before bed, but I might yet finish it tonight. One thing’s for sure, there will be loud and boisterous celebrations the morning after I manage to sleep on my stomach again and get a proper night’s sleep! Sleeping rules were one thing I didn’t think to ask about or get any instructions on, but I’m guessing it’s probably a bit too soon to smart smooshing the innards and probably wouldn’t be very comfortable right now anyway.

>41 YouKneeK: Yep. You're right. Mine was a 4½ inch vertical slice. Everyone else I have talked to that had that kind of incision for whatever had to be done had a long road to recovery because they are slicing right through the muscles. In your case she hopefully cut as much as she possibly could between the muscle strands.

>42 clamairy: Thanks, that does explain a lot!

>41 YouKneeK: The worst pain I can remember was due to being too active after anesthesia. My diaphragm spammed or cramped and it felt like being sliced in half. That was back in the day when they kept hospital patients for days after even simple surgeries and I thought walking up and down the halls with a couple of younger kids - I was 12-13, was taking it easy.

>41 YouKneeK: Happy to hear things are going well for you after your operation. Here's hoping you continue your rapid recovery without complications.

>44 quondame: Ouch, that sounds very painful!

>45 AHS-Wolfy: Thank you!

Review: The Black Prism by Brent Weeks



This is a series I’ve been looking forward to reading for a long time. I enjoyed the author’s Night Angel trilogy and I’d been keeping my eye out on this series from the time the first book was published, waiting for the full series to be finished before reading it myself.

Before getting into my review, I first want to provide a bit of personal context. My reading for at least the first half wasn’t nearly as focused or as attentive as my reading normally is. When I started the book, I was a week away from having surgery on June 11 and I was distracted by the necessary preparations I needed to make for that as well as my worries (it was my first surgery). Then during the first few days of recovery, I was of course quite tired and unfocused. So there are things I maybe didn’t pick up on as well as I would have if I’d read this at some other time. And I’m still quite tired, so I hereby blame any weird mistakes made in this review as well as all the rambling on that. ;)

This book has a lot of the things in it that I love about epic fantasy, without using too many of its tropes. There are some tropes, but there are also some anti-tropes, and it all has its own spin. There were some things that felt a bit forced to me and some characters I never warmed up to, but over all I enjoyed the story and was pretty well hooked by the time I got to the end.

I liked the magic system. Some people have the ability to use light from one or more colors to create magic, with each color generating material that has different properties, smells, and emotions. However, I wasn’t initially as impressed by that magic system as I expected to be. There isn’t much explanation in the beginning and at first it seemed haphazard, unstructured, and over-powerful. The different colors also seemed to be used in similar ways so that I didn’t really understand at first what the point was. By the time I got to the end though, everything made a lot more sense to me. There’s an appendix at the end, at least in my edition, that explains things in more coherent detail, so that might be helpful if somebody gets too frustrated with trying to figure things out as they go along. I didn’t read it until the end, and it basically confirmed what I had already figured out on my own, while providing some additional nitty-gritty details that I hadn’t picked up on such as which colors generated which smells and stuff like that.

I had some mixed feelings about the characters. The story is told across a few different point-of-view characters, although I considered Gavin to be the “main” one. They’re all pretty flawed, with many shades of gray, and I enjoyed that. The female characters never really grew on me, though. Karris felt under-developed. I think a lot of her behavior depends on a backstory that we never saw happen and that I therefore had trouble buying into. I never felt like I got to know or understand her, although she didn’t really get a lot of POV time compared to the other characters. She’s a tough magical fighter type character during the story, but apparently before the book began she was more of an obedient, “girly” female whose main role in life is to be married off to one of the Guile brothers. During the book, we see her have some more “girly” thoughts that are probably intended as call-backs to her earlier lifestyle, but they just came off as kind of odd/discordant. I never had a chance to buy into her character growth since I was only told about it and never saw it happen. Liv was more relatable and understandable, but I liked her less as the story progressed. She repeatedly made dumb mistakes and jumped to conclusions with insufficient info.

Gavin was ambiguous and interesting, which is good since it was his POV that drove the main plot. Even before his identity was revealed, I wasn’t quite sure at the beginning if he was actually the good brother or the bad brother or if neither of them were. I really enjoyed the twist about him actually being the “bad” brother, and his character had really grown on me by the end as I came to understand his actions better and felt like his actions and choices spoke well of him. By the end he had become more like the typical, noble fantasy hero that I can’t help but enjoy so much. However, I did find it very difficult to believe that he’d been so successful with his deception for all these years. Karris especially, who had history with both brothers, should have recognized the difference. I did like when we found that some characters had known and/or figured it out once they spent some time around him, and I’m expecting we might find that certain other characters had known all this time and just hadn’t told “Gavin” they knew..

I never entirely made up my mind about Kip. He starts off as sort of the typical epic fantasy hero – a young kid (teenager in his case) with a difficult childhood. Yet unlike the typical epic fantasy hero, he has a lot of traits that go very much opposite the tropes. He does have some innate abilities, but he’s clumsy, apparently hugely overweight, wimpy, and cowardly. If he’s being attacked, his first reaction is to roll up in a ball and wait for the punishment to stop unless he gets mad enough to actually take some action. I liked the way he wasn’t the typical fantasy hero, but did think the overweight thing was a bit overdone. Kip makes a lot of self-deprecating jokes in his head that were just too cruel, and I guess maybe realistic for somebody who has a really bad self-image, but it was difficult to read. Because of his ineptness, I was also a bit frustrated that most of his successes seemed to be more accidental than anything. There were times I really liked him, but also times he frustrated me. I’m hoping he’ll grow on me more in the next book.

The book has quite a bit of humor sprinkled throughout, although I can see it being more of a turn-off for some people. Some of it is pretty juvenile and eye-roll-inducing. It’s not all juvenile though, and I did chuckle several times. However, some of the humor felt off to me, just too close to common real-world humor. An example would be the “How much am I paying you?” / “Nothing.” / “Well double it!” joke. I’ve heard that often enough that it’s rarely even funny to me anymore unless it’s delivered particularly well. I’m sure it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine this joke would crop up in any money-based society, fictional or not, but somehow seeing it show up in my epic fantasy book felt really weird. I preferred the humor that felt more natural to the setting and characters of the book.

The chapters were really short, like 5-10 pages. Sometimes I like short chapters, but I think in epic fantasy I prefer longer chapters so I can get immersed in one storyline for a little longer before bouncing to the next. I think this is part of what made it more difficult for me to focus on the book until I started regaining my normal reading energy; the author himself was taking away my focus just as he’d captured it. I had less trouble with that once my reading focus improved, or maybe by then I’d just gotten invested enough in all the storylines that I didn’t mind as much.

So over-all, I’d say this book is a bit flawed, and I can see now why reactions to it among my friends have seemed pretty mixed. However, despite some complaints, there were a lot of things I did like about it – the story itself, the magic system, some of the humor, the shades of gray, and some of the characters. My guess is that the series will improve as it goes on, and I myself may enjoy the subsequent books more simply due to reading them (hopefully!) with far fewer distractions. I plan to jump straight into the next book.

Next Book
The Blinding Knife, the second book in this series.

>47 YouKneeK: Glad you enjoyed this. I had trouble with the first book because I went into it expecting another Night Angel style of story and this was quite different from that. I still enjoyed myself tremendously though.

Lashaan, a wordpress blogger on Bookidote, has recently gone through this series for the first time and I thoroughly enjoyed his reviews. He spaced them out a bit more than you, so I'm looking forward to what you think of the series all in a row. I hope you don't burn out on these bricks. This is a promising start however! :-)

I found it interesting that you had issues, at least beginning, of distinguishing the colors from one another in terms of what they could do. I've played Magic the Gathering since the 90's though, and I know that Weeks has as well (the game is introduced in the story later on I believe) and that has 5 colors, with each color having an "identity". So to ramp it up to 7 was no big stretch for me. If you ever want to try something like that, Cardweaver is a good free version that is just the right kind of complicated (in my opinion). Not that you need another distraction in life, but you know, just in case.

As for the characters, for some reason Kip was always the main character in my head for the whole series, even though, upon reflection, Gavin seems to be cast in that role. Karris gets more backstory, but I don't remember her ever becoming a break out female character. I think role goes to one of Kips classmates, but I forget her name at the moment, lol.

The humor was definitely NOT my thing, not even back in '10. I probably blocked it out. And I hear you about modern slang edging its way in. I can't remember any specifics at the moment, but I do remember being taken out of the story once or twice with something that was straight from our world.

Dang, between Lashaan and you, I'm starting to get excited to read this series all over again!

>47 YouKneeK: I'm glad you liked it, too. I might give this a go sooner rather than later. Apparently I bought it as a daily deal in 2013 without realizing it was part of a series.

>48 BookstoogeLT: I like it when an author doesn’t follow too closely what they’ve done before, although in truth I’m not sure I remember the Night Angel story well enough to have recognized if he’d done so in this case. I’d like to re-read that someday – I tried it on audio once during a year when I was taking a lot of road trips for work (one of my many failed audio attempts) but the narrator was so melodramatic that I couldn’t take it. Just listening to him would have been enough to induce road rage even if I had been the only person on the road. :)

That’s interesting about the possible MTG influence in this series! Pretty much all I know about it is what little I’ve absorbed from some of your blog posts about it. I think my issues with the colors may have been as much due to my lack of ability to focus as anything, but I also went in knowing this book had something to do with “color magic” and I had the misconception that each color would be a different type of magic altogether. Like red would be battle magic and purple would be illusions and green would be control over nature – something along those lines. So when they basically just seemed to be using all of the colors as weapons in those early chapters, the differences were more subtle than I was expecting.

Kip is the first character introduced, so I read him as the main character at first too. He seemed to fit the mold with so many epic fantasy stories starting out with a young boy. After a while though I saw Gavin as being the person around whom all the plot lines seemed to revolve and the one with the most impact on what was happening. Plus Gavin was also the character who was most interesting to me, so I think that influenced how I read things.

I can’t remember if you’ve said, do you have this slotted to be re-read in a specific year?

>49 clamairy: I’d love to read what you think of it if you do! Reviews among my online friends are all over the place. I apparently bought this one for $1.99 in early 2016. I did know it was a series, but I was also really confident that I was going to read it, and I think at the time the author was still thinking there would only be 4 books so I probably thought I’d be reading it sooner.

