Still reading The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson. Book 2 in the series. I am more than halfway through, so should be able to finish it this week.
What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?
–
There’s a Midyear Bingo check-in post, do take a look. Even if you haven’t started this year’s Book Bingo, you can still join, as there are still 6 months remaining!
For details, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and it’s Recommendation Post . Links are also present in our community sidebar.
Wind and Truth baby. Approaching the halfway point. It’s paced excellently. It’s impressive how he makes every scene have gravity without weighing the story down.
Still reading Altered Traits physically. It’s more biographical than I prefer, but it did inspire me to make an effort at meditating. All the (valid) short term/small sample stuff aside, it’s impressive how much a minute of simple breathing exercises at the beginning and on break of my workday changed how I felt at the end of the day yesterday. I was thinking of exploring meditation through yoga, but with more consideration I think finding the right kata from a martial art would suit me better.
Audible had some deals, so I went a little overboard
I’m up to H is for Homicide in Kinsey Milhone. I’ll finish those from the library first.
I bought:
28 books in Jana DeLeon’s Miss Fortune series.
7 books in her Shaye Archer.
4 main books of Skyward by Sanderson.
A little overboard, but at about $2.50 a book I couldn’t resist. I have a nice little backlog going for now.
Wow, and I thought i bought too much when I bought 11 books.
I didn’t buy Wind and Truth though, still have to re-read the whole series, so will be a while before I get around to it. Will get it soon-ish though.w
How are the Kinsey Milhone books? I have A, B and F. Wanted to read A and B to see if I like it before getting more.
Eh, was a little under $100 for something around 375 hours worth of book. It is a lot, but I don’t usually see prices at that point for audiobooks I know I like, and I really like when I can read whole series in a row. I’ve read something like 20 of the Miss Fortune as ebooks, but I’m way slower that way because I have way more time I can listen.
I like the character. The books are just a little brief, especially at the endings, compared to my preference, but I think that’s a style choice from the types of stories it’s inspired by. She’s a little bit crazy, but in the way that maybe we’re all a little crazy. She’s just direct about it at times. Overall, they’re enjoyable enough. It probably won’t make my bookshelf, but I would guess that it helped inspire some of the stuff that I prefer a little more, and I would potentially read them again at some point.
375 hours. I wonder how long it will take you to go through them. Three months?
Between Miss Fortune and Shaye Archer (and her other series) which one would you recommend as introduction to her writing?
One of my favorite things about the long Sanderson books is that even though they are SO LONG, they are paced so well that I never felt like it was too long. All the building up in the middle is important and enjoyable (at least to me), and it all wraps up so quickly and nicely at the end of every book.
There was an introduction to the version of Elantris I listened to where an early member of a writing group (or a teacher or something) was really confused about all his premises for stories just being characters in a setting. They had to “make him” get to the point where the world is at stake, because he was so focused just on the interactions between people. Then, in his notes at the end (of the later edition, with knowledge of its success), he wrote about how much he valued that it worked so well in a world of magic where most of the book minimally interacts with it. You can see that in every scene he writes. They’re all just so natural, independent of the stakes of the story.
But Stormlight feels like his real masterpiece. There are so many characters that matter, and on top of that he blends in elements of his other works so seamlessly
I finished Wind and Truth.
Spoilers
So despite the spoiler tag, I’m not going to mention actual details. But I think my impressions themselves could change how someone reads the book, so I’m tagging it anyways.
Wow. Just fucking wow. It’s not at all how I expected shit to go, but holy shit was it a hell of a ride, and the story it set up? Damn.
I need the next 5 books. I hope the timeline of the next setting is sooner than I had been expecting. It feels like a lot of threads that were winding up ripped wide open instead. The end result make the whole 5 book arc feel like a new beginning to something truly absurdly scaled. “There’s always another secret.”
All I’ll say without tags is that as high as my expectations were, he blew them away.
Not going to read the spoilers. May come back in an year or so to look at them though.
Glad to hear that it’s great!
I was probably liberal with the tag, but I’d rather lean towards not impacting the experience at all.
My head was spinning that night with all the possibilities for the second half though. (I definitely didn’t start War of Kings as a physical book immediately after to see what extra details I pick up. That would make me a crazy person.)
Tap for spoiler
There were a couple points where I was wondering how he’d clean it up, because I was expecting the two halves to be more separated like Mistborn.
But what he did was better. It doesn’t just open up the second half of Stormlight. It opens the whole Cosmere and makes basically everything that’s already happened feel like pre-history.
He’ll have to navigate all the time games he played at the end, but I have little doubt he has a plan.
How are you liking The Well of Ascension on reread?
I finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Overall a solid book with some good commentary on modern poverty, foster care, and the opioid crisis. The first half stuck too close to the plot points of David Copperfield, but thankfully it stood more on its own in the second half. The ending felt a bit rushed.
Now I’ve started Hex Education by Maureen Kilmer. If it wasn’t such a short read, I would not be finishing this book. Almost every character is unlikeable. I was hoping for a campy witchy book where I want to hang out with the characters, but instead I got a suburban mom who married rich and can’t stop humblebragging about it.
I am really enjoying it. I am about 2/3rd done, and as I mentioned last week, I had forgotten most of the stuff. So, really enjoying everything going on. And while I remember the ending of the book, I don’t recall how exactly they get there.
I haven’t even read David Copperfield, how is it?
lol at suburban mom’s humblebragging. Good luck!
David Copperfield is ok. I really liked the writing style and found the characters interesting. It dragged on for too long though and the main character didn’t have much agency throughout the story which can be frustrating.
Just finished The Skystone by Jack Whyte. Lovely little piece of historical fiction. I have the second in the series but everything has to wait until I finish Wind and Truth haha.
I’m plowing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, I’m currently on book 4. Book 1 was for bingo, the rest are just to boost my numbers for my annual reading goal :).
LitRPG can wildly fluctuate in quality, but if LitRPG interests you at all, this is one of the top 3 series I’d recommend.
I’ll try this later.
They can vary even by the same author: I felt burned by the “he who fights with monsters” series whose 1st book is simply awesome in my opinion, but by book 10 has devolved
Yep. It takes a certain amount of skill to be able to ramp up the power and abilities of your protagonist without the story getting away from you.  That’s kind of why I described what I could recommend as series because there’s a few where the first few work well HWFWM being one of them but after that, there’s a pretty significant drop off in quality of the overall narrative.
And even one of those that I’d say that I recommend (Ready Player One/Two) works pretty well but more so for a subset of readers that I just happen to be part of (those whose main cultural media experiences were between the 70s and the 90s.) and while the series works moderately well it’s definitely written to a specific subset of readers.
As an aside because I already mentioned two of the three I recommended in the original comment, I should probably also recognize the third just for posterity. It’s the four book trilogy, This Trilogy is Broken by JP Valentine.
Thanks for talking about broken, it’s on my next read list.
I did enjoy ready player 1; never did ready player 2 out of fright it would not be very good
I had to put down Fellowship of the Ring for a while due to a cascade of library books, but I’m finally back to it. God I just love how that book flows.
When I want something simpler to read I’ve been going to the Hardy Boys books lately. Read a bunch of them as a kid, they’re still quite enjoyable now. Normally if I reread something 20 years later it’s pretty clearly no longer my taste, but I’m on book 3 and still enjoying them quite a bit.
I’ve been tempted to give a few a go again. They were my jam in middle school.
