Jurjen

Much like all DCC books before it, this was quite a lot of fun. I will say that this is the first book in the series in a while where there are cracks showing.

As it has been for the last 3-4 books, the meta-narrative part of the story is the most fun and engaging, though the scope of the plot, and all the elements that play a part in it, is kind of starting to balloon. I appreciate the story growing more complex, but there are absolute growing pains. The humour is a bit hit or miss with Dinniman. I thought it was mostly a miss in Operation Bounce House, and it's generally always a miss with Samantha (who, unfortunately, is Dinniman's favourite character to write [she is my least favourite character to read]), though Donut, Prepotente, and now Penny as well are hits.

I think overall this was one of the weaker floors in the series, and the first 75% of the story was some of the weaker DCC stuff because of it, but the ending was very strong.

Overall I did definitely enjoy it, but I hope that this book isn't a sign of the series going in a bad direction.

It's been a while since Fonda Lee's last full-length solo novel released, which was Jade Legacy about 3.5 years ago (covid time is so fake). Jade Legacy being my favourite book of all, Greenbone Saga being my favourite series of all time, and her book with Shannon Lee falling a bit flat, Isako had a lot to live up to. And it was great!

The emotional heart of this story is the parallel journey of two contractors struggling to live by a code, one young and one old. Both increasingly growing disillusioned. As you can expect, Fonda Lee's character writing is on-point, and I was invested in both their stories immediately. Combined with interesting and complex secondary characters, the whole cast of this book meets the standard she set with Greenbone Saga.

The story is about a contractor on her last mission before resignation (which entails voluntary suicide to spare resources for humanity on a world with great scarcity), in which she gets embroiled in the mysterious fate of her old student, who is a contractor to the big rising star in The Company. Overall the narrative is very well crafted, and its many twists foreshadowed quite well. Some twists I was able to guess, others blindsided me. Both worked! The pacing is solid, the narrative structure interesting and constantly engaging (though I expect this part to be perhaps a little more of a contentious thing among fans), and the ending worked really well.

Lastly, worldbuilding. What made the world of Greenbone Saga so interesting is that it felt so lived in. From macroeconomics, to microeconomics, to how finance relates to politics, to geopolitics, to car brands, food and technology. There's such attention to detail in those books, and I was gladdened to see that Fonda Lee paid just as much attention to crafting the world in this story.

Really looking forward to whatever next project she's working on! Fonda Lee is an insta-buy.

The Faith of Beasts is an incredibly successful sequel to The Mercy of Gods, and has got me really excited to see how Franck and Abraham wrap the trilogy up in the final book in The Captive's War trilogy.

This installment basically does everything I wanted it to after b1. It advances the character work, setting and plot in really interesting and satisfying, with tons of surprises spersed in. I particularly enjoyed the story's musings on the conflict between rejecting oppression vs trying to make the best of it, in a setting with so much immediate seemingly arbitrary violence.

Learning more and more about how the Carryx think, and how their society is structured was great–they really do feel alien. Seeing the Carryx in a great amount of detail contrasted at just the faintest hints of the deathless enemy is also a cool way to frame the wider conflict of this story.

Overall I have no notes and no complaints. Really not a lot to critique about The Faith of Beasts. This series is very different to The Expanse, but I think it's just as good, if not better.

The first two Mark Lawrence books I read, being the first two books in the Library Trilogy, I thought were pretty fantastic. I fell in love with its setting, story and most of all its characters. The Book That Held Her Heart, the final book in the trilogy, was probably the most disappointing book I had ever read. I kept thinking: “why is any of this happening? Why is the story *this*?

Unfortunately, Daughter of Crows continues that streak, as its narrative, especially in the first half of the story, is a hot mess. The Rue POV chapters for the first 150 pages followed the exact same formula 3 times in a row. Thing A happened, then B, then C, back to A. This exact sequence 3 times in a row, and I had no clue what story the book was telling. Fortunately, Rue's story in the second half of the book was much stronger with a much clearer narrative that I ended up enjoying a bit.

I think the Academy chapters were much stronger, and contained some fun character dynamics and character relationships. The setting was interesting (though it seems like it's largely windowdressing, at least in this first book), the ending came together quite nicely, and the prose was pretty good. Mark Lawrence is obviously a very skilled writer, I just felt like this book needed two more rounds of outlining, and a much clearer direction from the start.