>47 YouKneeK: >48 BookstoogeLT: Good to hear this is worth picking up.

>51 Karlstar: I think it is. It also seems to go on sale fairly often so you could probably pick it up pretty cheap.

>50 YouKneeK: I don't have a planned year yet for a re-read, but since it's been 10 years since the Black Prism, its time is fast approaching. I'll probably add the series next year and get around to it in '22 or so.

When I do re-read it, I'm definitely going to be paying attention to Gavin as the main character and see how that affects the read.

>51 Karlstar: I think you might like this series. And with the series being finished, you don't have to wait 2 years between books :-D

>53 BookstoogeLT: That's a definite plus. Not waiting 5 years or 7 years or infinite years is bad. I'm talking about you, Mr. Rothfuss!

>54 Karlstar: I laugh at your misery ;-)

>55 BookstoogeLT: The misery has faded to mere regret and grumpiness now, unless we're talking about Mr. Martin. I'm just concerned he'll never finish.

>56 Karlstar: I think your concern is valid and sadly (for you), prophetic...

>54 Karlstar: The Rothfuss books just don't justify all the fuss they've generated - there is no dearth of fantasy just as good or better, especially if your willing to read books by women who haven't won Hugos.

>58 quondame: Hah, any book that has won awards is suspect in my eyes! :-D

>59 BookstoogeLT: The Hugos is pretty much straight popularity with the closest to an assemblage of my peers as it is possible to get, so while I have disagreed about which book won I usually find most worth reading. Not that I've read most of the nominees, but a fair amount.

>58 quondame: The first book was excellent, the second one not quite as good. What would you recommend that is better, I'll add it to my list! Off the top of my head, I thought The Goblin Emperor was better, but it may have won awards.

>61 Karlstar: The Goblin Emperor won the 2015 Locus Fantasy Award and was nominated for a few others. If you're interested, pertinent awards are listed on the book page over at WWE.

>61 Karlstar: I haven't any quibble with awards and the author of The Goblin Emperor has, under her own name, the Doctrine of Labyrinths series. I'd recommend the Glass Thorns series for something rather different but somehow within the fantasy architecture, and the Crown of Stars series that finds different roots to peculiarly similar, but not identical ends within the same frame. For a standalone book Song of the Beast is worthwhile. I don't think Rothfuss books are less well done than these, just that he was catching all the wow while these women were putting out book after book of really readable and in some cases, quite original work, and weren't even being mentioned. And I didn't even mention A Companion to Wolves which is a straight up story that also happens to sideswipe Pern and Valdemar and the whole host of the animal companion sub-genre by just being perfectly what it is.

For readers other than Jim, I checked which books are already in his library so, for instance, I knew I didn't have to mention Paksenarion.

>63 quondame: So you liked the Crown of Stars series? I read it and liked it at first, but the longer it went on, the less interested I became until the final book just left me feeling very meh. Thankfully I waited until the series was almost out before diving in and I think I bought the whole set in hardcover from the SFBC because my goodness, they had some really good looking covers.

>58 quondame:, >61 Karlstar: Someday I’d like to read the books and see for myself just what all the Rothfuss fuss is about, but not until and unless the series actually gets finished. :) From what little I've heard though, I've always figured it's something I'd probably like.

>65 YouKneeK: I think you'd like it too. I liked the first book. My dislike of the series stems from the broken promises of the author, not the books themselves :-D

>63 quondame: Thank you, I will look into those!

>66 BookstoogeLT: Yeah, that can definitely leave a bad taste in one’s mouth.

>64 BookstoogeLT: I did like it. It did interesting things with it's characters that weren't often done in epic fantasy, and at least the non-villainous ones seemed to grow with their experiences. Some of the twists were cool too. I liked the Griffins and the uses of their feathers. It did go on a bit, but didn't wallow in silly like WoT. I originally checked them out, but eventually acquired a mixed set.

>64 BookstoogeLT:, >69 quondame: I too enjoyed the Crown of stars series although I agree that it became rather bloated and would have been better as a compact 4-5 book series than the 7 books it ended up. I also really liked Elliot's more recent trilogy that began with Cold magic (I think it was named the Spiritwalker trilogy).
I haven't quite forgiven Melania Rawn for not finishing the Exiles trilogy ...

>70 Sakerfalcon: But Glass Thorns! It is ever so not same-same, while, sort of like Wicked isn't OZ, but with rock-stars! OK, players, but really rock-stars!

Review: the Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks



This is the second book in Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer series. Although I enjoyed the first book, I enjoyed this one much more. I’m not sure if it was because I was less tired and distracted while reading it, or if it was because of the story itself. Maybe a bit of both.

First of all, for anybody who was annoyed by the first book because, among other things, the author is completely obsessed with breasts and also likes to put his female characters in weird and unlikely situations, that hasn’t changed, although I thought the “weird and unlikely situations” part was toned down quite a bit. Not the breasts though, they were everywhere! There’s also still plenty of juvenile humor. There was other humor that I enjoyed though, and not much of the humor I complained about in the first book that was too close to real-world jokes and therefore pulled me out of the story. I particularly enjoyed some of the character banter.

The story really held my interest this time around; I didn’t want to put it down. I’m also growing more attached to some of the characters, including secondary characters. I also liked the new female POV introduced in this book much better than the others. This series is one continuous story – although there’s some resolution to the main conflict by the end of the books, the story then goes on to introduce new problems right at the end as a hook into the next book. The ending of this one definitely made me anxious to read the next one.

The rest of my comments will need to go in spoiler tags:
I completely did NOT expect False Gavin to kill Real Gavin. I had assumed he was going to get free sooner or later and we’d have at least one book full of Real Gavin wreaking havoc. That plot twist made me happy as I had felt like that storyline was going to become too predictable, so I was happy to see my expectations were completely and totally wrong. Unless he survived somehow and escapes, but he seemed like he was really dead.

I like that these books don’t drag things out too much, or at least they haven’t so far. For example, after Gavin was stabbed with the blinding knife at the end of book 1 and he lost blue, I was expecting to see him lose the other colors one by one over the course of a few books and I was worried this would soon become tiresome and predictable. Instead, he’s completely color blind by the end of this book. Now, instead of feeling like I know what’s going to happen in book 3, I only have some vague guesses and am very much looking forwarding to jumping into the next book.

This book focused a lot more on Kip than the first book did, and for a while became a bit of a magic school plot. I really enjoyed his POV chapters more than I had in the previous book, though. Kip is growing on me more now, although it seems like he has the potential to go dark side like his real father did, so I wonder if that’s going to happen at some point. With Gavin no longer able to draft, I imagine Kip’s role in the story will continue to increase. I still like Gavin best though, so I hope he’ll continue to play a large role. I imagine he’ll get his powers back eventually.

I’m giving this book 5 stars, mostly because of how well and consistently it held my attention throughout and because I found myself thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it. The book definitely isn’t perfect, but I rate primarily based on my enjoyment level and I got 5 stars’ worth of enjoyment out of this one.

Next Book
The Broken Eye, the third book in this series.

>72 YouKneeK: LOLOL I'm glad you enjoyed it, but I do find your observation about the boob obsession humorous. (And somewhat off-putting.)

>73 clamairy: Haha, it’s almost like a second form of entertainment – spot the "breast" references! For fun, I searched my Kindle to see how many times the word is used. 19 times in the first book, 24 times in the second book, and 14 in the third. I haven’t purchased any of the later books yet, so those remain to-be-determined. ;) Those definitely aren’t the most outrageous word counts of oft-repeated words I’ve ever seen, but I’d still say it’s a bit much for that particular word!

When I was reading through friend reviews of the first book, the treatment of female characters was definitely the biggest complaint. I haven't really been offended myself, although I have rolled my eyes a few times. In that regard, I did think the second book was better. Not in terms of breast counts, obviously, but in other ways! I can see why some have been bothered by it, though.

>74 YouKneeK: A lot depends on my mood when I'm reading a book, so while I'll cut an author slack on many occasions there are also quite a few times when I just don't have patience.

>72 YouKneeK: You rated this a whole star more than I did :-D I think that says something :-D :-D :-D

>76 BookstoogeLT: LOL, about my tolerance for juvenile humor? ;) Although I think what it really says it that I tend to be over-generous with my epic fantasy ratings!

>75 clamairy: Yeah, I think some things are more or less likely to bother me depending on my mood also. And it probably also depends a lot on how I feel about the rest of the work, how much I’ll let other issues slide.

>77 YouKneeK: I hadn't thought of that, but that particular issue IS one that I'll ding a solid half-star off for :-)

I am only just catching up after my two enforced offline sojourns, so my congratulations on such successful progress in your post-op recovery are rather late, I'm afraid.

>80 -pilgrim-: Thanks, it's good to see you back!

Review: The Broken Eye by Brent Weeks



This is the third book in Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer series. I’m still enjoying the series a lot, although this book didn’t hold my attention quite as firmly as the previous book. It had plenty of exciting and interesting moments, and it definitely wasn't a slow read for its length, but for some reason it didn’t have me as close to the edge of my seat wanting to find out what would happen next. That ending, though! There are all sorts of reveals and interesting twists toward the end of this book. Somehow my ability to predict twists with this series is really poor. There have been a few “I knew it!” moments, but a lot more “What the heck?!” moments. I enjoy the surprises.

All of my many other comments will have to go behind spoiler tags.

These paragraphs are all about some of the things I never saw coming.

Ironfist is Grinwoody’s nephew and he swore an oath to the Order of the Broken Eye? What?! I’m a bit angry about that one actually, because I really like Ironfist and I don’t want him to be evil, but at least he seems very conflicted. We had better get some more back story on this whole thing though so I can buy into it properly, and I really hope he chooses the right side by the end. I’m predicting a heroic and tragic death in which he redeems himself, although given my current track record with predicting things in this series, I’m probably way off. Maybe it’s more likely that Kip will encapsulate him in a flying bouncy green ball of doom and send him flying off into the sunset, where his green ball will be mistaken for the green flash by Karris at some momentous moment.

Speaking of Karris, I completely didn’t predict that she would become the White, and yet I think that’s one I really should have seen coming. There was tons of build-up for it, lots of hints, but I really hadn’t even stopped to think about who would be the next White. I’m hoping that will make Karris more interesting as I’m still not that crazy for her character. She just seems so inconsistent and contradictory. Her frequent pettiness also annoys me, even if she herself recognizes it and rebukes herself for it. I don’t really see her as having the personality to take on the White’s role, even considering that she’s still young and could potentially grow into it better as she ages.

