What are you reading at the moment?

Just finished Hero of Thera.

Spoilers, of course.

It was... pretty good objectively. Overall I liked it. I wanted to love it, but didn't manage to get quite there. I thought the game aspect of it was very, very, very good during the free trial stuff -- because of very clear and strict limitations and the "How are you gonna get out of this one?" situations. After that, though, it kinda gets watered down a bit. The emotional points are sort of there, but could have been explored much further. A lot of things should have be foreshadowed much more, especially the thing with his brother. If the ultimate conflict is to be about that, shouldn't we as readers learn of his whole brother complex way before the 70% mark? I felt something when he was forced to 'kill' his only friend during the free trial. I didn't really feel anything during the final conflict with his brother, because it just seemed to have come out of nowhere. Maybe it was foreshadowed, but I missed it.

Which brings me to the main problem I had. The prose. Was. In. Very short. Disconnected. Chunks. Throughout. I know it's a matter of styles, and I know I have a personal preference for long-winded paragraphs, but this was super disjointed and sometimes affected my ability to follow what's happening. It also made 'exciting shorter sentences during combat' indistinguishable from 'normal narration' and somehow lessened the impact of action sequences. It's probably my own problem, but does every single thought really need its own paragraph? A lot of these one-sentence paragraphs could have been combined into one longer paragraph and it would have made the flow of the story much smoother for me. This is one book I honestly feel might be a lot better in audio format, and if the narrator manages to vary the 'main narration voice' with a lot of the 'side thought' voice, it would work really well and it would feel like someone telling you a very good story in first-person. Maybe that's the tone it's going for, and I have to give props for the author being consistent, so it's a matter of style choice and not skill, but I would have really liked it to be a bit more 'literary' -- not in terms of sophistication or anything, but just more like written language and less like spoken language.

I can feel that there's a lot of thinking on the author's part - in terms of character motivations and the logical progression of the plot, which I really appreciate, and it's done to a level maybe a little too complex, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

I don't like doing numbers, but to capture my feelings a bit better: it's 10/10 plot-craft. 7/10 personal reader experience.

 

Hack: Tower of Gates Book 1

I bumped this up my reading queue because Paul asked me if it was game-y in the sense that I was talking about. And after finishing it I understand now why he asked. The answer is, no, it's not exactly game-y in the sense I was looking for, but it's very game-like. In fact, it's very D&D like -- and I'll be honest and say that I've never played a single game of D&D in my life, but this book made me feel like I was playing -- in the sense that despite its rather grim premise, I never felt like we're in any immediate danger, but rather that we're on a great adventure with a solid overarching plot that will drive things along and the game master will take us there eventually, and if that's what the book is trying to do, it captures the feeling perfectly.

Personally, I feel like the book reads like children's literature. I love children's literature. I still buy books from the kids' section when I want to be transported to a simpler world -- a world before 'ickiness', if you know what I mean. This book captures that kind of feeling, and there's a kind of beautiful simplicity to it. Everything feels clean, solid, structured, and there's a sense of control in the writing and presentation. A lot of indie books -- even excellent ones -- have a lot of "bodge", and this is refreshingly bodge-free.

I like that the leveling is slow. Sarah's solo chapters in the beginning is a great example of how you showcase a character's abilities so the readers actually understand. I love the very clear and structured combat where you sort of see it play-by-play, and you can sort of hear the dice rolling in the background. Again, there's no real sense of urgency, but I don't think that's what the book is trying to do.

But, like in a lot of kids books, you sacrifice something else for that sense of simplicity. The language is usually very simple and straightforward, very description-light and dialogue-heavy, and in a way you can't convey a lot of deep thoughts and emotions through that, and things that should elicit stronger reactions from characters mostly end up glossed over, including a whole slew of heavier issues that come with the premise. That said, the dialogue feels quite natural and these characters sound like real kids. I don't think the 'adults' in the books act like adults, but the whole thing has such a kiddie feel to it that you find you can't fault cartoon characters for acting like cartoon characters. It's almost like it's all in the spirit of good fun.

