You are right about the films.
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I have finished all 33 volumes of Ascendancy of a Bookworm.
I might need to reread some parts at some point. But I can finally read the trope aka spoiler wiki 
During my big company outing last week during breakfast someone whose name I don’t even know decided they needed to tell me that instead of reading “cheap” light novels (his German translation was Groschenromane aka dime novels) I should read some classics. I normally don’t get in people’s face about the books I’ve read but I was a bit offended because before that remark we’d been discussing Steven King and some German Belletristik author whose books are indistinguishable according to the others and whom I didn’t recognize. I don’t like King much because I don’t like horror books but a guy who writes indistinguishable novels does not give them much space to look down on light novels… So I gave him a list of classic authors I’ve read over the years and he quickly made a remark that he was just glad when people are reading to get out of the discussion. (In hindsight to really make a point, I should have told him that yes of course I’ve read the classics: Foundation, Dune, Culture, Pratchett, Lord of the Rings, Heinlein, 1984 and Brave New World, Le Guin… even Philip K Dick.)
The colleague sitting next to me then told me that since we had talked about New York 2140 for a long while during our last meetup, he had read it by now and grudgingly liked it
PS maybe now I’ll finish Stormlight.
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Oh, I missed that had come out.
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I’m still waiting for my signed copy 
(I have all of them signed, though I haven’t been to an in-person event since covid).
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I don’t blame you. People keep acting like Covid is gone.
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My wife is still living with long Covid…
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I am sorry to hear that. One of my friends has it too and it is no fun.
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A couple nights ago, unable to sleep, I read the Battletech: Kell Hounds Ascendant, which is a combination of the first 4 Kell Hounds stories.
Technically the Kell brothers (Morgan and Patrick) appear in the fiction earlier, but their decision to start the mercenary company The Kell Hounds, a mercenary force so good that war would become too expensive to wage, is outlined in the novel. It’s not a new idea (the inventors of the Gatling gun famously claimed that no general would be inhuman or stupid enough to send troops against such a weapon), but taking an economic approach to the problem is an interesting one. Stakepole is a talented writer, and although these are old stories (most notably in the treatment of beautiful women who are broken by evil men), they hold up pretty well. 7.5/10, would recommend to anyone willing to read about improbable big stompy mechs and surprisingly weak missiles.
Speaking of which, unable to sleep, I also finished Fox Tales and Voidbreaker, two more Battletech novels written by Bryan Young. Both really good. Fox Tales in particular is quite strong, but they were both cotton candy reading in the best possible way. Voidbreaker was interesting primarily for its focus on not mechs, unusual for the setting, but it felt very Bond-esque (I mean that as a compliment). Solid reads. 8/10 for Battletech fans, 6/10 if you don’t care about the setting.
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@Marx: I’ve absolutely no idea if this is of interest to you, but several years ago I played a sci-fi computer game -75% Brigador: Up-Armored Deluxe on GOG.com themed around mech-ish warfare in a non-Battletech fictional setting, and the developers had commissioned a novel to go with it, an audio book for which is included with the linked Deluxe edition.
I can’t say that I recommend the audio book, but I will say that although at first I didn’t like it at all, I stuck with it and it grew on me, and in the end I thought it was a pretty ok story. At first the dialogue seemed bad, though, and it’s also really gruesome as it goes on (the author seems to revel in describing the violence in detail), and I also found it difficult to follow in the early stages for a bunch of reasons (mainly that it’s a military setting where all the characters have a first name, a last name, and a call sign, which can seem like three different characters until you have your head around it).
I have nothing to compare it with, but if mech-based fiction in general is your jam, then it’s something you might consider. (And you get a synth soundtrack to go with it, if you’re into that :).
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Oh, I would hate this. Used independently of each other, with a large cast and the assumption the reader can keep up?
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Pretty much that, yes. I did eventually figure out who was who, but it took quite a while. I found it an interesting issue with the audio book format, as with a paper book I could easily leaf back through the pages in order to clarify things, whereas with this there was no way to scan the text and so I just continued on and hoped it would get less confusing. I expect some stories just don’t work as well in audio format for this sort of reason. I don’t know how common that is, though – I think this is the only audio book I’ve ever listened to!