Finally got round to reading Robin Hobb's Assassin's Fate a couple of weeks ago (I did try to report it on here a couple of weeks ago...but was travelling around...tried to enter it via mobile phone...and managed to lose "report" somewhere in electronic space.)
Anyway thought it was a very good ending to her latest trilogy...but enjoyed the first two so much...that "very good" was a mild disappointment.
For me, this latest trilogy has been a terrific read. But..a large part of me thinks that Robin has mined this particular world setting so extensively that she should move onto a completely fresh overall setting...there are getting to be so many related/ interconnected characters in her present set-up that only the most committed readers are fully savouring the stories.
But...no matter...what overall setting she uses for her next fantasy, I'll be reading it.
Recently read McClellan's Sins of Empire. Enjoyed it a lot, though not as much as I enjoyed his Powder Mage trilogy, despite it being a direct sequel. He does well in carrying a plot, but sometimes I'm left not caring about whats happening specific branches of the plot and wish there was a bit more focus. Still, looking forward to more in this series.
Probably going to read The Legion of Flame by Anthony Ryan next. Enjoyed the first in this series, The Waking Fire, quite a bit, so hoping that this one is at least as good. After that, there are a lot of books that I'm behind on and hope to slowly catch up.
I've been reading Traitor Son Cycle from Miles Cameron and I enjoy it quite a lot. It's detailed and maybe a bit "bloat" but I don't find that to be a problem. It's refreshing combination of "gritty medieval realism" and fantasy elements.
Another good one was Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence. Really dark...
I saw Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse, Book 1 of his Incarnations of Immortality, on a goodreads list of the best fantasy ever today (somewhere in the top 100) and had a WTF? reaction. I liked Anthony a lot as a kid, and liked this specific series, but am pretty sure Anthony doesn't hold up well (think I tried a book or two), and was any of it ever good enough to be on a top 100 list in the first place? Then I saw the book was $2.99 and figured what the heck. Will advise
Finished Two of Swords #18 by KJ Parker
It seems this is the next to last installment - the action clearly makes it possible as lots happen again, characters are separated, reunited etc, Telamon is still the main character and her saga continues (another promotion, another assassination order, another potentially suicide mission) and the ending (or better put the available excerpt from #19) is on another cliffhanger; definitely curious where it all goes
After giving up on A Hymn Before Battle, I started Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos. That was going okay, but due to some temporary technical difficulties related to an operating system upgrade on my phone, I switched to Lens of the World, the first of a trilogy by RA MacAvoy.
I'm roughly 3 hours in now, and it's really quite charming. Although not as poetic as Riddlemaster of Hed, it reminds me a bit of that in its narrative voicing. I hope it continues well; I know that my mom very much enjoyed the entire trilogy last year.
At 0252 this morning I concluded my fifth reading of Robert Jordan’s Lord of Chaos, book six of The Wheel of Time. The final reading session occurred during a left-sided migraine, which explains why I was up so early. (To be fair, being awake for the day prior to 0300 isn’t all that uncommon for me. In this particular case, my head, neck, and at times stomach hurt so much I got no sleep at all.) It has been extraordinarily rare for me to get left-sided migraines since circa 1999. Due to recently being permanently (?) denied one of my two highly effective migraine medicines, such attacks are apt to become more commonplace in the future. Or rather, not being able to quickly terminate such attacks when they do occur will be the norm.
My first reading ended 8 January 1996. I made a slip-up on the inside-cover and first wrote the completion time as 1128, then overwrote the first two numbers to reflect the correct time, 2328. The month is written in cursive script. I do not recall if that was my norm at the time. Cursive disappeared by my seconding reading, 2004.
Sometime between my second and third reading (2007) I realized that “re” in “reread” was unneeded, since all readings beyond the first are by default re-readings. Therefore, completion two reads “reread...” while subsequent completions read “read...”.
