I remember reading quite a few of those. Finally lost me with the one where, as far as I recall from the time, they spend several thousand pages where nothing apparently happened. But my recollection may be unfair.
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Nope, that is how recall it too. I got to Winter’s Heart, which is book 9, and I just could not go on anymore. I disliked all but two of the characters, and putting up with all the other characters just to keep reading about them was not worth it.
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Just checked, and I left it there as well. It is tricky for me, because I read most of the books in Spanish in the late 90s, and they get split in half in the Spanish version, so there’s twice as many books until book 8 or 9… Winter’s Heart I read in English, just arrived to the UK in 2003-2004, and it was a real drag…
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It is just one more to the finale then… and I admit that Winter’s Heart and Knife of Dreams (I think that is 11?) are the worst books in the series. Rand is… 
in those. And Perrin‘s arc grated on me. Basically, I wanted to read about Matt at that point.
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Well, Crossroads of Twilight is 10, and I don’t think I have ever heard anyone say anything complimentary about it. Kmife of Dreams is indeed 11, and then the Sanderson books start.
At this point, I would have to re-read everything to remember any of the story, as it has been way too long since I read it, plus I think I sold all the books. I think it was somewhere around books 4 or 5 that I really lost interest in a majority of the characters. It is just not worth the time investment to me when there are so many other books that I do enjoy that I could read instead.
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10 (of the 11) books I ordered back on May 1st have shown up! Woo!
3 of them are course books (Silas Marner, by George Eliot, A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, and The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge), but the other 7 are all fun books:
Battletech Warrior Trilogy (En Garde, Coupe, and Riposte, but I don’t know the order yet) by Michael A. Stackpole
Head On by John Scalzi
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers, and Record of a Spaceborn Few and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within.
I’m working on the Witcher trilogy at work over my lunches (about half done book 1), but I don’t know which of these I will start with… I’ll definitely leave the Scalzi for last, since he is my favourite living author, but I think the Chambers might be better, if only because I love sci-fi more than crime procedurals (technically, I love sci-fi travelogs more than I love sci-fi crime procedurals). So I guess that means I’m starting with the Battletech series… yay!
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En Garde, Riposte, Coupe. From memory, worryingly enough. 
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For me the inflexion point was when Rand went through the Aiel ritual that goes through his ancestry memories. From there on, the series goes down, and sometimes rapidly. It is good to be descriptive, but when you spend sometimes pages at a time about the ladies attire, and how it is coloured and fitted and tailored, or Nynaeve’s adventures that I found super-dull, well, it became a very testing read.
I think I am in the same boat as you. There is plenty that I am more interested on way before in the “to read” list, plus it has been quite a while since I read the books and cannot remember half the characters, and many plots.
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I just bought and read Metazoa, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, which, despite its title, is not primarily about zoology, but about the nature of consciousness as seen through the lens of zoology. The author talks about the organization and function of nervous systems from jellyfish to octopuses to vertebrates, and about what it indicates about consciousness. His basic perspective had a lot in common with mine, and I thought his exposition was admirably clear.
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Have you come across his previous book, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life? I imagine that if you enjoyed Metazoa you’d find a lot to appreciate in it.
Yes, in fact. I read it a few years ago, and liked it well enough to give it to my Call of Cthulhu GM, who’s a big cephalopod enthusiast, as a Christmas gift. And I had read several other books that discussed cephalopod neurology and behavior; it’s a topic that interests me. One of the minor cool points about Metazoa is that it had some even more recent material on octopuses.
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Finished Lethal White last night. Great finale. Actually, if it dragged a little bit from the first third to, say, half way, but the second half of the book really gripped me. I could not put it down for the last 250 pages or so.
I tend to spoil myself on many Crime novels by guessing or figuring out twist plots before they happen. And endings. On this occasion, Galbraith (Rowland pen name) had me guessing all the way to the very end. Kudos. Well played. Definitely my favourite book in the series.
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I finished Battletech Warrior: En Garde (Michael A. Stackpole) last night, and I’ll be honest… I enjoyed it. Big stompy robots, lots of the “Stackpole Effect” (fusion reactors that, when breached, exploding like nuclear fission would), but a fair amount of character development that, honestly, I wasn’t really expecting. A few of the characters are stereotypical, but this is an old book series by modern standards (over 30 years, I think?), and it isn’t as problematic as a lot of old sci-fi was. Not perfect (some really cringe-worthy sexism, and a fair dose of racism), but again, viewed through the lens of the time it was written, not as bad as I was expecting.
I’ll be moving on to Battletech Warrior: Riposte shortly, and I’m looking forward to it, honestly. I’m enjoying the depth to the story a lot more than I expected, and that’s nice… although, I will say that if these are the “best” (arguably, I suppose?) of the Battletech novels, I don’t think I’ll read any of the others. It’s good, but it’s old and not great. So I’ll enjoy it, put it on my shelf, and be happy to read other stuff afterwards… unless the next two books are spectacular (and, hey, maybe they will be!).
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Working my way through Bernard Cornwell’s Last Kingdom series. Bought them all for £30. Considering all but 1 are hardback (there are 13 books) i thought that was a pretty good deal!
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This series was when they kicked off the metaplot – it tied in with the 4th Succession War storyline. Before then the game universe had basically been static.
(I was there at GenCon 1988. I had a piece of Steiner-Davion wedding cake.)
The first wave of the novels was Decision at Thunder Rift and its sequels, and The Sword and the Dagger. Then came the Stackpole trilogy, and then they started to expand it into a whole thing in its own right rather than stuff to read between playing the game. Or such was my perception at the time.
(And then the Clans happened and I lost interest.)
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Do they ever explain why the Kells have a super-secret magical way to make their mechs impossible to target? They mention it twice in “En Garde”, and it’s basically Deus Ex Machina both times.
I figure it’s an early precursor to a Raven-sorta-deal, but I’m curious if they ever actually explain it?
I’ve just started reading Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga. In what is likely going to be the first of many embarrassingly obvious realisations facilitated by this book, it occurs to me that despite spending two years at school on “British social and economic history: 1750-1850” (AKA the Industrial Revolution), not once did we learn anything about where all that cotton actually came from… Hint: it was via the Atlantic slave trade
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Playing Brass was probably the first time I made the industrial revolution - cotton connection, and wondering about what the “distant market” represented took me down some rabbit holes.
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Not really. There’s discussion about it at sarna (spoilers until you’ve read Coupé) but it comes down to “Mike made up a thing because it seemed like fun”. Canonically there’s no verifiable supernaturalism in the setting.
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Oof, just very quickly bought and read “There is no Antimemetics Division”, about monsters that wipe your memory. The back blurb said:
“How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.”
LOADS of amazing ideas, great writing, but wow it’s dark and grisly.
Reminds me of the nastier Global Frequency one-shots. You think you’re getting smart SF ideas (and you are), but it’s also VERY much a Cosmic Horror book with global reality-bending and lots of messy death. I’m still excited by how good it is, and want to check out more by the author, but I’d have to prepare myself before a re-read.
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