2 hits and 2 misses.

The trouble you cause will chase after you forever. Doesn't matter how good you seem, if what you did is evil, that is what you are. If you act like a coward, you are one. If you're on a path of vengeance, you'll be trailing blood, and more blood will be ahead of you. You can’t take back what you did; you can't change who you are… but in rare cases, granted you meet the right people at the right moment, you can.

Whenever people rank all ten First Law books, Red Country usually finds itself near the bottom. I disagreed on my first read of the series, and this reread has solidified that view. Red Country is phenomenal.

I think one of the reasons why people don't like Red Country as much is because its main characters, Temple and Shy, aren't as immediately charismatic or exciting as Glokta, Logen or Orso were. But I think these two have such tremendous heart, and their emotions connected me so well to the book's plot. Temple specifically I am a big fan of, and I feel somewhat of a personal affinity to, as out of all the Abercrombie characters, I find him somewhat relatable in temperance, if not character. Then there is Lamb. Man did this character get a flawless conclusion. Red Country in general probably has a 10/10 ending, I don’t think it could have been done any better. The earlier story climax with the Dragon People was heartbreaking, but the more personal ending for these characters… just wow.

By now it's common knowledge that with the First Law Standalones, Abercrombie set out to write three archetypical cinematic stories. Best Served Cold is a bloody revenge story, The Heroes is a war-epic, and Red Country a classic Western. Although of these three, The Heroes is still my favourite (Red Country second, having grown closer than on my original read), but I think it's Red Country that does its genre best. It feels *so much* like a Western. The slow, morose tone felt perfect for the story Abercrombie wanted to tell. I think the book being pretty slow paced is another reason why people generally rate it pretty low, but I think it was the right decision for this story in this genre.

Spoiler talk

Not everybody can change, but you're better off trying. You are what you were yesterday, but with great effort and a little luck, that's not who you will be tomorrow.

Thematically, the story is about a lot of things, but the main theme that's on my mind is on whether or not people can change. There are four characters in this book whose stories run parallel. Glama, Temple, Shivers, and Logen.

Glama undergoes a big off-screen arc since we saw him last in The Heroes. Humility and regret have replaced blustering ego. Glama feels to me a lot like Logen near the end of The Last Argument of Kings. He knows what he is, and it seems likely that much like Logen did in the original trilogy, he tried being someone else. It did not stick. Glama finds his end against Logen much like how Logen went down in LAOK. Alone.

Temple's arc shows that people can change. All Temple needed was to meet the right people to help him along the way, and finally stand up for himself and do the hard thing. To really try.

Shivers is the main character of the standalone trilogy, and Shivers’ transformation across these three books feels like the thematic thesis or Red Country. It is both possible to try and be better and fail as Logen does–as Shivers does in Best Served Cold. But it is equally possible to try and do better and succeed as Temple does–as Shivers does in letting Logen go at the end of the book. I don't think Abercrombie figured out the formula for when someone fails or succeeds, but he seems to emphasise the importance of trying. After all, isn't there any character worth more pity and scorn than Cosca? Right before be dies we find out that he *wanted* to be something else, yet he never tried. And what did that bring him? Nothing much good at all.

That leaves us with Logen, my favourite character in all of the First Law, and one of the most complex and hard to parse characters in this genre. Is Logen evil? As he said himself, going by what he did, it's hard to argue he's not. But why does the reader find themselves rooting for him despite Logen failing to walk away from violence knowing what it does to him, time and time again. It's because he tries *so damn hard*. Logen leaving the North and helping raise Shy, Pit and Ro was an act of so much good, and yet… And yet Ro wishes Caul Shivers killed Lamb right in front of her eyes, for what he did.

I think for every sequential First Law read, I'll have new thoughts on this character.

All in all, I adore Red Country, and I think it perfectly wraps up the story of its characters, as well as The Great Leveller trilogy as a whole. This book deserves a lot more love.