I feel like the book doesn't try to do a lot, but it's great at what it's trying to do. Again, props for consistency and control. 9/10 for a kids book -- clean, fast, likeable. 8/10 personal enjoyment.

 

Bodge is when you mess around with the prose in order to fix something. It's when you realize you forgot to mention a certain concept and you go back and try to stick it in somewhere in an earlier conversation without rewriting the whole conversation between the characters. It's when you add an out-of-place paragraph to fix something, or a different unplanned POV altogether because you want to show some other part of the story. It's when you do a workaround to solve problems in the writing without tearing whole sections down and building them back up.

 

Just started Super Sales 2

 

Just finished the Completionist and its a good book the only problem I have is at the end theres an abrupt change which I feel could have easily deserved its own book as it is it felt shortened and a little bit easy for the MC rather then delving into certain problems the MC would have they were just skiped over and solved almost immediately would have rather had a shorter book that ended when said change happened and a new one later then the rushed ending it felt like happened especialy because the book could have easaly stopped earlier with no story problems.

 

Recently:

Down Among the Sticks & Bones - a prequel to Every Heart a Doorway. The first book was about a boarding house for children who had been taken into other worlds, Narnia/Alice in Wonderland style, then returned, and were having trouble coping with the real world. A good premise, but kind of squandered on an easily solved murder mystery plot. This one goes into the backstory of Jack and Jill, twins who were kidnapped into a word based on classic monster tropes - Frankenstein, Dracula and so on. The basic idea is that their parents sucked at being parents and forced Jill to be a tomboy and Jack (Jaqueline) to be a pretty pretty princess, so when they end up in the otherworld Jill falls for a vampire and Jack apprentices herself to a mad scientist to escape their previous unpleasant lives. Not too bad for YA fic, although it was a little precious, the plot was straightforward and a bit too sparse, and the characters simplistic. Honestly I think this story should have been folded into the first book somehow, since that one didn't flesh out the characters enough for the murderer's motivations to be compelling.

A Wind in Cairo - a fantasy story set in the ancient Middle East, in the time of Saladin. Hasan is a spoiled prince, a coward, drunk and gambler who gets by on his money and good looks. When he's beaten after losing a game, he's rescued from bleeding out in the streets by a sympathetic magician - but when he recovers, Hasan repays his kindness by forcing himself on the man's daughter, thinking only of his own pleasure. In return, the magician turns him into a stallion, with a geas laid on him that he was to be subservient to a woman, and a horse until his death. As a horse, he's sold to the daughter of an emir who has raised her as a boy after losing his sons to war. The story proceeds as expected, with the young woman training the headstrong horse and his gradually falling in love with her, leading up to a great sacrifice during a holy war, but the book is so full of lovely description and interesting character interaction that the fairy-tale like plot isn't a drawback. The author vividly evokes the setting, clearly knows her way around horses, and treats Hasan's rape of the magician's daughter with gravity and consequences, so it doesn't come off as a fridged woman character.

To Conquer Chaos - an army sets out to explore a stretch of lifeless desert from which hideous, vicious monsters appear to ravage the land, while at the same time the small group of humans living in the center of the desert struggle to guard the mysterious portal that spews the monsters. This is an early work by John Brunner, with none of the depth of his later work like A Maze of Stars but it's a good old-fashioned scifi-masquerading-as-fantasy story, very trope heavy complete with a Dude With Special Powers who Saves the Day and Gets the Girl, but a quick and entertaining read.

 

I go through so many books that listing all my books would result in a new post from me every few days. I listen to audio books while working my mundane, non-writing job so... yeah I clear a lot of titles.

For now, I'm reading The Witches of New York by Ami McKay... There's a lot to enjoy about the book, but I'm not loving the PoV shifts. I'd rather the story just stuck to following one character.

