John
I am a sucker for magic-school-battle-royal type books with a very-special-child type protagonist. So why is this one still excellent if you've already read Ender's Game, Harry Potter, The Name of the Wind, Hunger Games, and Red Rising (among countless others)?
- The World Building is exceptional. I do love a well-thought-out magic system, and there is one here, but it isn't even allowed at the school. Instead the focus in this book is a well-thought-out society built on the side effects of this magic system and what it would look like. Imagine Jeff Bezos also got god-like superpowers as a direct consequence of being at the top of his billion dollar company. It's interesting.
- People act pretty logically in most situations. They aren't robots, but they also aren't obviously doing stuff that doesn't make sense if you stop and think about it. Most of the time they act like people.
- The main character is pretty sympathetic. He's very good at most things, but they give good reasons why this makes sense with his backstory. He also surprisingly rejects a good number of calls to adventure when they don't make sense to his lived experience. Imagine Luke told Obi Wan to keep his glowstick and magic tricks because he was going to personally hunt down his Aunt and Uncle's killers instead. It's a nice change of pace, gives the MC a lot more agency, and leads the story to unexpected places.
- There are tons of hints at a larger and more complex world-ending collection of secrets and there are lots of interesting questions left unanswered. But in a good way that makes you really want to read the next book.
Here's hoping he can pull off a satisfying continuation. On the plus side, at least he's finished a trilogy before, which people seemed to like a lot, so I'm hopeful!
1000x loved it! Very satisfying mystery, strange and sympathetic characters, crazy fantasy world used well in service to the story. Excellent.
What if radioactive Godzillas kept crawling out of the seas to kill everybody and all of society reorganized itself to survive this? Then a guy is murdered by bamboo explosively growing him apart from the inside, and a rude and insane Sherlock Holmes woman and her living police bodycam Mr Watson solve a mystery that is much bigger than it first appears. Plus, scientists also gave everyone else x-men powers with Kaiju blood. But the society is super structured and polite like an 1800s Sherlock Holmes story.
I'm going to read the next one immediately.
A cosy story about Indian food and people told by a demon with an appetite that includes people. Beautiful art, and a literary and philosophical treatise on food as a metaphor for humanity that I'm pretty sure soared right over my head.
I liked Laila Starr better, just for the high concept ponderings on the nature of life and death. Flavors and cooking just aren't my thing.
I love high concept ideas that are well explored and this is a big one! What would happen if everyone on earth got one legit (none of the typical tricks) genie wish at the same time?
As you can imagine things get really weird and very dangerous immediately. Then the story goes on. Each issue is devoted to a duration of time after the genies appear. E.g. the first 6 seconds, then the first 6 minutes, then hours and so forth until the last issue covers 6 centuries after the genies appeared.
It's a really fun thought experiment that l felt only let me down on the last page, which I won't go into for spoiler reasons. Good stuff, although I wasn't in love with the art style in regards to the perspective of people's faces.
So this guy lives in an infinite marble house that has a ton of random statues in it as well as the ocean randomly flooding it. He goes around exploring it in a very scientific way. He's always lived there, or so he thinks.
It's so hard to do a good unreliable narrator mystery. You've got to drop clues as to what's actually going on, but too obvious and readers will want to strangle the narrator for being an idiot. And if the clues are too subtle you run the risk of people completely missing the hidden, more interesting secondary plot for most of the book.
This book keeps it subtle, and this did not work well for most of my book club, because for the first half it was just this random guy talking about living in this weird place.
This is my review, though, and for me the clues were tantalizing and just right. They hooked me and pulled me through the narrative the entire way.
I think it helped the insanity of the location that the main character is an exceedingly thorough and well organized person. It brought the book out of the realm of poetry into the realm of science fiction, which is where I'm most comfortable.
Loved it. Let's see if I go back and read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell some day!
I listened to the audiobook this time. Fantastic experience! Somehow Jeff Hays gives completely different and perfect voices to like 50 different characters. As to the book, I don't know how Matt Dinniman does it! He manages to keep things exciting, new, and fast paced, even after 6 books now. Fun characters, emotional moments and growth, and decent humor (on the blue side). I gotta slow down with these, I'm almost caught up, and then what am I gonna do?
I once left about 30 minutes into a horror movie I was watching on TV with my roommate. It was during a commercial break. I told him what order the last 5 characters would die in, and who would survive in the end. In the morning he asked me “How the hell did you do that?”.