I'm a big fan of the SCP-verse, and getting a full novel as an SCP story did not disappoint. SCP really excels at giving you an awesome scifi-mystery premise, and SCP-3125 was no exception. The concept of anti-memetics, and showing what an anti-memetic war could look like through the perspective of a foundation was really well done. It was definitely confusing at times–I still don't entirely understand the chronology–and I think the second half isn't as good as the first half (asking the questions is usually more fun than finding answers is par for the course with SCP), but I do think the book stuck the landing. It showed quite a lot of heart, especially the last few chapters, which I wasn't expecting.

Yeah I didn't fuck with Mythos. I feel like it takes up an almost anti-intellectual approach to Greek myths. “No need to think about the sociological reasons behind these myths or the way they were passed down and changed through history, just sit back and enjoy the narrative”. Fine–the book is obviously very much pop-history, but the problem is that the way Fry presented the narrative was just not super fun to read. The quirky millennial humour tone felt quite grating. Unfortunate.

I suppose my thoughts on Blackflame are much the same as on Cradle 1 and 2, and probably also the rest of the series moving forwards. Pretty fun, the progression is satisfying, but I'm not super hooked on anything in particular. This time I did the audiobook, and Baldree is pretty good. I like his character voices more than his 3rd person limited narration though. This book has a turtle which is a plus.

This was a lot of fun! Operation Bounce House shares a *lot* of DNA with DCC. The humor, character voices, pacing and action scenes could all be mistaken from being taken directly out of it. The premise itself is about 80% similar to DCC. The former is just how Dinniman writes, and fair enough, but the latter I think is slightly to the book's detriment. I simply wasn't as drawn and bought into the premise of this book as I was DCC1, which made OBH feel like a watered down version of it.

But after a decent chunk, I think the story found its footing. I got attached to the characters, and I really liked how the story came together in the last 100 pages. If you like DCC, you will likely enjoy this a fair amount. If you don't like DCC, you almost certainly won't like this either.

This is probably one of the densest books I have ever read in terms of the sheer number of events that occur throughout it. So much happens in The Bonehunters, it's wild. So many names, so many places, so many POVs, such rich history, great dialogue, memorable characters, harrowing setpieces, satisfying conclusions. For a lot of this book, it's Malazan at its best. At the same time, it is almost the counter-opposite of the book preceding it, being Midnight Tides, which is still my favourite.

Midnight Tides had essentially a brand new cast, a much more limited scope in its story, and it was incredibly focused. And this mix, in addition to fantastic character writing, dialogue and pacing, made me really appreciate Erikson changing the Malazan formula up a bit. But with The Bonehunters we are “back” to what Malazan was before The Bonehunters, as its stories are interconnected more than ever. As much as I did think The Bonehunters was great, it's a bit sad that none of the last 4 books will be able to recapture what made MT special to me.

After having read 6 Zan books, and finally understanding the world and cast of characters pretty well, everything is a lot easier to understand than earlier on in the series, and overall I would say enjoying Malazan is a more relaxed experience. Getting back to some of the characters introduced since book 1 was a lot of fun, and so was seeing them interact after years of being apart (and the 1.5 years since I read House of Chains lmao). If I had to make 2 criticisms, it's that it meandered a bit in the middle 25%, and it didn't really have some of the hard-hitting emotional gutpunches Midnight Tides, Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice had, though overall I would probably rate it pretty similarly to those latter two.

Malazan is unique, and it will continue to be so. I'm here for the ride.

First book I DNF in 6 years.

Almost every character in the story is motivated by their sexual lust, which for a significant part consists of inflicting sexual abuse.

Chapter 1: extended and explicit rape which is somehow framed as a positive experience for the victim.

Chapter 2: "consenting" sex but the sex is used to make a character stop talking as they are trying to make the other person stop doing something else that might be bad. I count that as sexual abuse.

Chapter 3: Once I read the names of the 2 characters it featured, i thought to myself "oh neither of them are mainly driven by sexual lust right?" Then the first paragraph, it frames the content of that chapter as character A threatening to rape character B in the unholy mansion of rape and sexual abuse.

The motives of a vast majority of the cast is ENTIRELY one-note, and these motives are expressed identically. Furthermore, the general personalities of most characters is just non-existent. Overall I think the character work is super weak.

