Miscellaneous Chatter > Literature
Yearly Reading Targets 2020
Wilshire:
Congrats on reading a phone-book ;).
Madness:
On a fucking phone, man! :(
Trending toward Seppuku.
Wilshire:
The Gap into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge by Stephen Donaldson (2)
Ugh. I want to like this book/series. There's a lot of narrative progression and worldbuilding potential, cool aliens and deep state politics, cyborgs, etc. All the trappings of entertaining scifi... But for fuck's sake does every POV character need to spend the majority of the book being raped repeatedly? If you took out all that in the first two books you'd probably not have enough narrative left to publish a book. There are only 2 POV characters, and both spend the vast majority of the time being treated violently - physically, emotionally, and sexually - both in "present time" of the book and in "the past".
Its exhausting to read, and I'm probably going to abandon it at this point. Its not a bad book if you can get past all the needless assault, the writing is pretty good and there's enough of everything else to make it worth reading. So I'm not going to say its not worth people reading, but I think I'm going to tap out.
Wilshire:
Six Sacred Swords by Andrew Rowe (3)
Not his best book, but largely because its not a true sequel. It tells the story of one of the side characters, but it felt too inconsequential to be engaging. True to form though, its funny and a fun quick read, but skip-able in the grand scheme of the series.
Wilshire:
The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (4)
Not the biggest fan of the setting, theme, or hook. Modern day fantasy, murder mystery, ivy league secret societies, respectively.
That said, it still was a very well written book that was enjoyable to read. I can understand why it got the attention that it did last year (2019), though I don't think it deserved to be goodreads "best fantasy of the year". The prose is great, and is what makes it worth reading. Bardugo was able to keep me interested in the book despite what I said above, and I think that's pretty impressive.
So if you like the setting/theme/hook above, definitely check this out. Its also set up for a sequel which could go an interesting direction, and I think I liked Ninth House enough to check it out whenever it gets released.
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