Before this one was... I think Super Sales II but there might have been something after that. I know the two most recent books in the Veridian Gate series came before Super Sales.

Next on my list is Rachel Aaron's new book. It's already downloaded, and waiting to be listened to.

 

Hero of Thera is the last book that surprised me in a really good way. I get excited when I encounter a new book in the genre with super clean prose.

Most of the others as of late have been either on par for what I expected, or fell short of expectations. SS2 was certainly worth the listen.

 

OMG I'm totally gonna read this right now. I've always wanted to read something set in the Middle East!

 

Just started Raiya: Starter Zone by Russell Wilbinski.

So far, it's not bad. The MC is definitely a "gamer dude" but not in a bad or offensive way so far. The premise isn't bad.

So far (12 Chapters in), the biggest thing that is bugging me is the main character's name. It's "Skree" and he tends to refer to himself as "The Skree" and for some reason, it's just really freaking annoying me. I mean, I know a lot of gamers use silly names or "fun" names, but constantly reading "Skree" just makes me think of something making some high-pitched shrieking noise. And it's just...weirdly jarring for me? An odd thing to have annoy me so much, but it really does. To the point, it's pulling me out of the story to just "hear" skreeeeee! in my head all the damn time.

The only other complaints is he tends to jump around POVs with minor characters for a paragraph or two and then bounce back to 'Skree', which is a bit baffling at times because it's just so rapid. And the author tends to just...dump a bunch of stats into paragraphs instead of charts. So you end up with a few pages of just paragraphs of stats, which look like 'normal' paragraphs. So I tend to scan and miss a bit of what's going on for a minute and have to go back because I don't really need to read over and over again what the stats are. Kind of wish they were at least italicized or bolded or something so they didn't blend so much and sort of jolt me out of the reading to go "oh, wait, stats again".

 

This really made me laugh. Thank you for that.

 

Glad you got a chuckle!

I mean, it is kind of funny, but a little sad. I actually like the book otherwise. But reading him go "Yeah! I am THE SKREE!" and stuff is just so...weirdly awkward.

 

Blasted through A Wind in Cairo

This was a case of: saw the recommend, went to amazon, read the first sample page, clicked 'buy', and started reading it immediately. Thank you @Viergacht for recommending it!

That prose! It was magnificent. Some of it was simply breath-taking. It flowed, it screamed, it splashed across the pages. This is one of the more extreme cases of what I call indulgent prose. It weeps, it whines, it burns, with color and color. Sometimes I wish I could write like that.

The thing with indulgent prose, however, is it sacrifices all control and structure, and the whole thing was like what you get when you swirl a bucket of water around. It sloshes all over the place - with emotion, with mood, with imagery. It was a wonderful taste, and I loved it, but I can't deny that it would have benefited from a bit of clear-headedness, maybe a slightly firmer grasp on itself.

The premise is interesting. I love horses, and the story manages to do something very interesting with how a horse's POV is presented, but at times it just becomes a bit too romance-y. Maybe it's supposed to be a romance, and unfortunately normally I have one (most likely subjective) tiny problem with romance-y stuff in general: how aware it is of maleness and femaleness. This somehow always makes me a bit uncomfortable. I get it that it works in this setting, since men and women were highly segregated in those times -- and I would have been fine with it, considering the issues surrounding the subject were addressed (although not to the greatest depth) -- but then it also wanders a bit into the realm of 'domestic bickering' almost in the realm of rom-com, which doesn't really go that well with the prose style. The conclusion and emotions at the end are a bit... not 100% there, but then I'm just nitpicking here. The more I like something, the more I nitpick.

I would have liked a clearer conclusion for atonement -- atonement for all his sins as a person, not just how "I have learned to respect women" -- and it's not even that -- ultimately, it's just "I love her so much". There's also this slight problem of it treading dangerously close to a clean version of a reverse-harem, where a young, strong heroine eventually finds herself surrounded by 'men' who love her but cannot have her. Not that she has not earned it, but... it's still... a teensy bit harem-y, and the 'I'm a tomboy and I'm not even pretty -- are you sure you love me?' attitude is a bit overdone. And I don't know, given the tone, I have a feeling it would have worked better as a tragedy.

