Still reading The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson. Book 2 in the series. I am more than halfway through, so should be able to finish it this week.
What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?
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Wind and Truth baby. Approaching the halfway point. It’s paced excellently. It’s impressive how he makes every scene have gravity without weighing the story down.
Still reading Altered Traits physically. It’s more biographical than I prefer, but it did inspire me to make an effort at meditating. All the (valid) short term/small sample stuff aside, it’s impressive how much a minute of simple breathing exercises at the beginning and on break of my workday changed how I felt at the end of the day yesterday. I was thinking of exploring meditation through yoga, but with more consideration I think finding the right kata from a martial art would suit me better.
Audible had some deals, so I went a little overboard
I’m up to H is for Homicide in Kinsey Milhone. I’ll finish those from the library first.
I bought:
28 books in Jana DeLeon’s Miss Fortune series.
7 books in her Shaye Archer.
4 main books of Skyward by Sanderson.
A little overboard, but at about $2.50 a book I couldn’t resist. I have a nice little backlog going for now.
I finished yesterday! So good.
Tap for spoiler
There were a couple points where I was wondering how he’d clean it up, because I was expecting the two halves to be more separated like Mistborn.
But what he did was better. It doesn’t just open up the second half of Stormlight. It opens the whole Cosmere and makes basically everything that’s already happened feel like pre-history.
He’ll have to navigate all the time games he played at the end, but I have little doubt he has a plan.
One of my favorite things about the long Sanderson books is that even though they are SO LONG, they are paced so well that I never felt like it was too long. All the building up in the middle is important and enjoyable (at least to me), and it all wraps up so quickly and nicely at the end of every book.
There was an introduction to the version of Elantris I listened to where an early member of a writing group (or a teacher or something) was really confused about all his premises for stories just being characters in a setting. They had to “make him” get to the point where the world is at stake, because he was so focused just on the interactions between people. Then, in his notes at the end (of the later edition, with knowledge of its success), he wrote about how much he valued that it worked so well in a world of magic where most of the book minimally interacts with it. You can see that in every scene he writes. They’re all just so natural, independent of the stakes of the story.
But Stormlight feels like his real masterpiece. There are so many characters that matter, and on top of that he blends in elements of his other works so seamlessly
Wow, and I thought i bought too much when I bought 11 books.
I didn’t buy Wind and Truth though, still have to re-read the whole series, so will be a while before I get around to it. Will get it soon-ish though.w
How are the Kinsey Milhone books? I have A, B and F. Wanted to read A and B to see if I like it before getting more.
Eh, was a little under $100 for something around 375 hours worth of book. It is a lot, but I don’t usually see prices at that point for audiobooks I know I like, and I really like when I can read whole series in a row. I’ve read something like 20 of the Miss Fortune as ebooks, but I’m way slower that way because I have way more time I can listen.
I like the character. The books are just a little brief, especially at the endings, compared to my preference, but I think that’s a style choice from the types of stories it’s inspired by. She’s a little bit crazy, but in the way that maybe we’re all a little crazy. She’s just direct about it at times. Overall, they’re enjoyable enough. It probably won’t make my bookshelf, but I would guess that it helped inspire some of the stuff that I prefer a little more, and I would potentially read them again at some point.
375 hours. I wonder how long it will take you to go through them. Three months?
Between Miss Fortune and Shaye Archer (and her other series) which one would you recommend as introduction to her writing?
Cut it in half for 2x speed and I’d normally guess about a month? But holidays coming is going to change my schedule, so probably mid-January-ish. We’ll see lol.
Miss Fortune is complete and utter nonsense, and I love it for that. Not many do nonsensical well. Stuff where the creators can just be free and toss sanity to the wind and still have it work is some of my favorite storytelling, whether that’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Psych, South Park, Janet Evanovich, whatever else. So many swing and miss, but when it hits, it’s magical.
Wow, that’s nice.
Yeah, you are right about swing and miss. Love Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, have already added Janet Evanovich to the list, will check out Miss Fortune too.
I finished Wind and Truth.
Spoilers
So despite the spoiler tag, I’m not going to mention actual details. But I think my impressions themselves could change how someone reads the book, so I’m tagging it anyways.