I also never imagined that False Gavin would end up in Real Gavin’s old prison. I hope that isn’t dragged out too long, although it was a kind of fun twist. But I suspect we’ll see even less of Gavin in the next book if things continue on as they have. The focus has shifted more and more to Kip as the story has progressed. You’d think having built the prison might give him an edge on getting out, but then he presumably built it to be as foolproof as possible to keep Real Gavin trapped. On the other hand, he had years to imagine how Real Gavin might have tried to escape, so maybe he came up with some ideas on his own. And Marissia knows about the prison, but I can’t imagine why she’d think he might be there unless she stumbles across somebody sending him bread or something.

Um, another thing I didn’t predict? That Kip would go Zorbing down a tower staircase! I’ve Zorbed down a long hill in the Smoky Mountains before, but I’m not sure the circumstances under which Kip did it would have been quite as much fun.

Oh, but one thing I did guess? I was pretty sure the White knew Gavin was really Dazen. I suspected that from the first book. So that confirmation was one tiny little moment of triumph for me, sandwiched between a bunch of “What?!” moments. ;)

I’m rating this at 4.5 stars, because I did enjoy it a lot, but I’m going to round down to 4 stars on Goodreads. I’m looking forward to finding out what happens in book four!

Next Book
The Blood Mirror, the next book in this series.

@BookstoogeLT, did you write a review for The Broken Eye? I couldn't find it on the work page here on LT.

>82 YouKneeK: Sounds like one for me to add to my TBR list.

>84 Karlstar: Yes, you should also add it right smack at the top of the list too (well, the first book anyway, not this one) so I can read your reviews while all the details are fresh in my own mind! ;)

>83 YouKneeK: I did. But somehow it isn't here at LT. I've currently correcting that....

Glad you enjoyed this so much. I'm pretty sure it will get a 5star from me next time around :-D As for twists, I just stopped trying to predict stuff much earlier than you. I really liked the magic system and since it wasn't Night Angel 2.0, I just sat back and let Weeks take the wheel :-D

>86 BookstoogeLT: There it is, thanks! I was surprised when I didn't find one.

I don’t think my predictometer has an off button, although sometimes it functions better than at other times. I tend to have fun whether I guess correctly or I’m completely surprised, as long as there aren’t so many correct guesses that it feels predictable. I also of course don’t like surprises that are only surprises because the author threw in something completely inconsistent. I’ve enjoyed the surprise in this series so far!

>85 YouKneeK: The Kindle edition is $6.95, so it is on the top of my list! I have a gift card burning a hole in my desk, so I'll get it soon.

>88 Karlstar: Flaming gift cards, that’s one way to ensure they’re used quickly! ;)

>89 YouKneeK: Hah! Flaming gift cards!

>82 YouKneeK: How high was the boob quotient with this one?

>90 clamairy: Asking the important questions, I see... ;-)

>91 ScoLgo: *snork* I have to admit that the comments on the previous book in the series made me chuckle quite a bit, but now I want to know if the trend continued.

>90 clamairy:, >91 ScoLgo: LOL! :)

The boob quotient didn’t seem nearly as high in the one I just finished (book 3), and I thought the juvenile humor might have been toned down just a teensy bit. Or maybe I’ve developed some immunity through repeated exposure.

In order to properly illustrate this very important topic and enlighten all interested parties, I’ve created a small spreadsheet. Higher numbers in column D are better, unless you’re a huge fan of boob books, in which case you would prefer lower numbers.

>93 YouKneeK:
Thank you for publishing the results of your scientific enquiry into this very important topic.

I am now wondering whether the BPP (Boobs Per Page) quotient should be a requirement for the proper assessment of all novels...

Although, given what I have been reading recently, correct comparison with the APP (Abs Per Page) quotient would probably be desirable.

>93 YouKneeK: That is one of the most informative (and incredibly specific) book related spreadsheets I've ever encountered!
Looks as though he got most of it out of his system in that second book.

>93 YouKneeK: Hahahahaaa! Now we just need to make a boobometer so we can point it at a book and have it give us that info before we read it!

Just be aware that book 5 deals with some really biological stuff. If you haven't found that out already.

>87 YouKneeK: Now I'm wondering how many other reviews of mine never bothered to show up here. Eh, I don't care enough, the blog is way more than enough work for me.

>94 -pilgrim-: LOL, I can imagine high APP quotients might be quite a bit more widespread than BPP. It might be interesting to compare APP vs BPP in certain genres.

>95 clamairy: I’m picturing a heated argument (entirely in my imagination, of course!) between the author and his editor which resulted in a compromise of cutting the boob quotient in half after book 2.

>96 BookstoogeLT: Hmm… a boobometer seems like it would be a very useful device! The Kindle conveniently has one built in, but that’s not much help for physical books. Thanks for the warning on book 5, it's always good to have things to look forward to! ;) Regarding the missing reviews, you can be sure I'll complain if I happen to find any more missing reviews of books I've just read that I know you've read too but I can't find a review for. (That seems like an excessively convoluted sentence, but I'm too tired to find better wording...)

>96 BookstoogeLT: Wait, are you saying that reviews of books you posted on LT have vanished?

>98 Karlstar: Not exactly. There is a record of my reading the book ( I had the broken eye in my records, but with no dates or reviews). The thing is, I imported stuff from booklikes and I tend to blame anything going wrong on that end and not on LT. But since LT has always been a backup of a backup, I just don't care :-D

It’s that time again -- I like to post my year-to-date stats after each quarter end. Below are the graphs with my mid-year stats as generated by my Access database.

I don’t think there’s anything surprising here. My average pages per day this year have continued to drop (it was at 89 pages/day after the 1st quarter), but there have been a lot of distractions this year between a major family health issue, the pandemic, my surgery, and the comparatively minor but sometimes distracting health issues that led up to my surgery. If anything, I guess I’m surprised my reading numbers aren’t lower!

So now we’re in the third quarter. My quarterly classic selection for this quarter was The Canterbury Tales. I’ll probably start it after I finish the Lightbringer series I’m currently reading. I expect it to be a challenge for me, especially since I intend to read it in the original Middle English. @-pilgrim- had suggested breaking it up, which I thought was a good idea. I thought about trying to read one tale per day while simultaneously reading other books, but knowing my reading habits I’m pretty sure that would greatly reduce my over-all reading. I’ll do better if I assign myself a more substantial amount of pages and focus exclusively on that, then focus exclusively on a different book. So I've broken it up into 5 sections of 100-200 pages each, not counting the 550+ pages of additional content in the edition I purchased. I'll read each of the 5 sections in-between other books. That’s how I’ll start off anyway, and I’ll adjust how I handle it if that doesn’t work out well.

Late to the game, trying to catch up, but thanks to all of you for the laugh on the boob count topic :D

>100 YouKneeK: As always I appreciate the stats & charts. (I'm a visual learner, so they speak volumes... No pun intended.)

>101 Busifer: >102 clamairy: Stats & charts are near and dear to my heart. They are things to be treasured. To be clasped close to the bosom, as it were...

>103 ScoLgo: I literally chortled. Are you also glad that we're being kept abreast of >100 YouKneeK:'s reading habits?

>101 Busifer: Now that I understand what an important topic this is to so many people, I feel negligent for not having ever even considered providing boob count statistics before. ;)

>102 clamairy:, >103 ScoLgo:, >104 clamairy: LOL at all the puns. :) I enjoy stats and charts, but I enjoy the actual number-crunching process (or designing the queries/programs to do the number crunching) even more. It doesn’t take too much provocation to get me to whip up some random spreadsheet. As I might possibly have proven recently. ;)

I’d join in on the punning, but I think you all have already exhausted my limited knowledge of breast euphemisms. So tata(s) for now…

wow, this was terrible! :-D

I am jealous of that 3.8 rating though!

>106 BookstoogeLT: Haha, yeah, after some of the recent exchanges, I think I need to reconsider whether it’s appropriate for me to call Weeks’ humor juvenile. ;)

>107 YouKneeK: Just glad you're all having fun with it!

"The Ladies" seem to be carrying the weight of this thread.

>107 YouKneeK: This sort of thing is what makes it imperative not to skip reading threads for fear of what one might miss.

>108 Karlstar: Once you give the series a try, you’ll probably be overly aware of it as a result of this conversation. Either that or you’ll be expecting it to be far worse than it actually is and will wonder what all the fuss was about. ;)

>109 MrsLee: LOL! :) And I agree, I at least skim everybody’s threads, because there are often things of interest even when our reading interests don’t coincide much.

Review: The Blood Mirror by Brent Weeks



This was the fourth out of five books in the Lightbringer series. I enjoyed it a lot, but my review is going to be really short. At this point I’m just waiting to see how everything plays out in the last book. I’m reserving judgment for that, and I have a lot of open questions until then, so I don’t have a lot of strong opinions to talk about yet.

As usual, there were a lot of surprising twists. There are some about which I’m not sure how I feel. Especially all the revelations about Gavin as the Black Prism and all the things he did but forgot due to drafting black luxin. I’m not sure I even trust all those revelations entirely, but I think at least some of it has to be true. I’m really looking forward to seeing where things go in the last book.

My enjoyment while reading this was about the same as with book three, so I’m going to give it the same rating – 4.5 stars, rounded down to 4 on Goodreads.

Next Book
Gunner’s Apprentice. This is a short story set in this series, available for free here. After that, I’ll read the final book.

>110 YouKneeK: I won't be able to read them without subconsciously trying to match my count with your table! I think my brother has read these and recommended them too.

>112 Karlstar: Haha, you’re likely to end up with a higher count if you pay enough attention while reading to include other euphemisms. The downside of using the Kindle search feature for a "project" like this is that it’s fairly literal. ;)

Review: Gunner’s Apprentice by Brent Weeks



This is a very short story set in Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer series. I wasn’t expecting it to be so short. The Goodreads book page has it listed as 40 pages, but it’s more like 10. You can find it for free here.

This is listed as book 2.5, but it shouldn’t be read until after book 3. I have seen recommendations to read it after book 4, but it would have much more impact if read before book 4. There will be a point where you’ll think I’ve led you horribly astray, but I read it after book 4 and regretted my timing.

I feel like it’s impossible for me to give any opinions without potentially spoiling everything, so I’m going to put the rest of my comments in spoiler tags. There are major spoilers here.

