Kochsalz

Senlin Ascends is definitely worth reading. The prose is beautiful, the steampunk-ish setting of the Tower of Babel is unique, and the protagonist's development as he is confronted with the reality of the tower as he climbs it floor by floor is well executed. It's not quite a walter white to heisenberg, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's where the series is headed.

Sadly, the weirdness of everything going on in the Tower stops being interesting after one or two floors, and just seems nonsensical. There are a few explanations why things work the way they do, and they don't make any sense if you think about them for a minute. This might be intentional setup for a twist in the sequels, though. I hope it is, but I won't continue the series to find out.

The character writing is mostly good, except for the female characters. Male characters get complex motivations and origins, women range from stereotypical cutouts to objects without agency. With cleavage, of course. Everything about the relationship between the protagonist and his lost wife was a bit uncomfortable to read.

The drastic increase in fight scenes in the last third also felt out of place.

DNF after about 3 hours of the audiobook.

If I were to write a review the way Fredrick Backman wrote this book, I'd be sure to include a neat summary of the last 10 years of my life, the places I've visited, the people I like or dislike in the neighborhood, and what my favorite brand of dental floss is. Oh, and of course I would repeat my involvement with the local sports club in every other sentence, without ever actually telling you anything about the themes or story of this book.

But I won't.

Painful to read. Unlikable and inconsistent characters, most of them built from pieces “strongly influenced” by popular fantasy novels, a nonexistent plot, uninteresting worldbuilding, plot armor, repetitive prose. If your main character solves problems by not sleeping for a week and really hanging in there for two sentences, that's just terrible writing. It happens multiple times throughout this ‘book'.

The first half was really good, but once the story reaches the inevitable twist that everyone saw coming from miles away, it turns into an endless repetition of the same dialogue which boils down to something like this:

“Doing the evil thing is evil! Why is everyone doing the evil thing?!”
“Because religion/money/tradition/racism. you don't understand because you're too full of yourself/a woman/of an inferior race.”

A lot of this could have been cut, along with the unnecessary romance. There are good ideas about the interplay of tradition, responsibility and guilt in a scenario like this, but the author doesn't trust readers to understand them without having characters say them out loud over and over again.

The City of Brass is certainly unique as far as the setting is concerned, and that is by far its strongest selling point. The author put a lot of effort into this world and it shows.

The plot and the characters' development seemed weirdly at odds with each other. The romantic relationship between two of the major characters is poorly set up, about as healthy of a relationship as in 50 Shades of Grey, and keeps ruining the otherwise totally serviceable plot of political scheming among immortal djinn.

The prose is decent, with some excellent lines of dialogue here and there, but nothing that keeps you engaged on its own.

I won't continue this series, but I'd still call my time with this book well spent.

First off, the good:

Lynch's prose is as good as ever, and remains the defining quality of the series. I also liked the relation between Locke and Sabetha in general, even though the way it is explored in the novel is pretty terrible.

Now, the bad:
There are two plots in this book, one set in the present, one in Locke's childhood. The problem with this split is that it is entirely unnecessary. Both of them revolve around Locke and Sabetha's relationship, so there is really no point to the flashback-plot because it doesn't add anything. To make things worse, both parts lack tension because the effective outcome is foreseeable from the very beginning.

Admittedly, both books one and two of the series had plot-related issues and stood on the shoulders of engaging characters and fantastic prose. The prose is still there, but the characters aren't, most importantly Jean. He is reduced to the role of a simple henchman to do Locke's bidding, and the wonderful friendship between him and Locke that was built up beautifully in the previous novels is just... gone. Instead we finally get to see Sabetha in action, and the difficult and incredibly frustrating (both for Locke and the reader) relationship she and Locke have. Which would be fine if the book had anything else to offer, perhaps in the flashback chapters that take up half the book and serve no purpose to the story or the characters.

At the end of the day (and the book) I was left thoroughly disappointed.

This book is a mess. Nothing makes sense, nothing is relevant to the plot except for the last 50 pages. The Skull Throne was disappointing, but this novel reaches uncharted grounds of terrible.

Don't read this book, you're much better off dropping the Demon Cycle after book 3 and pretending it had a decent ending. Whatever your headcanon may be, it's better than this.

Red Rising totally lost me half way through, after it turned into the hunger games for no reason. DNF at about two thirds.

There are many layers to this book, and way too many pages. Only the first and last 100 pages (the appendix) worked for me, and most of the things it tries to do bored me.

House of Leaves is a great satire of “academic” writing. It's also a horror story that isn't scary or unsettling, and a bunch of experimental storytelling that should have ended after 100 pages. The novelty and the meta-cleverness of it all wears off eventually, and at that point I felt like I was actually forcing myself to read some anthropological nonsense.

This book (series) has sooo many cool or interesting ideas about life, the universe, and everything, but that's all it is. It's just a collection of grand ideas. No real characters, no real plot, no quality in the prose (this might be better in the Chinese original). Constant sexism. Terrible depictions of mental illness.

It's basically a list of things that happen across centuries, including lots of descriptions of all the technology along the way. Everything at smaller scale is poorly done and feels like the author is writing about things he doesn't really know.

This and the previous two books (Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven) could have been a single medium-length novel, cutting all the unnecessary teen drama, incredibly detailed and repetitive descriptions of dragon tending, tons of redundant exposition and maybe a few POVs. There's excellent stuff in each of these, but it is outweighed by all the boredom in between.

This one doesn't even have a plot.

Cut 50-70 pages of nothing and this could have been good. As it stands, it is very hard to get through most of it, which even Rothfuss himself is aware of but decided to keep that way.