All reading annotations appear as follows, using completion one as example:
“Read 2328hrs, 8 January 1996
<my unreadable signature>”
I am aware, and always have been aware, that adding “hrs” to military time is incorrect. I add it to cleanly differentiate time of day from day of the month. “2328hrs, 8 January...” is, for me, easier to decipher than “2328hrs, 8 January...”. (Notice that I type military time correctly elsewhere in this posting.)
As to the book itself…
Many consider this the first “lesser” Wheel volume. I have never before believed this, seeing book seven as beginning Wheel’s mid-series slump. This reading, more so than in the past, I begin to see validity in the opposing opinion. For me, it has to do with the sudden lack of almost any relieving humor and “lightness” in a series that previously supplied a good balance of light and dark elements. Certainly George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire makes do without humor or lightness from the get-go to no ill effect. (Watchers of GOT get lightness and humor thrown in, but that’s TV for you.) With Lord of Chaos it’s not so much that such elements are greatly reduced but that we are not yet used to their near absence. Or so I believe.
Despite that, book six contains some of the best writing in the series. The whole business between the two competing Aes Sedai embassies and Rand from its beginning through the confrontation at Dumai’s Wells is for me utterly magnificent. I surprised myself in that after so many reading, including a few devoted solely to the book’s last hundred or so pages, my eyes still misted a number of times beginning when the true reason for Rand’s “disappearance” was finally unearthed and on through to the end, with tears soaking my pillow at the climax of Dumai. If I haven’t already, a rarity, I invariably lose it at Taim’s utterance, “Kneel and swear to the Dragon Reborn.”, followed by “...or you will be knelt.”
So my high opinion of book six remains. I do, however, now see in it foreshadowings of the slump that is to come. (This assumes, of course, that you see the series’ change in tone as negative.)
(To be fair, being awake for the day prior to 0300 isn’t all that uncommon for me. In this particular case, my head, neck, and at times stomach hurt so much I got no sleep at all.) It has been extraordinarily rare for me to get left-sided migraines since circa 1999. Due to recently being permanently (?) denied one of my two highly effective migraine medicines, such attacks are apt to become more commonplace in the future. Or rather, not being able to quickly terminate such attacks when they do occur will be the norm.
Well, I listened to Lens of the World alllllllll day and alllll evening, and finished it off this morning.
IOW, yes, I liked it.
I'd never heard of this before very recently, and I don't understand why it isn't better known; on the other hand, it has been mentioned here on the forum before, and since it was published smack in the middle of the period in which I was doing the least sff reading, I may just have missed it. It's really very nice -- mostly gentle and charming in voicing and story, though there is plenty of action to go along with. Not a lot of wasted words, either. Think McKillip, Le Guin, Beagle.
The first book is sort of epistolary. It's the tale of Nazhuret, an orphan, being written down by Nazhuret because his king has asked for the story of his early life, and in it Nazhuret is addressing himself to the king. But we're only reminded that this is a long letter to a king once in a very long while, so it's mostly just a first-person story. Nazhuret is 40 when he's writing the story, and he basically starts at age 19 with some brief summations of the years before that. It starts with the dreaded special-kid-in-a-tough-military-school trope -- but that doesn't take up much of the book, so never fear.
I think this is only my second MacAvoy book, and though I liked the first one (The Grey Horse), this one is much better. This is the sort of book that is very enjoyable on first reading, but you get the feeling that there's a lot of things going on that you'll only notice on a second approach. Logically enough given its "lens" title, and the fact Nazhuret himself is referred to as the Lens of the World, the reader is often not quite sure what's really going on -- there are often questions about perception vs. reality, how perspective changes that perception, what and who people really are, what is motivating them, and how those motivations can be shaped by the people themselves or by others. I'd love to give some examples, but I don't want to spoil any of the book's surprises; and the story can be read as an enjoyable straight coming-of-age adventure, if that's what you're looking for, so the multiple meanings and reality-shifting can be overlooked if you just don't want to be bothered. But do keep in mind that Nazhuret is very likely an unreliable narrator, especially when it comes to his reflections about himself, and watch how his claimed physical, mental, and emotional inadequacies match up against externally verified realities. For one small example:
As a 40-year-old man he tells us quite forcefully, at the beginning of the book, that he is an extremely ugly/deformed dwarf, and he has always been teased for supposedly looking like a monkey; yet later in the book we find out that he looks exactly like a large number of people in a neighboring country. So, actually, he is neither a dwarf nor hideous, though he still perceives himself that way; he simply belongs to a race shorter than the people he grew up with who have different facial features, which were seen as deformed by the ignorant children in his adopted country. He knows all this, but he still calls himself a hideous dwarf.