That said, it was still very, very enjoyable. The prose was delicious, and I haven't had any delicious prose in a long time. Some of the bits were gasp-worthy, tear-inducing, vivid, concise, sprinkled with crisp wisdom -- and these are not few and far between, this was almost every page. And that has my highest respect.

So, to test out my new personal rating system:
Vision: 4 - nothing very new but very solid concepts, and ventures into asking some 'harder' questions (might be a bit too harsh here, but there are a lot of opportunities lost simply because of its 'romance-and-happy-ending' structure)
Execution: 4.5 - the frustrating bits are 4, but the really good bits are beyond 5
Enjoyment: 4.5 - just like the execution, there are parts I fiercely loved, and parts I cringed at

 

I'm glad you liked it! The drawbacks you mentioned, I felt as well, although some of them I chalk up to genre conventions and some to this being quite an older book of the author's (from 1989). I didn't mind the "I'm not pretty" as much as I would in most books, mainly because the character is only 15, after all, and because she was raised in such a unusual way for her culture, where women aren't valued for much besides their beauty, that it seems like an understandable thing for her to think. But yes, overall it was a highly enjoyable read

 

Yeah, the male/female thing bothers me much less than in other books, because there's a real cultural reason behind it. The things that bothered me a little with the ending I ended up... uh, secretly rewriting/recutting for my personal enjoyment, like I usually do with a lot of things that are just so close and almost nearly there in my realm of worship. It ended up being 1.5k words and I spent an hour on it, but now I'm happy.

 

So just finished up Raiya: Starter Zone by Russell Wilbinski.

I'd give it a 3 to 3.5 by the end. It wasn't bad, but the stats were still kind of clumped in there. I still hated the character's name. It actually made it hard for me to read/enjoy the book; although I will openly admit that it's totally a quirk of my own. I can't really hold that against the author. I'm sure a lot of people thought Skree was a great name.

It started well, but quickly turned into "super special, super tragic, and now he's got to vastly change the world as it is his destiny!" which disappointed me some. I was looking forward to some interesting pirate adventures and instead I got yet another dude whose probably going to have a huge kingdom and be a super special Chosen One™. A lot of the hero's sacrifices were fixed via plot armor so nothing he gave up...was actually given up. It seemed more designed to paint him as a 'nice guy' while still giving him access to incredibly OP items. Like 'gosh, he's so kind and humble. It's not his fault the universe keeps throwing stuff into his lap!'. It wasn't done as bad as some, but by 2/3 of the book, I was seeing it coming left and right.

The game system was kind of confusing, overpowered, and made little sense to me. He started as a Ranger...got to instantly turn into a Druid (without losing any skills or getting any penalties) fairly quickly, but also could use Two-Handed swords easily, any magic, etc. etc. So it was quickly just the 'Elder Scrolls' thing yet again. Where apparently a character can be anything and super overpowered and there's no limit to what they can learn or really any necessity or uniqueness to classes since all can do anything, etc. His stat choices made little sense to me, even as he tried to logic them out as well.

In short, it started off decent except for the annoying name but ended on a low note for me as it became just the generic LitRPG with the same old 'super special' MC that can do anything (better than most) and can beat super Elite monsters with no issue, etc. etc.

Also, it ended on a really, really abrupt note. I don't want to do too many spoilers, but basically all this stuff happened, he sat down, did his stats and...boom. Story over. Not even a small wrap-up. Just "Well, my stats look great. ONTO THE NEXT ADVENTURE" and...book over. I felt like it just...needed a tad more.

 

SKREEEEE

 

Yes. Exactly. That's literally what would constantly go through my head every damn time I saw his name. Every. Damn. Time!