I also think Palmer makes very poor use of the pretty interesting worldbuilding elements she came up with. The 25th century is a stateless society, and instead people volunteer for "hives" based on what philosophy is dear to them. Instead of exploring these different hives substantively, essentially NONE of them have any substance, and instead they exist to give the autocratic leaders of the hives power. We then follow only the decisions of these leaders as per Great Man Theory, and completely ignore the systems and institutions of the hives.

Also just don't fuck with mycrofts narrative voice. He essentially narrates the events in the story as though he's from the 19th century. And yea a lot of the characters revere the enlightenment era (their sexual abuse building is stylised after 19th century parisian culture or w.e), but I just don't see what it adds or what the point is. I just found it very grating and intrusive.

In short, basically every element of the story repulsed me on some level, and I didn't really like any part of it. I see a lot of people consider this series thought-provoking, and the only thought these 54 pages provoked in me were "I wonder if someone is getting sexually abused in the next chapter", and then in every one someone did. My bad for giving b1 4 stars/a 7.75. It definitely wasn’t that good, I was looking through rose-tinted glasses.

Unlucky I already own b3 and b4.

The more I watch and now read the Female Titan arc, the stronger it gets. The scouting mission is just so engaging. The character development and moments in these couple of volumes is much stronger than earlier on. I do think the anime made the correct decision to pull the training arc forwards, but this way around doesn't bother me all that much. Good stuff.

She looked up suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare. ‘We've got to survive this, Amber. We have to. I've a life to live.’

It's two years to the day since finishing Assassin's Quest and the Farseer Trilogy, and now two years later, I've finished Ship of Destiny and with it Liveship Traders. Man, what a journey.

I think Ship of Destiny is the best of the three, and the best ROTE book yet. Robin Hobb is a tremendously well-rounded writer, and as I discussed at length in my previous Liveship Traders reviews, no element in these books is weak, they're all strong. What sets her writing apart from her peers most–even the very best– is the intensity of scenes. There is such an emotional weight to the characters–their unbelievable complexity and relationships, the writing of the dialogue–that the way in which Hobb immerses you into the drama of the story is unparalleled. It led me to being genuinely astonished at decisions characters made at times, which is a feeling I rarely have reading. Excited, sad, upset or jubilant? Sure. A feeling of astonishment seems reserved exclusively for Robin Hobb.

What is almost equally impressive is that, despite the book having ten or so POV characters, and the story involving a lot of different plots across a lot of different locations, I never felt annoyed at leaving one character, plot and setting for another. They all felt more or less equally strong, and they all built up to the greater story with clear purpose and direction.

What sets Ship of Destiny slightly apart from the first two books–other than the plot's conclusion which I think was perfect–was its thematic conclusion. At its core the story is about identity, and change.

Warning, spoilers ahead:

The Liveships. What are they? It's a question asked early on in the series, and answered in the literal sense late in book one, and more conclusively in the second. But the literal answer is not important. What is important lies in how the Liveships see themselves. They are dragons, they are ships, they are the memories of all who sailed on them, died on them, and experienced life with them. They aren't a sum of all of the above, but all of the above constitutes something different, something uniquely them. Paragon, who starts as more confused about his identity than anyone else is the first to find true solace with who he is. I think that conversation between Etta and Paragon was beautiful:

She took a breath. In a strangled voice she asked, ‘So you are Kennit now?’

‘No, I am sorry. Kennit is a part of me. He completes me. But I am, irrevocably, Paragon.’ It felt good to make that declaration.

I think this passage puts a bow on the series’ themes perfectly. Paragon is for a large part that which came before him, but he is himself. What is perhaps equally strong thematic writing is that this conclusion isn't equally shared by every Liveship. The Liveships are individuals, capable of coming to individual and different conclusions. It is heartbreaking that Kendry couldn't stop seeing himself as a dragon without being one, but who could blame him? The pain is his.

Change. Kennit's tragic story represented one extreme. He could not break out of cycles of pain, hatred, cruelty and violence. He was subjected to it to such a degree that he saw it as inevitable to do anything other than continuing it, trying to mold Wintrow into himself, as Igrot did him. The Vestrits represent the other extreme. Wintrow wasn't Kennit. Informed by his upbringing, he was able to take charge of his life and break the cycle of abuse. Althea would not allow herself to be destroyed by a need for vengeance, letting go of it so that she could experience happiness. The passage at the top of this review encapsulated that realisation beautifully. Malta's arc showed that sometimes change is inevitable, but it doesn't have to change who you are. Despite Malta growing an extraordinary amount throughout the series, being inflicted with physical change, Malta is still Malta. Ending her story by showing how much she grew and changed, but having her final line essentially be: “I can't wait to tell Delo about this” was a stroke of genius, and put a massive smile on my face.