Oh, also: there is little to no magic in the book, depending on how you interpret certain events -- whether they have anything to do with magic or not is pretty much up to you to decide.
Anyway, big thumbs up. I'm already well into book #2, and enjoying it just as much so far.
Oh, and as for the narrator: this is a new one to me, Jeremy Arthur. I thought he did a fine job, though I would have been happier if he had done some accents. They weren't strictly needed, but they would have made sense in context.
Just read The Amulet of Samarkand, which is marketed as YA, but I enjoyed quite thoroughly. I checked it out initially because it was on a goodreads top 100 fantasy books list. I really recommend it to all. It is quite funny, with the sarcastic acerbic wit of the 5,000 year old "demon" main character being the main selling point. The secondary main character, a 12 year old boy, is not very likeable, and there is a surprising lack of character development or growth, but the story & use of magic is exceptionally well done, and paired with the humor it is all quite enjoyable.
I'd be very interested to hear whether it is worth continuing on in the series. The editorial review I read re: book two indicated that there was not enough of the demon, and too much of the boy and a similarly aged girl, a criticism which resonated with me since the boy is really unlikeable in book one.
Finished The Dinosaur Princess by V Milan, 3rd in his Dinosaur Lords series - after a superb second volume which made me reconsider the series, this was disappointing - maybe it will become more interesting when volume 4 will be released as this one is to a large extent a pass the time book without any real resolutions and introducing more story-lines in the series
Book 2 of the Lens of the World trilogy -- King of the Dead.
Man I really, really like these books. These are mac and cheese for me -- just the right blend of prose and character and story.
This one continues the life of Nazhuret from book 1, and again it is pseudo-epistolary. This time Nazhuret is writing to his teacher, Powl, and he picks up the story at age 28 (the previous story left off at 22). This time he and Arlin are off to prevent a war.
The theme of perception vs. reality vs. possibly-magic continues, with the addition of Zhurrie living up to his name's meaning of "King of the Dead" and its implications. It is not at all coincidental that the main character considers himself to be a scientist in a mostly pre-scientific world, and that he attempts to find rational explanations for unexplained phenomena; nor that both the first two books have added distance from the stories they're telling because they're epistolary. The layers of distance between lived experience, imagined/dreamed experience, remembered experience, analyzed experience, and retold experience are all evident if the reader is paying attention (though as I mentioned in my review of book 1, this can also all be ignored if you just want a fun adventure story). One telling quote from the book: "If I can, I will call my magical experiences drug poisoning, or deep philosophy, but all these names do not change the fact that I do not understand."
I'm just so very pleased with these books. Not too dark, not too light, not too angsty, but angsty enough to hold attention. Not pretentious, but not mere fluff, plenty of drama without being overblown. Few wasted words, plenty of subtlety, graceful and thoughtful. Great comfort reading. I'm already about 2/3 of the way through book 3.
I saw Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse, Book 1 of his Incarnations of Immortality, on a goodreads list of the best fantasy ever today (somewhere in the top 100) and had a WTF? reaction. I liked Anthony a lot as a kid, and liked this specific series, but am pretty sure Anthony doesn't hold up well (think I tried a book or two), and was any of it ever good enough to be on a top 100 list in the first place? Then I saw the book was $2.99 and figured what the heck. Will advise
I liked the first book very much, and some of the following ones for an interesting take on concepts like Death, Time, War, etc. The series gets a bit strange with the later books and some of the Piers Anthony sex hangup issues start cropping up more.