The story kills off two POV characters, Kip and Liv. Then the author follows it up with a note implying it’s a scene from his not-yet-published-at-the-time fourth book. He then goes on to deliver the punch line where you realize that he’s just pulling your leg and that this isn’t actually a real scene in the series.

After one has read book 4 it’s clear that the events in this story don’t fit, so I spent the entire time up to the punchline just feeling confused, because nothing made any sense. If I’d read it before book 4, I would have been more alarmed by the story and I would have appreciated the joke better.

Although I did laugh out loud at the punch line, the story itself didn’t do much for me and it doesn’t add anything to the series (since it didn’t happen), which is what I usually read these sorts of extra stories for. I think what he did was funny, but the impact was lost on me because I read it at the wrong time.

Next Book
The Burning White, the final book in the Lightbringer series I’ve been reading.

@BookstoogeLT, did you read the above short story? Also, when I checked book 5 to see who I know on LT has read it, your name didn't show up. I expect you to have this issue resolved by the time I finish the book and am looking for your review. ;) I know you wrote one, because I remember seeing it, I think on your blog back when my own read of this series was still pretty far away. I would have skimmed most of it at the time to avoid spoilers, though.

>111 YouKneeK: Looking forward to your thoughts on the Burning White just to get some thoughts here. Glad you enjoyed it.

I have not read Gunner's Apprentice and while I can appreciate the kind of humor that Weeks displayed within your spoiler, I suspect I'd be pissed enough if I had read it for myself. I've watched enough of his Q&A youtube videos to imagine him chortling to himself and rubbing his hands at the anguish the story would bring to true fans :-D It warms my heart.

I DID review the Burning White. I'll go see why it isn't showing up.

edit:

Ok, that is weird! It shows me having written one, even says it is 2150 words, but it doesn't show up. Crap. I guess I'll have to go to the bug collector group or something.

>116 BookstoogeLT: I’m only 58 pages into the last book so far, but it started off great! It’s almost 1000 pages though, so it may take me a while to finish.

Haha, I haven’t seen any of Weeks’ videos, but I definitely get the impression he has an evil sense of humor.

Huh, that IS weird about the missing review. Hopefully staff can help get it sorted out. I found the thread you started and I see somebody at least managed to reconstruct the link to your review, so I’ll use that if it still isn’t showing up properly by the time I'm ready to read it. I wonder if other people’s reviews are missing for that book, because I did think it was weird there was only 1 review.

>117 YouKneeK: At this point, it would appear that my only real option to fix whatever the problem is is to delete the book from my collection and re-add it all over again. I don't care that much. I'll probably add a link to my wp review when you post yours here.

>118 BookstoogeLT: That works. I hadn’t read the other thread they linked to last night, but I skimmed through it this morning and it does look like an open bug that’s been unresolved for over a year.

Review: The Burning White by Brent Weeks



This was the fifth and final book in the Lightbringer series. The title is The Burning White but a good alternate title would have been The Enthusiastic Pep Talks. More on that later. I mostly enjoyed this entire series. It has a few issues, but nothing that bothered me too much. I was pretty happy with this last book, and the ending was mostly satisfying.

Before I go on to write about my own thoughts, if anybody read this and didn’t see the hidden Postlude after the author’s acknowledgments, or the web address at the very end that led to one more final bit, you may have missed some things. The bit on the web was also narrated, I think by the same person who did the audiobooks. I listened to a sample at one point and they sounded the same. I ended up having to turn off the narration though and just read the text for myself. He was reading too slow, plus I wanted to hear the characters with their “real voices”. You know, the ones I had been hearing in my head for the past several weeks. But I enjoyed those little extra surprises after I thought I was done. It was nice to be rewarded for being thorough. ;)

So… pep talks. GOOD GRIEF! I almost feel strongly enough about this to use multiple exclamation points, but I’ll settle for putting it all in caps. I think every single main character got at least one pep talk in this book, usually more. First the character with the incoming pep talk usually starts off by telling or thinking what a horrible person they are, and we get the litany of all the things they’ve done wrong. Then somebody tells them why they’re actually a wonderful person and we get the litany of all the things they’ve done right. Every main character seems to think deep down that they’re horrible and worthless no matter what amazing things they’ve done. This I think grated on my nerves more than anything in the entire series. It all started to sound the same and I kept getting bogged down in those sections. Different characters, similar self-recriminations, similar platitudes. In smaller doses it might have been ok. There was a little bit of this in the earlier books, but it went way beyond my threshold in this one. Sometimes there were interesting reveals hidden in those pep talks, and I think the pep talks were used as a vehicle for delivering those, but I wanted to slash that vehicle’s tires.

Aside from that complaint, the story was good, and I liked the ending pretty well. I did have a few minor annoyances I’ll mention in the spoiler tags. This last book felt more predictable to me than the previous books, though. I think at this point the things that already happened had to lead to a logical ending and since this was originally supposed to be a shorter series, the author might have run out of twists by this point that would fit logically with the intended end. Everything did lead to an ending that made sense and felt satisfying, but I kind of missed those “What?!” moments in this book.

The series in general has all the fun of epic fantasy without being too full of tropes. There is a prominent “chosen one” theme, but not done in quite the way I’ve seen it done anywhere else. There’s a lot of humor, although some of it is on the juvenile side. The author also used the word “breasts” so many times in this series (more so in the first two books) that it inspired a “Boob Quotient” chart. The first book doesn’t have any great female characters, but there is some improvement on that side in later books. Most of the main characters were likeable and fun to read about. The ones that weren’t didn’t get as much page time anyway. There’s a lot of fun banter between the characters which is something I particularly enjoy.

One thing that did distract me some throughout this series were the real-world quotes and references. It’s not so much that the things he used weren’t logical in his fantasy world, just that they sounded so real-world that it pulled me out of the story. In the first book there were a lot of jokes clearly inspired by common real-world jokes, although that did get toned down a bit. There are a few Shakespeare references. Some of it didn’t bother me, like some of the general punny-ness that was Shakespeare-like without being direct quotes that I recognized. And Gunner was hilarious. He reminded me of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. On the other hand, randomly having a character think the words “fretting upon this stage” was just too close to a direct quote for me, especially when it didn’t really fit the tone of how the character in question usually thought.

There are similar issues with Bible references. I mean, I admit I laughed on page 3 of the very first book when Kip walks “in the valley of the shadow of two great unnatural hills – the remnant of two of the great funeral pyres where tens of thousands had burned”, especially since Kip was in fact quite fearful of evil during his stroll through the valley of the shadow of death. After a while though, that kind of thing, combined with the other types of real-world references, started to get a bit jarring to me. There are also some Bible story parallels. It’s not an allegory by any means, but there are some very clear themes, and it gets a bit heavy-handed in this last book. Sometimes we had pep talks and heavy-handed Bible parallels in the same sections and I really loved those sections. ;) Other people might not even notice these things, though. If my quote at the beginning of this paragraph went over your head until I spelled it out, you might not notice it as much. If you didn’t even get it after I spelled it out, you’ll probably be blissfully oblivious through the whole thing.

So, as if this review isn’t long enough, I have just one more comment for the spoiler tags:
I would say I prefer happy endings, and I don’t like to see characters I’m attached to die, but I think I would have liked a few more consequences by the end. Dazen lost all his powers, two fingers, and an eye, but he gets everything back by the end. Karris nearly dies a few times and thinks she’s lost both Dazen and Kip, but in the end she has everything she wants. Kip completely dies but gets brought back to life, and while he can’t draft anymore there’s a little hint at the end that he thought he saw a flicker of green on the testing stick so we can probably assume his powers will come back eventually (the slowing healing versus Dazen's fast healing, like he quoted Orholam as mentioning during his wedding). Teia is able to function fairly normally with the glasses the Mighty gives her near the end. Ironfist is probably going to end up being the Blackguard commander again. Marissia shows up alive. It was just a bit much. Cruxer died, so that was sad, but I wasn’t that attached to him anyway.

I’m nitpicking a bit too much in this review maybe, because I would rather have an ending like this versus one that leaves me upset because a beloved character died. I think I like a tiny bit of negative along with a mostly positive ending to make me feel like I’ve earned my happy ending by swallowing a bit of realistic unhappiness. :)

Ok that was ridiculously long, but my last review was ridiculously short (for me), so I figure they balance each other out. Now, I would like to leave you with the complete results of the Boob Quotient analysis:


Next Book
Before I jump into The Canterbury Tales, I’m going to first read one of the July group read selections for the group I’m in on GR before July is gone. The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. I know nothing about this, but the title sounds dystopian.

>120 YouKneeK: So, it looks like the Book is the problem, not anyone's reviews. When I click on your link to go up thumb your review, I get an orphan work. So weird.

Anyway, I obviously loved the Christian themes that Weeks worked into this book. I've wondered how it would come across to others, so hearing what you had to say was great. For me, all those peptalks and talks with Orholam showed that Weeks has gone through something very similar to me in terms of questioning, because some of the scenes you can't imagine. You experience that or you don't.

The whole boobometer thing about this series has really made me laugh. That and the juvenile humor are things I simply wouldn't tolerate from another author but for some reason Weeks seems to be able to get it past me.

So that I don't cross the line about "religion", here's my link on Wordpress:

Bookstooge's Review of the Burning White

While I hope his next writing project is still epic fantasy, I do hope he can keep it to a trilogy. I don't want to have to wait 9years to read his next completed work :-D

>121 BookstoogeLT: Yeah, whatever is going on with that work page is rather annoying!

I can understand why you would have enjoyed some of those parts much more than I did. By the time I got to the parts with Orholam, I was already tired of anything remotely resembling a pep talk after reading all the ones the other characters received. My main reaction at that point was “No, not another one!” And then it turned out to be the longest one of them all. :)

I agree, I would much prefer if his next series is a trilogy, if only to make the wait shorter.

>120 YouKneeK: I'm keen to see what you'll make of The Memory Police. I have this on my TBR, too, and I also know nothing about it.

Btw, this is a brilliant way to track your updates here.

>123 BrokenTune: I was really tired last night only read one very short chapter, but it wasn't how I expected the book to start out and really grabbed my interest. I was tempted to read a little bit more, but sleep won.

I've come to love this reading journal concept. When I first looked at LT several years ago I ran across this format and thought it was weird and not something I would want to do, so I ran the other way. My experiences over on BL made me more receptive to it.