Generic horror movies follow pretty predictable rules, and I love when these are acknowledged and played with. The movie Cabin in the Woods is a fantastic example of this. All this to say, a LitRPG (crunchy stats focused explicit game rules fantasy) dealing with Horror tropes is a match made in heaven!
I wanted to like this book so much, that I put it back on my Kobo twice after deleting it while trying to get through the first chapter. The writing is rough, y'all. The characters and setting are really ill- defined, their conversations are not very natural or free-flowing. This is definitely more plot-driven than character-driven.
Luckily I stuck through it, and it gets really entertaining when they get to acting out horror movies and playing the game. The mechanics are interesting, and the horror movie plots are actually really well done. The overarching plot hooks at the end of the book made me want to pick up the next one.
Apparently it is common for the writing in LitRPG series to improve as they go on, so I'll give the next book a try. (Fingers crossed that the author did a Clarion Workshop or something in the meantime.)
God damn what a book! It's about the boring shitty life of a loser English professor, yet it was more addictive than any Dan Brown novel. I couldn't put it down. Literally just finished reading it at 2 am on a work night. I cried. It's devastating in parts, but always achingly beautiful and conveyed in simple but profound words. Masterpiece.
Listened to the audiobook. Fantastic narration from Pacey, as always. I love how everyone thinks and acts like adults, even grow in maturity a little along the way. Glokta the sarcastic crippled torturer is a standout character, and his storyline is particularly fun to follow as he defies odds and investigates conspiracies. In the end, I'm not sure the plot was pushed forwards a huge amount, especially after 2 books. I really wonder how it's going to come together in the end!
My first Diskworld novel since abandoning the series halfway through book 3. It turns out no one should start Diskworld at book 1 and I wish someone would have told me that 18 years ago!
This one is good, leaning towards great. Lots of clever and humorous observations, just like the first couple books, but this one has sympathetic characters with satisfying story arcs and an interesting plot that crescendos in an exciting finale.
Now that I know Terry Pratchett can write good stories, I'm looking forward to checking out the rest of the series!
Interesting continuation of the previous book, which was a simple fable about class warfare. This one was not as clean cut and consequently, not as satisfying. But it was done on purpose, since it was inspired by 9/11(!). I'm looking forward to the last novella in the trilogy, whatever direction Moses takes it!
Listened to the audiobook narrated by Steven Pacey, which I think has to be the best way to experience this story. He chose to give Glokta's spoken dialog a lisp, which makes sense given that he's missing half his teeth, but his thoughts have no lisp. Great choices, and really emphasize how people see the character in contrast to how clever he is. In regards to the story, it's some gritty fantasy with realistic characters and is constantly working towards some epic quest, and the fellowship only just meets each other at the end of the 600 pages or so. It's a testament to the world building and characters that I didn't find my time at all wasted despite that fact. I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of the series!
Read it in one sitting! Nice to read a 100 page novella after I just finished a 1300 page doorstopper. I got the nagging feeling that I had already read it before, until it literally spelled out (in-story) that it was inspired by the short story The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. It goes some interesting places that the short story didn't, and was much more satisfying. I avoid rereads, but I think I wouldn't mind revisiting this one!
Great stuff! It's a reverse first contact story where humans are the aliens watching and interfering with a less technologically advanced species. It gets dark in the middle and I had drop it to finish another library book before it was due, which really killed my motivation, coming back to the middle of the dark stuff. Luckily I pushed through and thoroughly enjoyed the rest! I couldn't put it down and finished at 4 am on a weekday.
Excellent book. Well worth your time if you've ever enjoyed something by Stephen King.
This story has two halves: The boy stuck in a toturous school who can see ghosts, and his sister who can see the future and is trying to free her brother via the legal system. Both stories are equally engaging and horrifying.
I didn't expect to enjoy the sister's story about trying to overcome a racist legal system (sounds boring, right?), but in the early parts of the book it was actually the most terrifying and had me on the edge of my seat the entire way.
The real horror of this book are the citations at the end and realizing how much of the terrible things actually happened in real life.
In summary: Read it!
Excellent horror short stories. My favorite was the one that the movie was based on, The Visible Filth. The relatable personal horror of the main character's love life was woven with the Lovecraftian supernatural horror in a way that made it hit extra hard. I also especially enjoyed the way the last story connected all the others together. Good stuff!
Great book, read it in less than 24 hours. Couldn't put it down! It's a modern fairytale with strong female leads. And there is enough story in here for an entire trilogy of books, but it's masterfully pared down to just the good parts - no filler in sight. Excellent writing and storytelling, can't recommend it enough.