I liked the first book very much, and some of the following ones for an interesting take on concepts like Death, Time, War, etc. The series gets a bit strange with the later books and some of the Piers Anthony sex hangup issues start cropping up more.
I liked the first book on re-read too, but not enough to continue I don't think. And yes, Anthony has some amusingly dated sexist/sexual issues. I got a big kick out of his reaction to the skinny woman who becomes his love interest. When he first sees her in a towel fresh from a shower he thinks she is kind of ordinarily - he apparently digs serious curves - but then after she puts on makeup, smart clothing and magic he says something like "wow, I never realized how sexy skinny girls could be".
After making a couple of starts (including the hyped Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, put down after 20% - found the characters flat and the writing unimpressive), I picked up the latest by Caitlin R Kiernan, the novella Agents of Dreamland.
This is a strange one - Lovecraftian elements set among an X-files/Area 51 type storyline, told from three different viewpoints and timelines. It's only 100+ pages but it works, because of the author's expressive and vivid writing and the original ideas presented. It is a bit disjointed, with only snippets of some ideas presented at a time, but I was immersed from the beginning and really liked it.
This is a strange one - Lovecraftian elements set among an X-files/Area 51 type storyline, told from three different viewpoints and timelines. It's only 100+ pages but it works, because of the author's expressive and vivid writing and the original ideas presented. It is a bit disjointed, with only snippets of some ideas presented at a time, but I was immersed from the beginning and really liked it.
I finished The Belly of the Wolf last night, book 3 of the Lens of the World trilogy.
I've already said most of what there is to say about the trilogy as a whole. This last installment leans more on the mystical components than the previous two, and readers who want everything explained to them will be disappointed. I saw one review that said MacAvoy is big on putting elements of Zen into her books, and you can see that here -- you can live an experience or you can try to understand an experience, but you can't always do both. Sometimes you just have to accept the ineffable and "go with the flow". I yearned for more explanation in some places, but that was very much not MacAvoy's intention. This isn't "Weird" fiction, but it certainly is Zen in that you can't analyze everything rationally.
And referring back to those layers of experience I mentioned in my previous reviews, I was especially amused by one of the premises here. You remember those letters that Nazhuret wrote to the king, the ones that made up book 1 and told the story of Zhurrie's early life and training? Yeah, now those letters have been published as a book without his permission, and they have been used as the foundation of a new religion/cult/school of mysticism, with Nazhuret revered as its spiritual father. And Nazhuret is livid about it, and he repeatedly complains that his new "followers" don't understand anything and keep getting everything wrong, and how dare they appropriate his life in the first place. All of which cracked me up -- adding yet another layer of interpretation to the gap between perception and reality. Interestingly, though, despite supposedly not understanding anything, the followers have also surpassed him in some ways, and have some abilities that he never did -- showing that "understanding" doesn't always mean what you expect it to.
Oh, and I don't think I've mentioned much about how MacAvoy plays with gender throughout the trilogy. We've got an important female character living as a man (not trans, she just couldn't have the same freedoms if she lived as a woman) who is sometimes thought to be a eunuch, a man who cross dresses when the occasion strikes (and sees it as "becoming" a woman, rather than just pretending to be one), an actual eunuch, scattered gay characters of varying importance, and
an important "straight" character who discovers in middle age, much to his own surprise and discomfiture, that he's actually bi
. This all adds to the perception-vs.-reality theme of the trilogy in interesting ways, and at times becomes quite amusing to boot (as when
the middle-aged "straight" character is first surprised to discover that he's being romantically pursued by a gay character... and then discovers that he doesn't actually mind it at all ;-)
).
In sum, I loved the whole series. I'll definitely have to do a reread one of these days. My one real complaint: the production on the audio of book 3 was lousy, and you could frequently hear where splices were made to insert corrected passages (I think there's a word for that -- where a reader goes back and rereads segments -- but I can't think of it at the moment). Pretty annoying.