Do you think you might start a thread of your own? I would definitely follow it.

>124 YouKneeK: If I didn't have too many books going on already, I'd be mightily tempted to have a peek at The Memory Police right away, but I fear that I might just stress myself out by starting yet another book. LoL.

I'm a little all over the place at the moment but I will start a thread once I set myself some principles of how I want the thread to work and when to link to the WP blog etc. (similar to how Bookstooge uses his thread). Tho, I think I'd use the WP link mostly for non-book blog contents and keep the book-related updates and reviews here on LT (with WP acting as a back-up only).

>125 BrokenTune: Haha, I still remember that blog post BL staff put up years ago about different types of readers – monogamous, polygamous, etc. I always remember that when people talk about reading multiple books.

I think that makes a lot of sense regarding your future thread.

>124 YouKneeK: Excuse me, what is BL?

>127 -pilgrim-: Booklikes. Both Youkneek and I came from there :-)

>127 -pilgrim-: Sorry for the unexplained acronym, and thank you >128 BookstoogeLT: for making it an explained one!

Booklikes as you can probably guess is another book-based site along the lines of LibraryThing and Goodreads, but with a unique format. Each member has their own blog page, and their book reviews show up there. Since Booklikes has a book database, you can also search for and shelve books. When you post a book review to your blog, those reviews are also linked on the book page, similar to what you see here, which makes it very different from a blog platform like WordPress. People can post whatever they want on their blog, not just book reviews, kind of like how we talk about all kinds of things in our threads here in the Green Dragon. Like WordPress, you can follow different people’s blogs and their posts all show up in a continuous feed. You can also comment on the posts.

It’s sort of like a cross between WordPress and Goodreads. It’s really a cool format that had a lot of promise and a small but friendly and enthusiastic membership, but staff have all but abandoned it. Over the past few years I think they’ve been doing just enough to keep it (barely) going for as long as they’re getting enough ad revenue to make some low-effort money off it. I left around 2.5 years ago and they're still having the same sorts of problems they were having when I left.

>120 YouKneeK: Thank you for including the chart. I wanted to ask if the frequency had continued to drop, but didn't want @ScoLgo giving me crap about it. LOL

I am considering giving this series a go soonish, but not until I've finish some of the other series I've already started.

>130 clamairy: LOL, the breast reduction (so to speak) at the end there was quite impressive! I’ll be really interested to read what you think once you do get to this.

>129 YouKneeK: Thank you for the explanation. It sounds like it was a good idea. I had been wondering whether to start a blog, since my reviews here seem to be getting rather lengthy!

>132 -pilgrim-: Blogging seems to work very well for @BookstoogeLT. I played around with WordPress for a little while, back when I was looking for BookLikes alternatives. I decided it was more work than I really had the time for. Also, since I’m so anti-spoiler, the lack of spoiler tag functionality would be a big problem for me.

>133 YouKneeK: This is how I feel about Goodreads, basically, I just don't like the interface. Sometimes, I'll add an Early Reviewer book there, if I thought it was a good one and needs the clicks, otherwise I log in there about once a year.

>134 Karlstar: There are some things I definitely dislike about the GR interface. It was the first book site I ever signed up for though (in late 2013) and the first one I learned how to use, so I’m pretty used to it. I do like the SF&F group I’m in over there, and I have a handful of friends who are often reading and reviewing books I’m familiar with since we take a lot of our reading selections from the same place – the group’s bookshelf.

Review: The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa



This was a little strange. I was sucked in from the first page, and it held my interest all the way through to the end, but it left me unsatisfied. It’s the type of thing I might have expected in a weird short story collection, more of a thought experiment than a tangible story. Although this book is primarily categorized as science fiction on Goodreads, I wholeheartedly disagree. Horror maybe, although it’s not really scary. Maybe magical realism.

In this story, things “disappear”. Everybody just wakes up one morning and they know that something else has disappeared from their lives. Hair ribbons, for example, or perfume. This disappearance isn’t a physical disappearance, but more of a mental disappearance. The object no longer holds any meaning for the person who sees it. The people are expected to destroy the things that have disappeared, and the Memory Police exist to enforce this. Once the things have been destroyed, people soon start to forget they ever existed. If they do see it later, they don’t know what it is or what it’s for. With the example of the perfume, they can’t smell it.

So like I mentioned in my first paragraph, this is more of a thought experiment where you don’t really get any answers. For somebody who isn’t bothered by that kind of thing, I would highly recommend it. I love books that keep me guessing while I’m reading, but I want answers that make sense by the end. I might have been a little less frustrated if I hadn’t thought I was reading a science fiction book, because I expect answers in science fiction. Unexplained weirdness is less surprising, though still annoying to me, in a horror book.

Major spoilers in the tags…
There were so many unanswered questions. We were never told how the disappearances happened. My first thought, influenced by another book I had read last year, was that maybe the story was taking place inside a computer simulation. I discarded that within the first chapter or two, after learning that some characters do remember the things that have disappeared. My second thought was that maybe everybody had chips in their brains and the disappearances were being pushed out to people’s minds that way and maybe some people had faulty chips or something in their brain that prevented them from interfacing fully. However, in the end, even the main character’s dog seemed to believe in the disappearances so that idea went out the window too. I doubt an intelligent entity who was controlling things would have seen any need to make animals go along with things.

So maybe it was some random phenomenon. There certainly didn’t seem to be any logical reason behind the disappearances. They were often things that you wouldn’t expect some controlling entity to object to for any reason, whether logical or irrational. Hair ribbons? Birds? Hats? And then in the end people slowly lost all their body parts, so that they had these “things” attached to their bodies and didn’t know what to do with them, until their entire bodies finally disappeared altogether and they were nothing but voices. And then the story ends, with the only apparent resolution being that the people in hiding who had retained their memories were apparently free now because the Memory Police wouldn’t be able to take them away since the Memory Police didn’t believe they had bodies any more. And even that’s not entirely certain, because they were walking normally even after everybody lost their first body part – their left leg. The main character thought it was because they’d practiced for it, but how do you practice walking on a leg you don’t have while you have it? But then if the Memory Police weren’t truly affected, it would surely have to be some intelligent entity affecting things. Which brings us back to the unexplained why.

We also never learned anything substantial about the Memory Police – how were they formed, who controlled them, what did they do with the people they took away? Soooo many unanswered questions, combined with an unsatisfying end. The story within the story mimicked those things also.

I’m not sure if this story will stick with me, or if it’s going to be disappeared from my head. It had a very haunting quality, so it might stick with me, but I’m actually not even sure what the author’s message was intended to be. A commentary on mental illness? An admonition to fight to keep the things that are important to us because otherwise our lives will be empty? The danger of accepting the loss of things (or freedoms?) that seem like only a mild inconvenience because in the end the losses will be compounded into a huge loss without our even realizing it, like a lobster being slowly boiled alive?

I would have rated this higher for how well it held my interest while reading it, and I do like that it made me stop and think when I finished it to try to figure out answers for myself, but I prefer stories with more tangible explanations. I’m going to rate it at 3.5 stars and round down to 3 on Goodreads.

Next Books
I’m finally going to start my third quarter classic selection, The Canterbury Tales. As I mentioned in a previous post, I plan to split this up into 5 sections and will read other books between those sections. I doubt I’ll post a review until I’ve finished the entire book, so probably the next review I post will be for the next book I plan to read. I may make some brief (well, we’ll see!) comments about how my reading of it is going meanwhile, though.

The next book I plan to start after I finish reading the first section of The Canterbury Tales is The Bear and the Nightingale, the first book in The Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden, so that’s probably the next review I’ll post here.

Glad you enjoyed the Lightbringer series. I might need to bump it up in my reading priority for next year. The Memory Police sounds very different. I'm interested in how you do with The Canterbury Tales. I remember reading parts of it in high school and always meant to go back some day but never have.

>137 Narilka: Lightbringer has its issues, but I thought it was mostly fun to read. I’d like to find out what you think about it if you get to it. I’m definitely going into The Canterbury Tales with some trepidation!

>136 YouKneeK: I hope to read The memory police when it comes out in paperback, so I will not look behind your spoiler tags yet! I will bear in mind your comments about the lack of resolution/explanation though.

Have you read The professor and the housekeeper by the same author? I rated it 5 stars.

>139 Sakerfalcon: I hope you enjoy it and will look forward to reading your thoughts once you do! This was my first time reading anything by the author, although I would like to try her work again sometime. Does The Professor and the Housekeeper have a similar lack of explanation?

>140 YouKneeK: I read that a coupe of years ago, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I gave it 4 stars. (Apparently I added an extra half for the mathematical content. LOL)

>141 clamairy: Haha, mathematical content surely deserves at least half a star!

>140 YouKneeK: It's a totally different kind of book, showing the relationship between the title characters in a very tender, moving way. It's a short read and very beautiful.

>143 Sakerfalcon: Ah, ok, I might check it out at some point then, thanks!

Having just finished The Miller’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales last night, I'd like to take a moment to say that I now feel like Brent Weeks’ somewhat-juvenile humor was just a warm-up for surviving this one. ;) I admit I laughed a few times, although I felt bad for the much-abused carpenter.

>145 YouKneeK: Survive. That is a good choice of words :-D

>145 YouKneeK: LoL. That sounds great. I've not read the TCT yet. I didn't know it was funny.

>146 BookstoogeLT: Haha, so far it hasn’t been too horrible, although these definitely, absolutely, and most assuredly are not the types of stories I would typically choose to read.

>147 BrokenTune: So far only parts of it have been funny, and some if it has been more of a shocking funny, like “I completely did not expect to read something like that in this particular book! Or any book, really.”

Some more general comments…
I’ve made it through the general prologue plus four of the pilgrims’ prologues/tales. I have one more to go to get to the stopping point I had planned. So far the stories have been mostly based on either romance or just general “swiving”. (For anybody whose education is as lacking in certain terminology as mine is, “swive” is apparently the Middle English equivalent of the F word.) And then there was the rather unexpected moment in the Miller’s Tale when (extreme crudeness warning, as well as a bit of a spoiler) a guy kissed a girl’s naked butt and mistook her pubic hair for a beard, which was his first clue that he wasn’t kissing what he thought he was.