And finally, accepting change in others. This was the moment I alluded to earlier, when I was astonished by the writing. Althea coming to the conclusion that her place wasn't on Vivacia anymore, and that those days were behind her. That Vivacia could lead a happy life without her, and she without Vivacia. That realisation might have been the most earnest and brave in the entire series, if not, in anything I have read. Not having a final moment of connection between Althea and Vivacia felt sad and bittersweet, but as Althea said: “What more was there to say?”

A super interesting read, and although it's a reread, when I first read it 9-10 years ago I didn't read every interview. I will say that you can tell that the book is constructed by someone other than Leon Goldensohn himself based on his notes. It's largely descriptive, and often lacks the psychological analysis you'd expect of a psychologist.

Most defendants and witnesses can be put into three categories:

1. The outrageously cynical, able but unwilling to do introspection, and intuitively evil ones: (think Himmler and Goebbels). The best examples are Ohlendorf (kommando einsatzgruppe D) and Streicher (head of the infamous anti-semitic newspaper Der Stürmer). The types you'd recognise to be evil people the first time you spoke with them.

2. The utterly pathetic shells of human beings, complete worms. Not just unwilling to do introspection, literally being psychologically unable to do so: not a really famous analogy, as these types were generally not as well known. Funk (minister of economics) and Frank (hitler’s lawyer, governor of Poland) are good examples of this.

3. The boring, dull but intelligent and generally competent yes-men. This is a category that falls in line with Arendt's writing on Eichmann. I have my issues with her characterisation of Eichmann and that study's approach (she was only at his trial for like 5 days)--eichmann absolutely *was* ideologically driven and an emotionally passionate anti-semite through and through. This category describes most of the army high command–careerist wehrmacht generals and field marshals–but also many ministers like Frick (minister of interior), Sauckel (minister of labour) as well as Hoess (kommandant of Auschwitz). This class was probably more instrumental to the atrocities than the more obviously evil ones.

There's outliers. Mannstein was laser focused on creating the clean wehrmacht myth as soon as he was captured, employing half the field marshals of the reich to do so. Göring is your archetypical melodramatic, charismatic, larger than life charlatan strong man. Speer was a conniving rat (and not interested at all in talking with the psychologists, which is curious considering how “guilty” he felt). Hess, I still can't tell how much of his amnesia he was faking (it started and stopped 3 or 4 times lol), and Ribbentrop was probably Hitler's biggest dickrider of all of them. Schacht was aggravating to read because of how indignant he was about being charged. I'm not convinced he should have been declared not guilty. Oswald Pohl might have been the most delusional man in human history (“labourers in Auschwitz enjoyed the same working standards as German workers”). Alternatively, he might have been lying. He was probably the biggest liar of the lot. Hearing him describe the idyllic working environment in concentration camps and factories was infuriating, especially as my own grandpa was kidnapped by the SS, and made a slave labourer in Lübeck for 2 years before he was able to escape in 1944.

Fritzsche is funny, because literally no one else at the trial knew who the fuck he was, and they were all wondering why they selected him for Nuremberg (he was chosen as a stand-in for Goebbels). All of these men were deeply evil, though if I was forced to pick one to be the least evil, it'd be Ewald von Kleist (panzer general taken out of retirement, later field marshal)

*Every* single defendant repeated the same refrain: 1) I didn't know of what was going on in the camps. No one knew what other departments were doing, as per Hitler's directives. 2) I share zero responsibility for the atrocities I directly ordered, because I myself was ordered by Hitler (and Germans simply must obey orders, didn't you know that?). 3) I am not an anti-semite, nor evil. The real evil ones were Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Bormann and Hitler (incidentally, the 5 big names not at the trials… what a coincidence). I was fooled like everyone else. Also, jews didn't *really* face persecution until 1942 (“the pogroms of 1938? What are those? Never heard of them. Also the Nuremberg laws were good and fair”). Cowards, all of them.

