God Emperor of Dune - I love the premise. when the term God-Emperor is used, it’s often a lame character. For once, the God-Emperor actually feels like an almight God-Emperor that is to be feared.
Spoilers
You hate the God-Emperor for oppressing humanity for 3 millennia
I hate how he made me read through hundreds of pages full of philosophical diarrhoea
WE ARE NOT THE SAME
I am so engrossed on the Stormlight Archives! I have finished The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, and Edgedancer (a side story to the main series). I’m currently on Oathbringer
The Alloy of Law. I really enjoyed seeing the world of Mistborn 300 years later and how that modernisation interacted with the allomantic and feruchemic powers. I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series.
Nona the Ninth. There’s something about Tamsyn Muir’s writing style that I really like, and that was just as true for this book, but I felt that the book was let down by an anticlimactic ending. Apparently, this grew into its own book out of the opening of what was intended to be the final book, which may well explain why I found the ending to be lacking. I’ll still be picking up the next, and presumably final, book in the series when it releases.
Continuing the Brandon Sanderson theme, I finished Warbreaker last night. I think that’s me done with all of his other Cosmere novels/novellas other than the Secret Projects. Oh and the graphic novels.
Read Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author yesterday. It was very good. It is setup so it is mostly about a woman in the modern day but she is an author and there are sections that are interviews with people in her life and ones that read as excerpts from her novel about robots and AI post-humanity. The focus is on the messy life of the author and the connections between her life as the child of African immigrants, as a paraplegic, and as an increasingly famous person when her book becomes a bestseller versus the world of the robots and AI as the fight over what Earth should be with humans gone. Quite enjoyed it.
Just finished reading Between Two Fires based on a recommendation. It’s billed as a “historical fiction horror novel”. It’s very grim in places, but not all that disturbing. Still, I enjoyed it as something a bit different to the fantasy novels that made up so much of my last year of reading.
Brubaker/Phillips Reckless series - Brilliant, as usual, from this pair. A pulpy 80’s action comic. Superb.
And… Dan Da Dan. What can I say? It makes me laugh!
I read the first 2 Books of the Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros. And I am conflicted. The genre is supposed to be Romantasy. And I am not sure that is entirely correct after reading 2 of the 3 books–tons of sex-scenes notwithstanding (and I’ve read better).
I devoured Fourth Wing and Iron Flame. There is a reason this is so successful. They are very good. But at the start of this week, I tried to begin the third book and the first chapter was already so stressful, I had to put it down and haven’t made another attempt to read it since then.
Throughout the first two books (mostly Iron Flame) there were more than a few incidents that eroded my trust that I am going to enjoy the rest of the story. And the finale of book 2 seems to have finished it off. I think this is very much about subverted expectations. I thought I was getting another ACoTaR and instead I got a mashup of Romantasy with Red Rising. And I also stopped reading the later volumes of Red Rising because the level of intrigue and character suffering became too much for me.
I am also not enamored of the relationship problems between the heroine and her love interest feeling all too real and the heroine acting quite … dumb at times (which reminds me in a very bad way of ASoIaF)
I am having trouble reconciling my reaction to the books with the fact how much I enjoyed Code Geass. It feels like there is some element missing here that Code Geass has. And I knew long before the end of Season 2 that Lelouch wasn’t going to make it. So why am I having souch trouble with the character deaths (mostly Liam and her mother) and the fact that her love interest got “corrupted”. It still feels like the ending will be fine. I am just seeing clear signals that the road is going to be incredibly bumpy until then. Because it already was in the first two books. And I am somewhat afraid of the author subverting my expectations even more and giving me a romance book without the classic ending in the name of educating teenagers that ‘life is hard’? And even if I enjoy the finale will I enjoy the road to it? I am not sure I had fun reading the last 20% of book 2.