To borrow the narrator’s excuse, don’t blame me, I’m just repeating the story that was told to me! This is why I love going into books as completely ignorant as possible. All I knew was, “a bunch of people tell stories while traveling”. I wasn’t too sure what to expect, but whatever I expected is not what I’m reading and that adds a level of amusement that I would probably not be feeling otherwise.

There's a reason why the bit of The Canterbury Tales that gets taught in beginning Eng Lit is the Prologue! Long time since I read any of it, but I did and do love the Prologue. Here's Neville Coghill (friend of C S Lewis and occasional Inkling) reading the Prologue in Middle English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN3JA1IfbVM.

Let us know when you get to the Wife of Bath's Tale.

>149 haydninvienna: The Wife of Bath’s tale will be the first one I read when I pick back up after my next non-Canterbury book. I’m guessing she must have more shocks in store for me! Thanks for that link, now I know how it should sound as compared to my pathetic stumbling through it. Much nicer. I’ve been reading it out loud (my cat is thrilled) because I find the Middle English easier to understand that way. The downside is that after a long reading session, I can’t stop trying to make my thoughts rhyme. :p

I have to admit I struggled with the General Prologue. This was partly because I was still adjusting to the language, and also because I was overwhelmed by the large cast of characters being introduced all at once, many of whom had titles that blurred together for me. I had trouble trying to understand the individual words, retain that understanding long enough to combine the words into coherent descriptions in my head, and keep all the different characters’ descriptions straight. I read the first half twice and the second half once, and by the end just gave up on retaining it. I Googled and printed a brief summary of the characters to reference instead. I might try reading it again after I finish all the stories since I’ll remember the characters better from reading their stories and I should also be better at following the language by then.

In that respect, The Knight’s Tale was a good starting tale for me. It was rather boring, but it was so simplistic that it made it easy to follow while I improved my familiarity with the language.

>148 YouKneeK: My memories of it are hazy as I read it way back in grad school, but the ribald humor was a shock to me, too. I do remember laughing quite a bit. You're referring to the 'nether eye' incident, yes? LOL

>145 YouKneeK: I only remember that fart jokes were strong in this one. I don´t think I ended up liking this very much, so I´m curious how you will get along with it.

It's one of the classic Eng Lit books that I haven't read - probably because in my day it was an 'A'-Level text (and probably one the nuns disapproved of), plus I did sciences at 'A'-Level. I never read it later on - although I have a modern prose translation of The Faerie Queen which I have read.

I've ploughed my way through Orlando Furioso, Jerusalem Delivered (this because there's a family legend we're descended from him - my paternal grandmother was née Tasso), The Divine Comedy and other classic works, but never The Canterbury Tales.

Still, I've now got what I consider a readable copy in modern English, so I shall be rectifying this at some point.

>153 Maddz: "probably one the nuns disapproved of"
No doubt! At the risk of sounding like an idiot, were you educated in Britain or elsewhere? I would have assumed Catholic schools would be very rare there.

>151 clamairy: LOL, yes, that would be the incident!

>152 Lille_lara: Haha, yes, I have seen at least one of those already. How long ago did you read it? And it’s great to see you here in the Green Dragon!

>153 Maddz: I can’t imagine why the nuns would disapprove of this. ;) I’m curious now if the modern English versions tone down some of the details or make it sound even more explicit for saying the same thing with modern language.

>154 clamairy:, >155 YouKneeK: I was born and (mostly) raised in Britain. There are Protestant orders, AFAIK, but my family were Catholic. The convent school I attended was my mother's old school - they originally took boarders (my mother was one - she was there pre-WWII), but by the time I started in the 1970s they were day pupils only. Catholic schools were quite common - I can recall there were at least 3 in Bournemouth - The Convent of the Cross, St Peters, St Thomas More, and others. There was a big reorganisation in the late 1970s - the Convent & St Thomas More merged with St Peters. The Convent Junior School became St Thomas Garnett and there's a link to Corpus Christi. My junior education was secular, and I only joined the Convent when I was 11.

I'm not sure how much was expurgated in those days; as I said, The Canterbury Tales wasn't studied until 'A' Level and I moved to the boys school to do my 'A's (the convent only did Biology and I was taking Chemistry and Physics as well). I do recall reading Aristophanes - it was part of the Greek Literature in Translation syllabus which some of the other girls took (I did Latin - hence The Aeneid). I don't think Lysistrata was one of the texts - more likely The Birds.

>156 Maddz: I went to a secular grammar school, but we were still issued with the bowdlerized texts of Shakespeare - literally, in this case, as I believe we were using Bowdler's version.

My English teacher was so incensed by this censorship that she issued the class with Xeroxed printouts of the missing passages!

And, to confirm your reply to @clamairy: there were both Anglican and Catholic convents in my (small) home town. But the Anglicans were a closed order, so only the latter has a school attached (which was fee-paying in those days).

>156 Maddz: & >157 -pilgrim-: Thank you for the info. I did some Googling last night for hard data. There are a lot more Catholic schools in the UK than I would have expected.

>158 clamairy: It used to be necessary. Schools were required to provide religious education. Even under the Butler Act (1988), which specified that the act of worship should be "of a broadly Christian nature", the requirement for daily religious assemble remained. So if you did not want your child exposed to Protestant ideas, you had to find a denominational school that fitted your beliefs.

I went to a secular school. We still had the daily assemblies, although the "scriptural" readings were not necessarily Christian. (Sometimes they were even humanist.) The result avoided indoctrination, but the prayers involved were uncomfortable for those who did have a specific religious belief. Parents could withdraw their children from these assemblies - in my personal experience, the only parents who did so we're a small group who had arranged for their children to receive instruction from a Catholic priest in preparation for Confirmation during that time.

>156 Maddz: My mum grew up in Bournemouth! She was born in 1939 and has vague memories of them being bombed out of their home during the war. She went to Bournemouth School for Girls which I believe is still in existence.

>155 YouKneeK: Thanks, it´s great to be here :). I´m still figuring out how to navigate the groups on Librarything and I guess it will take me some time before i dare to post something more elaborate. Your various posts both here and on Goodreads, how to navigate this site, are very helpful. Thank you for that.

As for the Canterbury Tales: Well, I gave it a three star rating, so I must have enjoyed parts of it. Which is a surprise, because I thought I didn´t like it that much. But I´ve read it at the beginning of 2017, which was a difficult time for me, so I´m not surprised that I forgot a lot of things about the books I have read back then.

>160 Sakerfalcon: Small world! Yes, BSG is still going. I was up for Parkstone Grammar but Mum wanted me to go to a Catholic school, so it was agreed that I could go to Boscombe Convent as there was no Catholic grammar in Poole.

My mum was born in 1921 - in 1939 she was attending St James Secretarial College in London before they got evacuated to Bridport in 1940. She got called up after that and joined the WRNS.

>161 Lille_lara: Even in a normal year I have trouble remembering in any great detail many of the things I read 3 years ago. I’ve also found myself remembering a book as being either better or worse than the way I actually rated it.

If you have any questions about using LT, there are a lot of very long-time users here who know it way better than I do and will surely be happy to help! You’ve probably seen it already, but the “Preview” button next to the button you use to post your message will let you see how your post will look before you actually post it, in case you’re trying to do anything fancy and want to make sure it looks the way you intended before anybody else sees it.

Review: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden



The Bear and the Nightingale is a fantasy story set in medieval Rus’ and heavily features Russian fairy tales. Sometimes I like stories based on fairy tales and sometimes I don’t; it depends on how they’re written. They get tedious if they’re too predictable and/or if characters make idiotic decisions because that’s what they’re supposed to do in the original fairy tales. They also have a tendency to be too romancey, usually of the instalove variety, and I hate that. This book, on the other hand, I loved. I'm just not sure how to explain why I liked it so much. It's way easier to explain why I don't like things.

The story focuses primarily on a young girl called Vasya, although it starts a bit before she was born. She’s the granddaughter of a witch and one of the few people who can see spirits, like the various household spirits that guard different things. In this setting, Christianity is gaining popularity and is coming into conflict with the old beliefs. People are starting to treat the spirits as fairy tales at best, or demons at worst.

I really liked the characters. Vasya made a great heroine, brave and independent and kind-hearted and easy to sympathize with. I also really liked some of her siblings. The story held my attention well. There’s some foreshadowing and for the most part there weren’t any big surprises, so this wasn’t exactly an edge-of-my-seat read, but there were some things for which I didn’t know how they would turn out and some characters who didn’t always do what I expected them to do. I was always interested to find out what would happen next. I liked that there’s very little romance in the story, just a few hints of it. I don’t know if the next book might have more or not.

This book is the first in a trilogy, but it tells a complete story. I’ll definitely continue with it as soon as I finish a few more tales in my reading of The Canterbury Tales.

Next Books
I plan to read five more characters’ tales in The Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath, the Friar, the Summoner, the Clerk, and the Merchant. After that, I plan to read The Girl in the Tower which is the second book in this trilogy.

>164 YouKneeK: Glad you loved this! We've got the series, and it's one I actually finished reading and enjoyed too. (At some point I must re-read the Prince Ivan series to see how it compares. There's also a couple of Josepha Sherman titles - Horse of Flame and The Shining Falcon, and Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver as well.)

For the stories themselves, Arthur Ransome's Old Peter's Russian Tales is available for free on Gutenberg. It's a children's book, but has got much of the familiar stories. (For some reason, it's not in my catalogue - I may have a hard copy somewhere around.)

>164 YouKneeK: It is much easier to state what one doesn't like, isn't it? Glad you were able to write this review anyway :-D

>165 Maddz: I’m glad to read you enjoyed the whole series. I’m really looking forward to continuing it. Of the other things you listed, Spinning Silver is the only one I’ve read. I liked that pretty well, but I liked The Bear and the Nightingale better. I was also reminded of Deathless while I was reading, mainly because of the legends since the books themselves aren’t much alike. I liked that much less.

>166 BookstoogeLT: It really is, which makes a book I have no complaints about very difficult to review sometimes! :) It’s also why my reviews often come across as more negative than my star rating implies, because it’s easier to write about the negative things and even harder to explain why I still enjoyed it despite those things.

>164 YouKneeK: Great review! I have read such mixed reviews of this book but it sounds from your summary that this is a book I should have another look at. It's also great to hear that it works as a stand-alone and that there are minimal romance elements.

>168 BrokenTune: Thanks! The main plot takes a little while to get going, so that might be one of the things that put people off if they’re not in the mood for it at the time or if they just don’t like that sort of thing. I’m a sucker for stories that begin by following the main character through a few of their early childhood trials and adventures though, so I was absorbed from the beginning.

