Kyle Erickson
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this as a reading experience but I DO know that I will never read a John Keats poem in my whole life, purely out of spite. Eat your heart out, Dan Simmons.
This would probably be a one or two star read if it wasn't for the Scholar stuff.
The Wheel of Time has one of the best endings I've ever read, to a series I mostly feel very mixed about. But damn. What an experience. I'm glad I didn't completely throw in the towel after book five like I planned. The second half of A Memory of Light are some of the best scenes I've read anywhere
9.5/10
This book is beloved by many, and I was excited to finally read it. Unfortunately, the hype train missed me on this one. It is a very heavy book, dealing with heavy topics, such as rape, assault, poverty, child abuse, war etc. The prose is really well done, and I think the author does a great job making Afghanistan come alive in all the necessary detail.
However, the narrative is where this book loses me. The narrator is just so unlikeable at every turn, and is telling the story in an overdramatic, insufferable way. The plot itself is relatively unbelievable, but also very obvious and I called every “twist” way beforehand. There was also way too much incredible convenience- a boy who rapes someone in front of the MC grows up to be a Taliban member who just so happens to be in the perfect spot to obstruct the MC's goals 20 years later- and the way this is resolved is absolutely ridiculous. This was my least favorite part of the novel.
Overall, I did not enjoy my time reading this, but there were some poignant bits and the ending was pretty well done. I can see why other people loved this book, there were just things I personally couldn't get past.
This book is absolutely ridiculous and probably not good however it is very entertaining so I guess it was worthwhile. A film version of this would probably be a campy success.
Brent Butt's narration skills for sociopaths are not good.
“What is a man's life worth?”
“The slavemasters say one is worth about two emerald broams.”
“And what do you say?”
“A life is priceless.”
It took me five months of casually dipping into The Way of Kings in between other books to finish my reread. Well, not true. It took me five months to read the first half. It took me three days to read the second half. Oops.
The reread continues, to much hype. The Pale Horseman is not as good as book 1, but only barely. The main thing for me is just that Uhtred is at his most unlikeable, out of probably the whole series, in this one, and many of the best characters only get brief appearances. There's an entire plotline in this that the show cut out, that I totally forgot about
This reread is mostly going to continue to remind me what a travesty it was that the show butchered my man Steapa. What a great character. Pyrlig, too, but not as much as Steapa.
9.5/10
Look, is this series peak literature? Perhaps not.
Does Uhtred son of Uhtred (son of Uhtred) know how to spin a tale that gets me hyped as fuck? Absolutely.
It's been 8 years since I read this book and several years since War Lord came out and I've read anything following Uhtred. This book reminds me why he's one of my favorite characters and why this series gripped me so much.
Also Cornwell writes the best battle scenes. For sure. The end of this book I knew what was going to happen and I still was sitting there like “holy shit”.
Wyrd bið ful aræd!
9/10 or 4.5/5 for those who insist on stars.
This book is still really good. The ending is excellent. The melancholy is well done. The writing is still moving and evocative. But it's my least favorite due to some plot decisions that I just didn't love. I still highly recommend this trilogy and it is now my go-to recommendation for people who like fantasy to try historical fiction.
And so, after a little over a year, my journey through the (current) Cosmere has ended, and now my watch begins.
I ended with Elantris because it was his first novel and everyone told me it was subpar or clunky. Then people told me I should have started with it because going backwards is a let down.
I like Atul Gawande, and so I probably gave this one more leeway than I would have otherwise. I think Gawande has a good premise and he did a good job convincing me of that hypothesis, I just don't know that the book justified itself overall. But Gawande is a decent writer and did make me think about some things and bring awareness to just how easy it is for people to forget asinine or everyday things. I'll definitely consider using checklists more often, although thankfully there are no lives on the line if I don't do so.
The worst book I have ever read.
Not my least favorite, though, because Catcher in the Rye and Ready Player Two exist. But this book is definitely worse.
Beyond the real world repercussions, this book is just utter garbage. It is an affront to literature. To art. To the written word. It's an affront to the actual feeling of rage. Rage deserves better than to have this book named after it. I cannot believe Stephen King wrote this. I also can't believe the rating for From a Buick 8 is like .4 less than this paper concussion. This should never have been published, this should have never been shown to publishers. This should have embarrassed King too much to ever show someone. Before the real world repercussions.
As for those, well. King was absolutely right to let this be out of print. Normally when people shoot up schools and the media points out everything they've ever owned as a possible cause, I roll my eyes. “What, the shooter liked Hubba Bubba Max?! Burn it all!”. But this book glorifies school shooting in such a fucking insane way that I am just completely perplexed at the decision to write this. Zero stars. Negative one stars, actually, for causing real world harm.
This book made me a worse person. Prior me had hope in humanity. It's gone now
My initial, immediate after finishing thoughts-
I started Changes 31 hours ago. That included 9 hours of work and 8 hours of sleep. And it is with my whole heart that I say: that was one of the best books I've read in my life. I did not wish to be this person; I wished to be a disbeliever. I wanted to sit here and say, “Changes, meh”. Alas, Dresden mania has taken me. Allow me to officially welcome myself into the Loud Screaming Stage of Dresden Fandom: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH WHY WAS THIS BOOK SO FUCKING GOOD IT DEFIES ALL SENSE IT WAS ESSENTIALLY PERFECT
Really entertaining and fun memoir! Henry Winkler seems like a great person and his stories are very good. I feel like he has tried to maintain integrity in a cut throat business and people think very well of him so I'm happy for all his success and this book was very readable.
