Review Round Up: Castles, Mercs, and the King of the Seas

I’ve been upping my reading recently. There was a long stint there where I just wasn’t able to muster the energy to read at night. I worked, slunk through some TV for a few minutes, and sloughed off to bed. I thought I was bring more “efficient” and letting the TV wind my brain down – but, my sleep was as terrible and unrestful as ever. And, truth is, I was really on the edge of total burn out.

So, I stopped. Stopped working late at night, stopped watching TV. Stopped trying to force productivity, re-learning a lesson I knew from long ago: Working harder isn’t always working better.

And, while re-setting myself, I picked up a book and burned through 500 pages in a single sitting. I finished that book the next day, and picked up another one. As I increased my reading, my sleep became more restful. I still wasn’t going to bed early by any measure, but my quality of sleep has steadily improved. My brain is transitioning from the endless attention churn to more focus. My attention span is getting back to normal. I check my phone a lot less.

In the following weeks, I’ve kept on reading, getting at least 30 minutes before falling asleep. It’s been helping. A lot.

I figured since I was doing all of this additional reading, I would post the reviews – and I’ve got a backlog of reviews to write, as I’ve been burning up some books since I started. I’ll try and take a night each week to keep up with the reviews (fingers crossed).

I use ThirdScribe (of course) so I write the full review there in individual book pages, and you’ll see this latest batch below. Under those, are links to the books themselves, with all of the purchase links if you want to pick up a copy for yourself. You can also click through any of the books and talk with me about them, because that would be cool…