>164 YouKneeK: I´m glad you liked The Bear and the Nightingale.

I´ve read a fair chunk of it a way back and the writing was beautiful. But unfortunately, the coming of age elements at the beginning of the story did put me off, as they so often do. I could not get into this book.

>170 Lille_lara: I could see that book being very difficult to get started with if one doesn’t enjoy the coming of age trope.

>164 YouKneeK: So glad you enjoyed The bear and the nightingale! I thought it was fantastic, really well written and plotted. I thought The girl in the tower was an excellent sequel. Now I need to read the final part. Like you I preferred Arden's book to Spinning silver, which was spoiled for me by the problematic romances. I really liked Deathless too.

>172 Sakerfalcon: Have you heard of/read Tasha and the Grey Wolf? I downloaded it, but haven't started it yet as I'm perpetually buried under a load of library loan e-books due day after tomorrow.

>172 Sakerfalcon: Thanks, I’m really looking forward to continuing the series! Agreed on the romances in Spinning Silver.

>173 quondame: I'm not familiar with that title, but will check it out! Thanks for the tip.

>173 quondame: I checked the author page - given the other title listed, I'm not sure I want to know!

>176 Maddz: Uh oh.

>177 -pilgrim-: It gets worse if you check her Amazon page...

>178 Maddz: I love Russian folktales, but somehow I don't think I'd be loving that one...

>164 YouKneeK: Oh, good! So glad you enjoyed this. I finally bought the kindle version the last time it was on sale. I think I'm diving into this one soonish.

>176 Maddz: Well, ha! Not the best look if you're not looking for it. It may delay my already delayed read of the story.

>176 Maddz:, >181 quondame: LOL, I could see where that would raise some concerns.

>180 clamairy: I can’t wait to read what you think if you do!

A brief update while I'm here... It took me 3 days to get through the 31 page prologue (not even the story, which is actually shorter than the prologue) for The Wife of Bath in my ongoing read of The Canterbury Tales. Some personal stuff has caused distractions and an inability to focus on something quite so challenging right now. I’ll put a little more effort into it to see if I can get back into it, but I think I’ll end up putting it aside for a few weeks or more until I can give it better attention. I'd rather read it when I can focus on what I'm reading and get something out of it, otherwise it's just a waste of time.

>176 Maddz: >177 -pilgrim-: >178 Maddz: >179 -pilgrim-: >182 YouKneeK: Nothing to worry about if a smidgen of conventionally raunchy behavior is not taboo.

>183 quondame: Seems to have speeded up its progress through your TBR pile, rather than retarding it, as per >181 quondame:. Hmmm... ;-)

>184 -pilgrim-: LOL! Over in the 75bpy group I, I had finished up a challenge and had a wee gap to fill before starting on the next challenge book.

Review: The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden



The Girl in the Tower is the second book in The Winternight Trilogy, following The Bear and the Nightingale.

The story starts pretty close to where the first book left off. It does get a bit heavier on the romance than the first book did, and that romance is pretty cliché and a tiny bit angsty, but it didn’t ever reach the point where it annoyed me or dominated the story and I enjoyed most of the story quite a lot.

It took me some time to get into it, which is the main reason for the lower rating -- 4.5 stars rounded down to 4 on Goodreads. However, I’m pretty sure my slow start had more to do with external factors than with the book itself. Once I did get into it, it held my attention better than I expected despite everything going on. I’m planning to continue straight on to the third and final book.

Next Book
The Winter of the Witch, the final book in this series. As I mentioned, I did set aside The Canterbury Tales for now. This isn’t a good time for me to give it the attention and effort it requires. I’ll get back to it once I can do that.

Review: The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden



This is the third and final book in The Winternight Trilogy. I’ve enjoyed the whole trilogy and I thought this was a satisfying conclusion.

The author included some notes at the end about the parts that were based on real Russian history from around 1380 and a couple years before. That was very interesting to me. I’m not much of a history buff and don’t tend to seek out history just for history’s sake, but I do enjoy learning a bit of it in this sort of manner, where it’s preceded by a fictional story that’s up my alley and then I’m told what parts were true, different, or speculation.

Although I didn’t really think anything that happened in this story was a major surprise, I would have to think that somebody who has better familiarity with Russian history than I do might find the story a little too predictable. I think there are some things they would know for sure since some characters in the story were based on real historical figures. It’s one thing to suspect what’s going to happen and not know for sure if you’ll be proven correct, and another thing to already know for sure what’s going to happen because you knew what happened to that character in real life. For me though, the story followed by the historical notes made for interesting reading.

One comment for the spoiler tags: I did roll my eyes big time at the “magical sex” scene in which Vasya had sex with Morozko and this magically brought back his memories. They’d never had sex before, so it’s not like it should have been a familiar experience that might trigger a memory. Surely no more so than just seeing and talking to Vasya. Maybe if she’d wounded herself and talked him into healing her, I would have definitely bought into that triggering some memories! Still, it was a fairly small complaint about a story that I otherwise really enjoyed.

Next Book
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre. This is one of this month’s group reads in the group I’m in on Goodreads. I don’t know anything about this book, but I did read and enjoy some of the author’s Star Trek novels many years ago, and I think some of the movie novelizations also. It will be interesting to try some of her original work.

>187 YouKneeK: Good luck with McIntyre. I've only read her star wars stuff and my goodness, it was some of the worst writing and plotting in the Star Wars EU (and that is saying something in that franchise!).

>188 BookstoogeLT: Uhoh! I've noticed there seems to be more comments than usual in the GR group read threads for that book, although I'm staying out of them myself until I finish the book. Usually that happens with the more controversial books where the people who like/dislike it are more evenly split.

> 187 So the whole series has worked out well for you? That is fantastic!

>187 YouKneeK: I read that book a long time ago and re-read it a few years back, it held up fairly well. I'm glad to see you are reading it, I hope you enjoy it.

>187 YouKneeK: Vonda McIntyre makes my list of Top 10 authors. She tended toward 'hard SF', (not so much in Dreamsnake), so may not appeal as much to readers that prefer fantasy or are not much into the harder stylings of sci-fi, (I'll admit to also being put off by all the infodumps and over-'splaining of scientific concepts that are often a hallmark of hard SF, (eye-roll at Kim Stanley Robinson)), but McIntyre manages to keep the character-driven aspects of her stories going while also keeping the astrophysics relatively (see what I did there? ;) realistic.

McIntyre also wrote one of my favorite opening sentences in SF: "She gave her heart quite willingly", is a seemingly standard opening if the story were a romance but, in Superluminal it is weighted with extra meaning that quickly comes clear in the ensuing paragraphs - and thereby puts a completely different spin on that sentence.

I hope you enjoy your read of Dreamsnake. I'll be watching for your review here once you finish.

>187 YouKneeK: Dreamsnake is a work that is at least as important historically as it is for writing or content, probably more. I was super impressed by the stories as they came out and it was lovely to be there when she accepted the Hugo award, but I can't even remember for whom I voted that year.

>190 BrokenTune: Yes, I really enjoyed the whole Katherine Arden series. I hope you'll enjoy it also once you try it! It does get quite a bit more romance-y in the 2nd and 3rd books, though. I liked the 1st book best, but still got a lot of enjoyment out of the other two.

>191 Karlstar:, >192 ScoLgo:, >193 quondame: I read the first couple of chapters today. The e-book edition I have doesn’t show page #’s, but based on % I’m guessing that’s a little under 50 pages. It’s too soon to really form any opinions, but so far I’m enjoying it and it’s holding my attention well when I have time to read it.

>192 ScoLgo: I read a couple KSR books (Red Mars and Green Mars) and had mixed feelings about them. There were things I liked, but the many descriptions of craters in the first book and lichen in the second book did get to be a bit much and contributed to my decision to abandon the series after the 2nd book. I love it when an author can do a better job of balancing the hard science with an enjoyable story and interesting characters.

Review: Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre



Dreamsnake is a standalone novel set in Earth’s distant future, at some point after a nuclear war, featuring a young woman named Snake. Snake is a healer, and healers use snakes to heal illnesses such as tumors and infections. The titular Dreamsnake is a special and rare snake used to help a patient have pleasant dreams or, if there’s nothing that can be done to save that patient, to help them die without pain.

I have a few complaints, but this was an interesting and fast read. I enjoyed the characters and I enjoyed the story. I particularly liked Melissa. I liked Snake too, with the brief exception of one very squicky thing she said to a 12-year-old girl, which I guess was supposed to fit within the cultural setting, but that setting wasn’t developed anywhere near well enough for me to accept her suggestion as appropriate even in the context of the fictional setting.

That leads to one of my other complaints -- the world-building. The setting was really interesting and hinted at all sorts of cool elements, but I was left wanting more. I wanted to know more of the world’s history, and especially more about the city and the offworlders who visited it, and the source of the alien creatures and plants. I couldn’t tell if the author had a detailed backstory in mind as she wrote the novel and just didn’t want to risk too much exposition, or if she just tossed in random elements she thought sounded appealing and that would help drive her plot where she wanted it to go.

On the complaint side, I also could have really done without the whole side plot in which a shared snake wrestling event leads to the kind of instalove that could drive a man to travel across a desert and beyond, in search of a girl he’d known for like a day or two. That whole thing was just ridiculous to me, and the story would have worked better without it.

I’m probably making this book sound really bad, because like I’ve said before it’s a lot easier for me to explain the things I dislike than it is to explain the things I liked, but I really did enjoy it a lot. The instalove side plot was only a small portion of the story, and the world-building helped add interest to the story even though I was left a little unsatisfied due to its lack of depth. The main thing is that I stayed interested in the story throughout and was satisfied with how it was wrapped up.

Next Book
Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older. This is the fantasy group read for August in the GR group I’m in. I don’t normally join in when they’re reading series books since that means potentially fitting more than one book into my schedule, but it’s a fairly short and apparently complete series, and if I don’t care for it then I’ll only read the first book anyway.

>195 YouKneeK: Glad to hear you liked Dreamsnake! McIntyre's first published novel, The Exile Waiting, is set in - and somewhat introduces - the same world as Dreamsnake. However, being a first novel, it exhibits even more issues, (I won't say more because spoilers). It's a fast-paced read with lots going on in just over 200 pages, but I'm not sure it adds much world-building to what you just read, since it mostly takes place in and around 'Center', and with a completely different cast of characters. Her novelette, Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand was later expanded into the full-length Dreamsnake novel. I have not yet read the novelette but I doubt it would add much, being a shorter version.