Winkler read the audiobook himself and was a delight, injecting a lot of humor and pathos into the material.
So, this book was a disappointment to me. I don't think it's a bad book, in fact I think Baldree wrote a better plot to this book, and some of the descriptions and dialogue is better than L&L.
There are two main reasons this one didn't work for me as well. The first is the decision to make it a prequel. I'm not opposed to prequels, and perhaps the lower stakes of L&L made it seem like another low stakes story but earlier could be thought as a good idea. But low stakes books still HAVE stakes - L&L had plenty of stakes. It was just, “are these two characters going to get along”, “is Viv's coffeeshop going to work”, etc.
This one- we know Viv moves on from these characters and there is not really a fundamental shift in her character throughout this that makes her journey satisfying. She...learns to like reading, I guess? Beyond that, the stakes of this book are actually higher - there is danger and conspiracy in this book to a higher degree than in the original- but simultaneously lower, because we know everything is fine at the start of L&L. So I was mostly just letting events happen with no fanfare.
The second reason, I think, is more on me than the book, but I don't think a bookstore is as good of a setting, or maybe Baldree didn't write the book sections as interestingly. It felt like preaching to the choir, people reading this book obviously like books. So having a bookstore owner wax pontific about how reading is so fun just makes me go, “yeah, duh” more than Viv trying to convince people that coffee tastes good. None of the book talk is particularly inspiring, it's mostly like “wait, people read mystery novels? Whatever for?!?!?” “Well, because the ACT of READING a STORY is MAGIC, Viv!”
Finally, the epilogue is vexing to me. I don't understand why it's in this book. The epilogue is a flashforward to after the ending of Legends and Lattes. And it is exclusively designed for people who have read both books. It's utterly meaningless to this book and basically spoils the end of L&L, which being a prequel is fine, but some people will read chronologically. It's mostly to set up a third book, which could have been done a different way, I think.
6/10
This book is about an undercover cop who is trying to bust alligator poachers.
Some of it was very interesting, but then it would get bogged down a little with extrenous details. The middle especially could have been trimmed a little.
The cop tried to understand why the poachers were doing what they were doing which threw in some good morality questions.
I was already pretty sure I was over this series, but it's been two years and they're short so I gave it a chance. Alas, I just didn't really care about anybody or anything in this novella. It might have been good, but 7 books into a series I want some sort of forward momentum or characters to care about besides a sassy AI-bot and I have never gotten that. But it's good to know for sure that this series is not really my thing any longer.
An massive improvement to me over Age of Ash, which I think was very well written but I really didn't like the character we were following. This book takes place across the same time period, but due to my disinterest in AoA and the time it's been since I've tried it, I didn't catch a single reference to the first book. So it works perfectly well on its own.
Abraham is excellent at making realistic characters and having all their decisions make sense. He is great with dialogue. My failure to connect here is mostly with the plot, which I didn't think gripped me at all until the last third. I will definitely read the third one and will probably do a full series reread before tackling it when it comes out.
This book was great. I think Yasuke is an awesome character to showcase in a novel and Shreve did an excellent job making his voice very distinct and the story emotional.
The book is told in alternating chapters for a large portion of it, with Yasuke's time in Japan with Nobunaga Oda and when he is first taken as a slave. The flashbacks were less interesting to me, but always provided relevant poignancy to the Japan timeline.
For a book about samurai, I expected more action, but Shreve kept a reserved hand here. The action is good, but it's way more about character introspection and Yasuke learning who he is and how Japan works, as well as his place there.
Really liked the ending! Highly recommend checking this out.
This book was decent, some really good parts mixed with some not as good for me personally.
It follows four POVs, all co-mingled around Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis, and his quest to subdue the middle East. The twist here is that all the POVs (besides Hulegu's) are trying to prevent him, one way or another. I really liked three of the POVs, particularly Hulegu's which dealt with the political and cultural politics back in Mongolia with his brothers as well as his desire to fulfill his grandfather's wishes.
Kaivon's POV was also really good; a Persian general turned bodyguard for Hulegu who wishes to undermine him. Where this book fell apart for me is almost everything to do with the fourth POV; Temujin.
Temujin is one of Hulegu's sons and the one that everyone hates. My first issue is that people's views of Temujin felt a bit too modern or...not Mongolian enough? They hate him because he's fat. Okay. I am not an expert on Mongolia but Kublai Khan is in this book and a few decades later he is supposedly very large and it's not treated as a big problem. There's also a rumor that Subutai was fat, even if it's untrue the evidence suggests this wouldn't be a big issue with the Mongols. The second reason they hate him is because he's not a fighter. This again feels like someone trying to think of WHY a strong warrior would hate their son and not considering cultural context. If this was Genghis's generation or before, sure. But Genghis' whole thing was finding uses for people that suited their talents. His brother Temuge was not a good fighter, but was a highly trusted administrator and counsellor in the khanate. So everything to do with why Temujin was utterly rejected just fell flat for me.
Beyond that, I found his internal struggle to be not very compelling. He flips switches on his father on a dime and his sensibilities feel so modern that it's jarring. Finally, most of his story doesn't get started until near the very end; he basically spins his wheels until 80% into this book, and even then, he is basically just training. I'm sure there was a way to bring this forward or make his storyline more dynamic in this book. Kokachin's storyline also had a lot of training, but it has way more going on to keep it interesting. Temujin's just didn't do it for me. I will read the sequel though; the combat and political stuff in this book was good, and the set-up seems over.