Wow. Just fucking wow. It’s not at all how I expected shit to go, but holy shit was it a hell of a ride, and the story it set up? Damn.
I need the next 5 books. I hope the timeline of the next setting is sooner than I had been expecting. It feels like a lot of threads that were winding up ripped wide open instead. The end result make the whole 5 book arc feel like a new beginning to something truly absurdly scaled. “There’s always another secret.”
All I’ll say without tags is that as high as my expectations were, he blew them away.
Not going to read the spoilers. May come back in an year or so to look at them though.
Glad to hear that it’s great!
I was probably liberal with the tag, but I’d rather lean towards not impacting the experience at all.
My head was spinning that night with all the possibilities for the second half though. (I definitely didn’t start War of Kings as a physical book immediately after to see what extra details I pick up. That would make me a crazy person.)
Haha, I don’t think it would make you a crazy person, just shows the impact of the final book.
And thanks for being liberal with it, I want to know nothing about it, no matter how small.
lol I was joking because I did exactly that.
The context of knowing the whole series lets you pick up a lot of detail all the way back to the opening scene of Way of Kings.
Heh, I took it as you really wanted to, but didn’t. I stand corrected.
I just finished The Mercy of God’s by the same dudes who wrote The Expanse series. I can’t wait for the rest of the series. I also read the in-universe novella called Livesuit which was also very good.
Did it differentiate itself enough from The Expanse? It’s on my to be read pile but I’m worried it’s just going to be a bad Xerox copy of their previous work.
Yes, it’s nothing at all like the Expanse.
About to finish Babylons ashes, ive really enjoyed the whole series so im gonna had mercy of god to my to read list.
It’s also sci-fi? Or some other genre?
And offtopic, but curious, do random people send you pics after seeing your nick?
Yeah it’s Sci-fi.
No, unfortunately no one has ever sent me pictures. I still have hope that it will happen someday though.
Well, good luck!
How are you liking The Well of Ascension on reread?
I finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Overall a solid book with some good commentary on modern poverty, foster care, and the opioid crisis. The first half stuck too close to the plot points of David Copperfield, but thankfully it stood more on its own in the second half. The ending felt a bit rushed.
Now I’ve started Hex Education by Maureen Kilmer. If it wasn’t such a short read, I would not be finishing this book. Almost every character is unlikeable. I was hoping for a campy witchy book where I want to hang out with the characters, but instead I got a suburban mom who married rich and can’t stop humblebragging about it.
I am really enjoying it. I am about 2/3rd done, and as I mentioned last week, I had forgotten most of the stuff. So, really enjoying everything going on. And while I remember the ending of the book, I don’t recall how exactly they get there.
I haven’t even read David Copperfield, how is it?
lol at suburban mom’s humblebragging. Good luck!
David Copperfield is ok. I really liked the writing style and found the characters interesting. It dragged on for too long though and the main character didn’t have much agency throughout the story which can be frustrating.
I guess I never going to read that then. 😀
I’m in between fiction right now. Contemplating what to read next. Maybe going to give Earthsea another try.
I’m also working through Guns, Germs and Steel, which is a fascinating read.
Wizard of Earthsea is part of the 3 books that showed me I loved Fantasy.
What are the other two?
Magician by Raymond E Feist (later broken into Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master and the split works even better)
Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings.
Both are pretty cliché by modern views, but both are pretty well written otherwise. Good world building.
But ooo-boy, if one is the type of person that has trouble mentally separating the very problematic writer from their works (like JK Rowling or Marion Zimmerman Bradley), Eddings probably isn’t the best to read.
I have seen Eddings get recommended a lot, but I have never gotten around to reading any of his book. Belgariad has been on my wish list for more than a decade now. I really should check it out sometimes.
I had to put down Fellowship of the Ring for a while due to a cascade of library books, but I’m finally back to it. God I just love how that book flows.
When I want something simpler to read I’ve been going to the Hardy Boys books lately. Read a bunch of them as a kid, they’re still quite enjoyable now. Normally if I reread something 20 years later it’s pretty clearly no longer my taste, but I’m on book 3 and still enjoying them quite a bit.
I’ve been tempted to give a few a go again. They were my jam in middle school.
The first few are available on standard ebooks and they’re quick, easy reads, go for it! With the caveat that the standard ebook versions are the original 1920s versions so there’s a bit of weird racial stuff now and then.
