Fantasy Buddy Reads discussion
This topic is about
The Perfect Run
Book Clubs!
>
Vagabond Treehouse ~ [Fall 2025: World of Chains #1-3 (Wayward Bard) | The Perfect Run 1-3 (alternating)]
Sorry, I meant on hold at the library. I am 19 in line for #3 and 16 in line for #4, so unless the library orders more copies I have time until my turn.
Mod
Mod
It's been forever since I read book 2 (February/March 2024, apparently), but I still remember the gist of the premise and a few key plot points from books 1-2...
Book 3 picks up where it left off for some similar shenanigans...
I'm about halfway through, and just had a good laugh... the eponymous MC has been lured away to the capital to deal with an invading threat (but she was told she was going to cook for the king, so she's being her usual stubborn self and focusing on that)...
Her apprentice Hero was left back home, to mind the restaurant/etc, and just got betrayed by her childhood hero, an S Rank Adventurer secretly allied with the Big Baddie of the series (or the Baddie's chosen Scion)... and the pet chicken (that HAS to be some budding Spiritual Beast that sadly can't talk), just charged through and stole the Hero's corpse to save her... BOK BOK...
ROFL... this series is great for a good laugh sometimes, and pretty cozy in general... since the MC is so overpowered that she oneshots the highest level adventurers while being outside the RPG systems of this world... she spent 10 years trapped in a Void Dimension, and was spit out into this fantasy world to become their HERO and rejected the Directive... she originated on Earth, but feels very Dragon Ball Z, since she can also just kinda fly for no reason, with her willpower...
Mod
Right now the MC Amelia is back home after poaching the Royal Chef to work in her restaurant (King wants chef to convince MC to save kingdom from Baddie kingdom/army)... the Spirit Bees had babies, and are angry about what happened while MC is away... the baby queen and all her baby underlings are swarming and attacking Amelia... have been for like 12-18hrs already... Amelia is immune to damage (it's how she gained a beehive in the first place, to harvest honey for curry)... but the baby queen refuses to accept this... and actually keeps leveling up from continuing to attack Amelia over and over... she's level 9 already... the baby bee POV was cute/hilarious... Amelia is like one of those World Bosses in WoW, only she's not fighting back... XP grinding at it's finest... "surely they'll get tired soon"... little beknownst to her, every time they level up their energy is restore and they keep going...
That story for Amelia sounds like a nutty mashup of Wandering Inn, Beware of Chicken and a few other popular LitRPG/Cultivation stories.😆
All my notifications are dead again. Yay?
Mod
Mod
Mod
Timelord Iain wrote: "Started Mother of Learning... the last of the LitRPGs/etc I pre-downloaded last week..."I am interested in this one. I see it recommended a lot. Hope it's good.
Mod
I am interested in this one. I see it recommended a lot. Hope it's good."
Me too... especially since it 's a complete story, time loop story... more magic academia than LitRPG, it seems...
I've seen some spoilers, but not too many... sounds like the time loop characters spend years/decades in the loop before resolving everything...
I'll probably be buying the rest of the series with Whispersync, for 7.49 each...
Mod
(view spoiler)
Narilka wrote: "Timelord Iain wrote: "Started Mother of Learning... the last of the LitRPGs/etc I pre-downloaded last week..."I am interested in this one. I see it recommended a lot. Hope it's good."
Ditto here, I've been interested in this for a while. Gogo Iain vanguard reader!
Mod
You see the initial pre-loop play out for 5 chapters, then the following 45m chapters play out loops in varying ways, changing different things and crashing/burning in various ways while making minor progress... then admits to resistance to the new norm and skips over 4-6 months of loops until MC admits this isn't just gonna wear off... then changes tactics, and the missing 2nd time traveler shows back up, to stir up the story... I stopped a chapter or so after that last night, and haven't continued yet today, been doing 2 other Buddy Reads first...
Mod
It's really quite impressive how many different ways there are to live out this month... and I/we are only in the first book... there's 4 ARCs and over 100 chapters in this story, so I'm barely scratching the surface...
At this point, Zorian has tried all the elective magic classes, improved alot in his focuses, become a librarian (to see helpful books), taken a quest and stumbled onto some sort of sentient spiders (this'll obviously be explored more later), talked with the other time traveler a bit while keeping his time traveler nature a secret, gone to the school dance with 2 different students (seeing how much Invasion night has changed), and had an annoying couple months where the other time traveler kept dying super fast and resetting the loop (view spoiler)... and then finally agreed to bring his younger sister along to magic school, and opened up a whole slew of new possibilities with the foreign exchange student with a 3 year old daughter... since they live off-campus with the same landlord/babysitter...
Really glad to hear that series is hitting so well--I've really been wanting to read it.
Mod
Timelord Iain wrote: "I'm giving Nirkatze a run for her money, this year, reading at 3.5x and stuffs... averaged 750 pages/day in January, and so far February is 1000 pages, a week in... only 30-40 points behind Nirkatz..."Sigh. I am having a tough time trying to catch the 2 of you.
Mod
It's just a nice secondary effect, if I happen to gain 1st place...
No burnout! Reading burnout sucks. Keep it chill and fun. 🎉📚📚🎉
I can be a dark horse! 🤣🤣🤣
Maybe
Mod
If I want to take a break and watch TV, or go to bed early, I do it...