>196 ScoLgo: Oh, interesting, I didn’t know she had another novel set on the same world. I might have to check that out at some point. The GR group discussion threads had some comments about Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand. From what people were saying there, the first chapter of Dreamsnake was the entire content of that original novelette.

Review: Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older



I’m glad that’s over with. I’m not sure how much of it was me and my own external circumstances and how much of it was the book, but this became a slog for me by the end even though it’s pretty short. I did enjoy the previous few books I read quite a bit despite similar circumstances, so I think it was at least partly the book.

The story focuses on Sierra, a teenage artist living in Brooklyn. She’s painting a mural on a tower in her neighborhood when she starts to notice one of the other murals changing expressions and even weeping. It also seems to be fading faster than one would expect. Then she’s at a party and a zombie guy starts chasing her. Sierra has no idea what’s going on, and nobody who seems to have any information will tell her anything.

I thought the story started off well. I liked Sierra, I liked the depiction of Brooklyn culture, and I was really interested in the hint of magical art. I think the first thing that started to annoy me was the way the book relies heavily on the “everybody has answers but nobody will give them to the main character so she stumbles around confused and endangered for no good reason” device. This really got on my nerves. Then there’s the grandfather who can’t speak but manages to get out just enough words to move the plot forward a bit.

I’m not sure exactly what made me decide I was bored, but as the story progressed, it held my interest less and less. The magic powers seemed poorly defined. As an example, in the beginning we see murals with changing expressions, then we see them dancing on walls (I think, unless I misinterpreted that part and they left the walls to dance – I don't care enough to look it back up), and then suddenly we have people making chalk drawings on sidewalks that can get up and run off. So what made the murals stay put day in and day out? What made other drawings decide to get up and go? Both types were apparently imbued with spirits. I also thought the powers portrayed by the end showed an unrealistic level of growth.

But really, I’ve had worse complaints about books I’ve liked better. I don’t think this was a bad book and I can’t put my finger on why I didn’t like it more. It just didn’t hold my attention and there wasn’t anything I really loved about it enough to offset the things that annoyed me. I’m giving this 2.5 stars, and rounding down to 2 on Goodreads.

Next Book
Hyperion by Dan Simmons, the first book in the Hyperion Cantos series.

>198 YouKneeK: Ouch.

I am very curious to hear of your experience with Hyperion! Please keep us in the loop while you're reading it, if you can.

>198 YouKneeK: Woo, Hyperion! What a great sci-fi read. I hope you think so too. :)

> 198 I read Older's Salsa Nocturna and I felt it really dragged, and I'm sure at some point I lost track of what the story was, even tho I really liked the concept of what he working on and the voice of narration of the stories.

>198 YouKneeK: I hope you have The Fall of Hyperion handy. It's not really necessary to read all four books right in a row but Hyperion just... ends...

... and The Fall of Hyperion then resumes the narrative, which does conclude satisfactorily at the end of the 2nd book.

>199 clamairy:, >200 Karlstar: Thanks. I think I’m likely to be very slow on reading/finishing it, even if I like it. If I stall out on it altogether, I’ll try again at a better time because I’ve heard a lot of praise for it and I really want to give it a fair shot.

>201 BrokenTune: That does sound similar to my experience with Shadowshaper -- at least the dragging part, and liking the concept and the voice of the narrator.

>202 ScoLgo: Thanks for the forewarning about book 1 not being concluded until book 2! I do plan to read the whole series all in a row if I enjoy it enough to continue with it. Since I read primarily on my Kindle, I usually don’t buy series books in advance unless they go on sale and I’m really confident it’s something I’ll like, but that’s because I can buy them instantly after I’m sure I want to read it.

Hyperion is on my TBR pile so I will look forward to your review!

>204 Sakerfalcon: Here’s hoping we both enjoy it! :) I managed something like 1 page yesterday, which has nothing to do with the book, but I expect this one will take me a while.

Enjoy Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. I found the Endymion duology to be, um, not as good (to be generous). I did enjoy the Hyperion duology enough to buy an omnibus hardcover from the sfbc back in the day...

>206 BookstoogeLT: Six days later and I still haven’t made it past the first couple pages, but I should be able to start reading again soon. Thanks for the warning about the Endymion books; if I love the Hyperion books, I’ll try to keep my Endymion expectations lower.

>207 YouKneeK: Is that because of the book or because of life? It may just be that Simmons isn't for you. I know he's not for me outside of Hyperion. I think I tried another one of his after these and quickly gave up and never bothered to record it.

>208 BookstoogeLT: It’s purely because of life. I may find he’s not for me, but I haven’t read enough of it with enough concentration to decide. I did finally make it through the prologue today and it seems interesting so far.

>208 BookstoogeLT: I've loved every Simmons I've read so far except for Hyperion. I got about 150 pages in and still didn't like any of the characters. Maybe it was just over my head; I've read wonderful reviews of it but it just never grabbed me no matter how much effort i put in. Its like there are two Simmons fandoms and you are in one or the other....

>209 YouKneeK: Don't give up on it yet! It takes a while, there is a lot going on in the beginning of that series.

>210 Darth-Heather: That would explain a lot!

>211 Karlstar: I don’t plan to. Like I mentioned in >209 YouKneeK:, what I’ve read seems interesting so far. I read a little more yesterday and I’m still interested, but sometimes hobbies have to take a back seat to more important things. Nothing about this book strikes me as difficult to get into. Like I said in >209 YouKneeK:, my slow reading pace with it is purely because of life.

I’m glad I was at least able to get through the first few parts of Canterbury Tales before Hell Month started, because I’ve been able to appreciate some of the parallels the beginning of Chapter 1 in Hyperion has with The Prologue in Canterbury Tales. I’ll probably be able to get back to Canterbury Tales after the next book or two. I plan to re-read the Wife of Bath’s prologue before moving on, because I got absolutely nothing out of it before stalling out.

I just wanted to post something in my thread to note that I’m still here and still reading – slowly. I’m almost halfway through Hyperion and still enjoying it. Eventually I expect my reading speed will pick back up to a more normal state, and it’s definitely better than it was a couple weeks ago, but I’m probably going to be slow for a while.

>214 YouKneeK: Glad you are still reading it! Hopefully it is work that's keeping you from reading and not problems.

>215 Karlstar: I finished the 4th chapter and story list night, the scholar’s tale. (The scholar is the character with the baby if that helps jog anybody's memory.) I think that was my favorite so far, even though I guessed where it was going from the beginning.

I like how all the stories have a slight hint of creepiness to them. I’ve had his The Terror on my Kindle for years but have never gotten around to it because it’s on the long side (about 950 pages) and horror, depending on the type of story, tends to get repetitive and tedious to me so I was afraid it would be 950 pages of tedium. I’m a little more interested in trying it now, though. Of course, if >210 Darth-Heather:’s theory is correct, then maybe I should avoid it. ;) Any opinions on it from anyone here?

>217 Karlstar: I've had mixed results with Mr. Simmons non-scifi. Drood was really strange and not great. The Abominable, which is more of a mystery/thriller, was fantastic, but probably not for everyone. The Crook Factory was more historical fiction and I liked it. I've picked up and restarted Black Hills multiple times. I haven't read any outright horror in years, not since Pet Sematary, for which I blame (or thank) Mr. King.

>217 Karlstar: I was lent a copy of Pet Sematary by my then boyfriend. After the lovingly detailed description of the decomposing car smash victim, I decided this sort of thing was not for me. I extracted a synopsis of the rest of they plot from my boyfriend, and handed him back the book.

I have never picked up a book labelled "horror", with a first publication date in the 20th century since.

>218 -pilgrim-: Stephen King quote from Danse Macabre, his dissertation on writing horror novels...

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion, and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”

So yeah... Pet Sematary was a novel where he was reduced to resorting to 'The Gross-out' a few times... ;-)

>219 ScoLgo: I am not really into the genre as a whole. But if I do want chills, M. R. James is more my style.

The boyfriend's synopsis justified the gross-out as a deliberate way of emphasising that the horrible concepts revealed later on were much, much worse than mere revulsion.

I prefer your explanation. ;-)

>219 ScoLgo: I´ve read The Running Man by King a couple of years ago, which, at its core, is a dystopian novel. But then, on the second to last page of the book, he turned it into the most disturbing and disgusting kind of torture porn without any discernable reason to do so. After having read that book, I´m convinced that King gets some kind of kick out of writing gore and disgusting scenes and I´m not sure what this tells about him as an author.

>216 YouKneeK: I´m one of the weird people who liked both Hyperion and its sequel and The Terror. The latter has the added benefit of having one of my favorite settings ever, the Arctic. And it really got me interested in the Franklin Expedition in general. I wasn´t overly fond of the ending of The Terror, though.

>217 Karlstar:, >218 -pilgrim-:, >219 ScoLgo: I enjoyed reading horror when I was somewhere around the 8-12 age range, Pet Sematary being one of the books I definitely remember reading. The Shining was another. I remember thinking both were pretty scary at that age, but when I re-read The Shining as an adult (in preparation for reading the sequel), I couldn’t really understand why I’d found it scary. Part of the problem was probably familiarity, since the few parts that I might have found creepy weren’t scary anymore because those were the parts I remembered best. Even so, horror seems a lot less effective on me as an adult in general, which I guess isn't surprising.

>221 Lille_lara: I hope I prove to be the same and enjoy both! I’m often annoyed by the endings of horror stories, which is another reason I don’t read them as much anymore, so I won’t be surprised if I have the same reaction to the end of The Terror. I probably won’t read it until 2022 at the earliest though. I'll read series books together, but otherwise I like to wait at least a year between reading an author's works.

>217 Karlstar: Bummer about Drood. I'm going to be reading that in conjuction with my re-read of The Mystery of Edwin Drood this year. I'll lower my expectations :-D

>223 BookstoogeLT: You've been warned!

I finished Hyperion last night and will have my review up shortly, but first I'm going to start a new thread in the hopes that I've left myself enough time to make it to 151 in the new thread by the end of the year despite my slower reading/posting pace!

>225 YouKneeK: No worries. WE can make it 151 easy peasy...

>226 BookstoogeLT: LOL, I definitely believe that!