Recently met the librarian at kid’s school and he recommended me Hardy Boys as the next series to start (for the kid). Glad to see it still holds up well.
I’m plowing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, I’m currently on book 4. Book 1 was for bingo, the rest are just to boost my numbers for my annual reading goal :).
LitRPG can wildly fluctuate in quality, but if LitRPG interests you at all, this is one of the top 3 series I’d recommend.
I’ll try this later.
They can vary even by the same author: I felt burned by the “he who fights with monsters” series whose 1st book is simply awesome in my opinion, but by book 10 has devolved
Yep. It takes a certain amount of skill to be able to ramp up the power and abilities of your protagonist without the story getting away from you.  That’s kind of why I described what I could recommend as series because there’s a few where the first few work well HWFWM being one of them but after that, there’s a pretty significant drop off in quality of the overall narrative.
And even one of those that I’d say that I recommend (Ready Player One/Two) works pretty well but more so for a subset of readers that I just happen to be part of (those whose main cultural media experiences were between the 70s and the 90s.) and while the series works moderately well it’s definitely written to a specific subset of readers.
As an aside because I already mentioned two of the three I recommended in the original comment, I should probably also recognize the third just for posterity. It’s the four book trilogy, This Trilogy is Broken by JP Valentine.
Thanks for talking about broken, it’s on my next read list.
I did enjoy ready player 1; never did ready player 2 out of fright it would not be very good
It’s mostly fine… It kind of suffers similar flaws to the second Hunger Games book by being a “let’s do that again”-style rehash of the first. But the series makes a cohesive whole.
I think one of the reasons Broken works fairly well for me is it doesn’t feel the need to tie off every loose thread by the end. I still end up wanting to return to the world without the story being anti-climactic.
I guess I have to get it now.
My re-read for Stormlight Archive has been taking longer than I figured it would, so I just started Rhythm of War this morning. I even got Wind and Truth delivered a day early, but didn’t get to start it lol.
My re-read hasn’t even started yet. I was hoping to have read at least The Way of the Kings and Words of Radiance this year. Well, no hurries, it’s not going anywhere.
Just finished The Skystone by Jack Whyte. Lovely little piece of historical fiction. I have the second in the series but everything has to wait until I finish Wind and Truth haha.
Heh, I wonder how many Wind and Truth comments we will get this week.
I’m almost finished listening to We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo. A fascinating memoir by an indigenous woman growing up in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Heart breaking tales of her family, neighboring tribes and home being exploited and swindled by missionaries and oil companies.
Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith, the only complete SF novel he ever published. Part of the Instrumentality of Mankind universe that included “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell”.
Currently a couple of chapters into Deadhouse gates. I do enjoy it, but the malazan universe is so massive and filled with so many characters, that I need the malazan wiki around, just in case I need to check something.
I’m listening to Extinction by Douglas Preston. Only heard about half of it, but I find it entertaining and the narration is done very well.
Delay, deny, defend. lol
Ignoring the relation to current events, how’s the book?
Great, to be honest. It’s very educational. I’m reading things I’ve never known about.
Reading everything by Victoria Goddard. I should stop, I’m close to ODing, but it’s delicious.
Currently reading “Artemis” by Andy Weir. I’m enjoying it a lot more than I did “Hail Mary” which I thought was awful.
I liked Hail Mary more than Artemis, but I loved them both.
Why do you think Hail Mary was awful?
Spoilers:
I have a difficult time believing that they didn’t have enough backup plans to the point that they had to send a school teacher to save the world. I also couldn’t believe that someone with a doctorate would be teaching junior high (we don’t pay teachers enough in the US). I also didn’t care for the story stopping every few pages so that the author could do a math proof to pretend that the protagonist was some kind of genius (who just so happens to have the skills to reprogram a rocket ship trajectory???). And the endless “something else went wrong only I can fix!” every fifty pages got really tired. Oh and whatever you do, don’t send any of the probes back to earth until the last minute. Because instead of keeping Earth informed and updated as you learn things that might save them, you’re going to need all those probes for a plot point later.
Artemis was fun, but had a lousy ending. It’ll make a good tv series some day if they change up that part of the story.
Heh, interesting points.
