Juan York

A personal exploration through time, of the songs, acts, defining moments and the evolution lyrical/production stylings of hip-hop. Each chapter roughly equates to a 5 year period, where Quest lays out his take on the pivotal songs, artists and production of the period filled with interesting facts, social commentary and biographical stories . There are some great through-lines where he discusses the effects of tribalism in hip-hop, society's influence of hip-hop and vice versa and a very personal inspection of the struggle with personal biases as it pertains to art and it's constant evolution. Cool concept, well executed. One of the better books I've read this year.

Overall I did enjoy this book, this is my second read through of the series, honestly I remembered enjoying the series much more the first time around. I think this is due to how I was reading the books, i.e. waiting 2-3 years between releases. There is a lot of regurgitation of previous books, I think this was probably to try and ensure the books could stand-alone, however it's quite a lot of redundant information when reading the books back-to-back.

Dies the fire, the first series in the book is one of my favorite post-apocalyptic reads, and the change over time of the world from technical/agnostic towards religion/magic being real is fascinating. I think I'm probably going to take a break before I go on to the next book and see if that makes the reads any better.

Poly-amorous elves, grumpy dragon shape-shifters and a ton of spicy bits. Not personally my usual read but there's a wonderful bit of world building, a strong character-forward story and more than enough plot to make it a strong debut novel.

Really enjoyed this second book, I thought there was definite improvement in the writing quality as well as good continuation with the world-building and character-arcs, I particularly enjoyed the dialogue, which was good in the first book and even better in this one.

Didn't enjoy this as much of the first, I struggled a bit with how the story was told via flashbacks, something just felt off for me with that. Other than that, enjoyed the plot and the characters and how the overall world is evolving.

Pretty satisfying finish to the first act of this series.

Really enjoyed this, aside from swallowing the main premise, which i won't go into and spoil it, the after-effects of an apocolyptic event and how different humanity might respond was well executed and an interesting read.

Vonnegut has such a unique voice, he's always fun to read. I did feel this pace of this book dragged a bit for me.

Not Bad, Not Amazing. The world-building in this book is probably the strongest part of it, there are some truly unique and interesting concepts. I did like the characters however I found the character development was lacking, ending in pretty flat character arcs for everyone involved. The pacing was fast and the plot interesting, but if you're expecting character driven story you'll probably be dissapointed. Given this is a debut novel, I'll be curious to see what's next for this author.

Absolutely loved these books, arguably the best historical fiction I've read.

Absolutely loved these books, arguably the best historical fiction I've read.