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Varysblackfyre321

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  • 2 weeks later...

I didn't read that Bakker Consult book either, I read all the previous books and found The Great Ordeal to be such a f'ng nightmare ordeal I passed on the consult thing.  b'ah!  enough

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Malazan - got through book 4 and decided there were better uses of my time. 

Rothfuss - I plowed through Name of the Wind despite misgivings from the first few pages (in short, I hated Kvothe's guts). Decent book, but I had no interest in reading further.

Black Company - Read about half of the first book and moved on. Not terrible, just not for me. 

On 5/9/2019 at 11:35 AM, Corvinus said:

I can now say that I've failed to get into Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn.

I've only gotten about 20% into The Dragonbone Chair, on my 2nd attempt, and I find it really boring. There is nothing here to grab me. Maybe if I had tried to read it years ago, when LOTR was the only other thing I had read, this would have been fine, but not now.

The first 150-200 pages of that book are simply putrid. It gets a lot better in a hurry after that, and I found the subsequent books quite good as well.

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1 hour ago, Ferrum Aeternum said:

The first 150-200 pages of that book are simply putrid. It gets a lot better in a hurry after that, and I found the subsequent books quite good as well.

hmm, I've wondered, but couldn't find out how established Williams was before MST, because I really don't see how you can sell this book with that beginning. Or maybe publishers in the 80s were more willing to give books a chance.

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where's the limit between tried & failed, on the one hand, and stuck with it beyond the point of sense & decency, on the other?  i read half a malazan and let it go like mf elsa, but also read eight jordans too many, like a necrotic marriage in which one persists out of a deranged sense of obligation or for the sake of social appearances, an exercise in aristotelian akrasia, perhaps--knowing the moderate principle of conduct but through incontinence failing to live up to it; by contrast, reading all of bakker's books, and adoring them, is an instance of aristotelian akolasia, just immoderate, unprincipled, not even knowing the relationship is substantially injurious, or at best just too reckless to care.

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Anything I've ever tried by Sanderson. His writing just does nothing for me. 

Prince of Thorns/Broken Empire. I'm all for grimdark but when your book opens with your protag and his boys gleefully raping and murdering an entire village I'm out. 

Malazan. Mainly because I'm an audiobook "reader" and the audio version I tried was awful. Also I just found it extremely difficult to follow. 

Prince of Nothing. Don't really have a reason for this one, I just kinda stopped and never started it again. 

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Malazan:  made it through Toll the Hounds (loved some earlier ones like Midnight Tides).

 

On The Great Ordeal by Bakker and plan on reading so not giving up (had too many kids the last 4 years).

 

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On 5/23/2019 at 12:08 PM, KiDisaster said:

Anything I've ever tried by Sanderson. His writing just does nothing for me. 

Prince of Thorns/Broken Empire. I'm all for grimdark but when your book opens with your protag and his boys gleefully raping and murdering an entire village I'm out. 

Add these to my list, for the same reasons. 

I did somehow grind through and finish the whole Broken Empire trilogy, mostly because I found the worldbuilding very interesting. That ended up not being nearly enough to offset the rest.

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On 5/23/2019 at 10:08 AM, Ferrum Aeternum said:

Malazan - got through book 4 and decided there were better uses of my time. 

Rothfuss - I plowed through Name of the Wind despite misgivings from the first few pages (in short, I hated Kvothe's guts). Decent book, but I had no interest in reading further.

Black Company - Read about half of the first book and moved on. Not terrible, just not for me. 

The first 150-200 pages of that book are simply putrid. It gets a lot better in a hurry after that, and I found the subsequent books quite good as well.

This is almost exactly my experience with these.  Although I've never read any Rothfuss and I only read Gardens of the Moon - which I remember pretty much nothing of (that's how much of an impression it made on me).  Also, I read The Dragonbone Chair early enough in my life that the slow beginning didn't turn me away and I ultimately enjoyed the series.  Oh, and I, too, read a few too many books in the Wheel o' Time series (but not eight like @sologdin :D).

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On 5/23/2019 at 8:08 AM, Ferrum Aeternum said:

Rothfuss - I plowed through Name of the Wind despite misgivings from the first few pages (in short, I hated Kvothe's guts). Decent book, but I had no interest in reading further.

Meh I can relate.  I’ve always found Kvote to be  a bit of a Sue type character. Well at least Young Kvote but given that’s who we’re focused on throughout the story so yeah. Like for most of the books everything he does he pretty much excels at. It’s not until book 2 that he is briefly mentioned to have failed at things at chemistry and Theoretical math towards literally the last few pages. Also, the series magic system seems pretty standard. The world doesn’t exactly strike me as that interesting. Ambrose as an antagonist seems more suited to be the bully for 80s movie. He’s not nuanced and that in it self is ok, but he’s also evil enough to be that interesting either. 

My readings of series so far could mostly be categorized as “meh”. 

Still I’m probably going to read the third novel. More to see if my hunch on who is the King Kvote kills is correct. 

On 5/23/2019 at 10:08 AM, KiDisaster said:

Prince of Thorns/Broken Empire. I'm all for grimdark but when your book opens with your protag and his boys gleefully raping and murdering an entire village I'm out. 

 

I personally don’t see a problem with introducing the protagonist(s) in the series  doing something deplorable. But it should  to have a point that isn’t just “Aren’t these characters so dark?!”. Which the introductory scene of “Prince of thorns” seems to be the only message the author  wants to convey. The Broken empire trilogy feels to me like the writings that a teenage edgelord does when he tries to feel deep-and fails doing.  “Religion is a scam” “Civilary is stupid” Very surface level critiques that lacks any real nuance on the complicated subject matters it wants to address. 

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On 5/23/2019 at 12:29 PM, sologdin said:

where's the limit between tried & failed, on the one hand, and stuck with it beyond the point of sense & decency, on the other?  i read half a malazan and let it go like mf elsa, but also read eight jordans too many, like a necrotic marriage in which one persists out of a deranged sense of obligation or for the sake of social appearances, an exercise in aristotelian akrasia, perhaps--knowing the moderate principle of conduct but through incontinence failing to live up to it; by contrast, reading all of bakker's books, and adoring them, is an instance of aristotelian akolasia, just immoderate, unprincipled, not even knowing the relationship is substantially injurious, or at best just too reckless to care.

8 Jordan's? Well, now I don't feel near as bad reading the Gor novels past the point of pleasure and prudence. 

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