A very good, but often aggravating read. Fuck Nuremberg (2025) starring Rami Malek, you are a trash movie. Fucked up how you slandered Leon Goldensohn in it.

My first Arthur C. Clarke book, and I really liked it! I appreciated how coy Clarke was with giving away information about the Ramans. Ultimately, the story is mostly about their unknowable nature. Having a first encounter with aliens be met with essential indifference was a very inspired choice, I thought.

I can not wait for the Villeneuve adaptation. When the interior of the ship got described, I immediately knew why he wanted to direct its adaptation. It's going to be one of the most impressive visual spectacles in modern scifi history, and I can't wait to see it.

Since being dragged along to a Paolini book signing 2 years ago, I've been reading these books for the first time around Christmas (replacing my earlier LOTR Christmas tradition). They feel seasonally appropriate, and it's pretty fun seeing Paolini's writing skills grow.

This book is one of the most bloated books I have ever read. You can easily tell the same story in less than half the pages. Not a whole lot of plot progression happens if you compare it to b1 and b2, it's mostly setting up a lot of pieces in the right place for the finale, but it does make it so that there is not a whole lot of “there” there. I also feel like Paolini had several opportunities to make an interest choice to add tension and internal conflict to the narrative, and then every time he went with the very simplistic choice (“good guys = good, bad guys = bad” is the guiding principle basically at all times), which was pretty disappointing to see.

Quite a bit of the character interactions were fun, and there were definitely some entertaining sequences, but as a whole it fell a bit flat. It wasn't boring, though, and generally more skilfully written than Eldest, so I probs rate this somewhere between b1 and b2.

Having read the first 3 City Watch books, Death was always my favourite character in those, sporadic though his appearances were. I knew I’d really enjoy seeing more of him. As always, this book is incredibly funny while staying heartfelt. I probably would have liked to see a bit more of Death rather than Mort (although I knew it’s gonna be the series where they can’t overload you with Death because his intrigue and such comes from him being shown infrequently), but I still did think Mort was a solid character. I do think the ending came together a bit strangely.

It’s Discworld and Discworld is good.

Attack on Titan might be my favourite story in any medium, it’s certainly in my top 3 (other 2 probs being Avatar and the world of ASOIAF). I had read a couple of the chapters over the last 11-12 years, but never more than maybe a volume. I think season 1 of the show is the weakest, but I think I might enjoy the manga more? The order of events are mixed up in the show, where you see the training arc before the first major story arc of the series. I’d always imagined that being much better than doing Trost before the training corps arc, but to be honest this way around was fine. Being immersed in this story, knowing where it’s heading as well as the directions the characters are taking, understanding so much of the foreshadowing–it’s really just all fantastic stuff. I’m really digging Isayama’s illustrations as well! Apparently that’s a hot take.

I’ve rewatched the series 6 or so times since season 1 aired, and I reckon I’ll be rereading the Manga a bunch as well. Slowly getting the omnibuses, right now I have the first 3. Fun fact, my sister bought me the first while she was in Japan a few years ago!

This was a pretty huge miss. Basically nothing in the book worked for me. The characters and character dynamics felt flat, the way the story progression and some of the directions Novik took it in in the last third were strange, and the actual writing felt quite clunky at times. The most interesting part of this book is the conflict with the Woods, but even that felt underutilised, and had a pretty underwhelming ending. The romance was genuinely bizarre and somewhat disgusting. The last chapter was pretty cool though.

Had my eyes on Scholomance for a while, cus it seemed like it could be fun, but after this experience I’m not sure if I wanna try more of her work.

The first 80 or so pages did very little for me, so I was thinking this read was going to be a bit of a wash. Fortunately, the story picked up and I started enjoying it a fair amount. I think JL Odom’s dialogue is one of her strongest qualities, and there was quite a lot of depth and nuance in conversations between characters, and the character dynamics more broadly.

The story is largely about ethnic strife and prejudice (made clear by the title, “By Blood” referring to an expletive of the dominant ethnic group, “By Salt" referring to one by the oppressed one). Despite this being so core to the story, we get no real sense of the identity of any of the peoples involved in the story apart from some surface level cultural practices/traditions. To really elevate the story, this needs to be much more fleshed out. The pacing also felt a bit odd and the ending was a bit of a dud.

A pretty neat self-published story that won the 2024 SPFBO, glad to have read it. Not sure if I’m picking up the sequel though, we’ll see.

After about 30 pages I got the feeling that the book was going to be a complete retread of the story structure of the first 2 books, which I wasn’t looking forward to. Fortunately, that wasn't really the case. The message of this one felt different, and definitely one worth telling. If this series is unified by one concept it's definitely the feeling of belonging, and whereas b2 felt like it retread the same steps b1 did for the most part, Brigands & Breadknives felt like it had something new to say about it.

I think this book is stronger than the second, though it still doesn't really recapture the magic of the first. Not sure if it ever can be recaptured (and maybe that's okay). The side characters were fun. Zyll was great. Another strong ending.

The Will of the Many has probably been my favourite book of the last few years, and The Strength of the Few the most I've been looking forward to a new release. I kept my expectations tempered as, structurally, I knew b2 was going to look pretty different to b1. But god damn was this a fantastic follow-up.

The way the story progresses and mysteries are revealed and new ones introduced, is seriously some of the strongest plot writing in the genre. The ending of WOTM might be my favourite ending of any book as it just sent my mind spinning for an hour as to what it could all mean, and what was going to happen in the sequel. The ending of SOTF damn-near matched it. There's so many directions this story could go into now, and they're all as intriguing sounding as the next.

I think overall this was a really ambitious sequel. As I said, structurally it took a pretty huge departure from a tried and tested formula executed pretty perfectly, and set out to do something much more innovative within the genre. There were some downsides to this. I don’t think that every storyline was constantly engaging (O especially), although they were for the most part. The quality of the secondary characters felt uneven at times, though considering the time spent with them, I think this execution was about as good as you could expect. The character motivations were probably a little more focused in b1 as well. I do think that The Will of the Many is the better book between the two, but it's certainly close.

The mysteries of this world Islington crafted in book 1, and the twists and surprising directions he took the story were done absolute justice in this sequel, and I think that's the most important achievement of The Strength of the Few. Having just finished it minutes ago, I can't WAIT to read the third book. That's exactly how I felt finishing WOTM for the first time, and getting to re-live that experience is about as good as it gets.

I decided to reread The Eye of the World exactly 5 years after starting it for the first time. I’ve never been a massive fan of the Wheel of Time (though I did enjoy the experience of finishing the entire thing, more than the sum of its parts and all that), and I certainly wasn’t a huge fan of b1 back then, though people always say how WOT is so much better on a reread than on the initial read. I think I’ll be finding myself in that camp. Having gone through the entire journey in this world with all these characters definitely has invested me in a way that I wasn’t before. The charm of Emond’s Field, the way the world and its mysteries slowly opens up to the gang, and the many hints of what’s to come… I had a lot of fun.

The flaws that bothered me back then bothered me less, though they’re still absolutely flaws. Initially I was intensely annoyed at how Jordan approached Mat’s characterisation, as well as the last-minute heel turn the story made in the final 100 pages. Knowing it’d happen didn’t make it so bad though.

When I decided to pick EOTW up again after so many years, I’d imagined it to be a one-off, and that I wouldn’t reread the entire series. I think I am going to commit to an entire reread, but god knows how long that’s gonna take. 2.5 years for my initial reread, this one’s looking at 5+ lmao. Also, the copies I read the series on initially are fucking illegible. Insanely narrow pages with very tiny spacing. Even back then I said that had I read them on proper copies, all my grades would go up by half a point. And what do you know, reread it on an ereader, and I am in fact upgrading the rating by half a point lol.

After having read Shroud earlier this year, this is my second Tchaikovsky book, and I'm really digging his scifi stuff!

The premise of the story is pretty unique. Two characters experience the same conflict together, but one from a scifi angle whereas the other experiences it from a fantasy angle. One man's anthropologist is another man's wise wizard. The way the book plays around with language and the difficulties of communication (a favourite trope of mine, and judging by this and Shroud, something the author is also really into) between people who essentially speak 15th and 21st century English was done in a really cool way.

As with Shroud, this def has me committed to reading more of Tchaikovsky's standalone scifi series, though I'm sure I'll read his sff/f series as well.

Zyll is p cool i guess.