Altho, it's way too easy to give in to post-work energy crash at 2-3pm, and I try to power through it until I find my 2nd wind and stay up until a normal bedtime...
I was meaning it in jest. Unless I am doing some team challenge I tend to stick to books I want to read and not force myself to finish anything that doesn't interest me. It's also why I don't like to be the only person committed to a buddy read unless I know for sure I will follow through.
Mod
Mod
I don't feel like I enjoy epic fantasy as much as I should... especially on audio... maybe epic fantasy is meant to be eyeread?... it's both some of the worst words per minute on audio, and can slow down my reading in general, as I'm weighed down in other ways... I dunno...
But if I don't work on a few of them a year, I'll never read them...
With Stormlight Archive finished for awhile, and Osten Ard dropped, my longest reads are future Dark Tower books & future Shadows of the Apt books, I think... and they don't go much past 30hrs/book...
I think it depends on the epic. Stormlight slowed me down a lot too. But then look at Dresden. I'd call it pretty epic at this point and those books just move so darn fast they're hard to put down :D They also tend to top out around 700-800 pages instead of 1200+ which I think can make a difference.
Which is funny. I'm struggling slightly with Heretical Fishing 2 because I feel like it's run on too long, though did not have that problem at all with the first one. Go figure.
Mod
I can read Urban Fantasy all day... and have really started revisiting the genre more after letting it fall to the side for a few years... re-reads, and retrying series I didn't give a chance before, and finding new stuff...
Mod
I told ya... I regretted reading 1 & 2 back to back, and enjoyed 3 more after a break...
Maybe for Epic Fantasy, you need a mix of audiobook and print?Wandering Inn and BoC are totally on the epic end for page counts and you're ok with those.
I love tome lengths! Part of the reason why I've been enjoying my LN sprees.
Timelord Iain wrote: "I told ya... I regretted reading 1 & 2 back to back, and enjoyed 3 more after a break..."I took a few months in between. I think it's the repetitiveness of the story. It's not bad, I'm just ready for something else which is a sign I'm getting bored. Weirdly, I also miss the fishing aspect as the characters do that less and we have a lot of eating instead.
We start that Lackey/Mallory series BR next week. It's old school high fantasy epic-ish. I think in the 700-800 page range so not Stormlight or Wheel of Time but a good test if you were planning to join.
It's also OK to figure out a genre isn't for you :) Knowing that can free you up for more things you do love and other experiments, like Mother of Learning :D
Mod
Most of my negative connotations of epic fantasy tend to spiral back to Wheel of Time, and the feeling that epic fantasy / high fantasy spends a lot of time describing locations and inner monologuing, as opposed to character interactions / dialogue... it makes the stories slower and less easily digestible...
As a result, I don't tend to think of Wandering Inn & Beward of Chicken the same way, whether that's accurate or not...
It might also be who tends to narrate epic fantasy, and when they were recorded, as I feel this is gonna loop back around the Michael Kramer and older Books on Tape recordings...
Mod
I took a few months in between. I think it's the repetitiveness of the story. It's n..."
It's a shame, but I'm generally intending to limit my epic fantasy reading even more than I already do probably... at least this year... I'll probably end up just limiting myself to tentpole series and/or newer trilogies, more and more...
I'm not doing the Lackey/Mallory series... only older series I signed up to join was Keeper's Chronicles...
Keeper Chronicles is UF so you should be OK there.
Mod
The covers feel similar to the other more epic fantasy series you guys are reading this year...
Mod
Mod
Other than Discworld, I'm not signed up for anything past April. I'll have to figure that out at some point. Perhaps we'll start the DI Adams books after that.
Timelord Iain wrote: "Actually found an answer... the original manuscript of Dragon Prophecy #3 was rejected by Tor 3-4 years ago, and they had to rewrite it (there was something about the ending that was unmarketable, ..."That's interesting. I don't think I own the any of the other books but would have to go search the house to be sure.
I've had books piling up. We finally bought another bookcase today that still needs to be put together hah
I'm not a big fan of Lackey & Mallory co-authored books. Narrative comes across as dry and it takes longer to get into the story. Though, that doesn't stop me from trying out the books in audio format. Narrator can help with the dry aspect.
Mod
And events played out in such a way that the sentient spiders hunted him down and started telepathically communicating... and immediately believed in time loops... it took me a few chapters to realize they're also super smart in a similar way to Children of Time... the spider Matriarch is using the MC to transfer memories across the time loop barrier, using similar genetic memory available to spiders... and that's so cool... love it...
And MC is starting to articulate his theories about a 3rd evil time traveler (one of the main villains of the series, working with the other villainous factions that keep killing the MC and other time traveler at the end of each month or sooner)...
Really, everything's coming together as a solid first entry to a larger narrative...
At some point, I'll probably stop posting all this stuff outside spoilers, since some of you guys want to read this in the future... I think book 1 is mostly about possibilities tho, and books 2-4 will be more about answers...
Dude, Kate Reading is 90% good to great narrator, but Reading & Kramer are awful narrators for Wheel of Time. I'm so glad the series is getting a secondary narration by other people. Wandering Inn doesn't have long descriptions for setting and all, but there's plenty of monologuing and inside character head's stuff.
I'm gonna be upset if the older styles of writing that embellish setting and all dies based on the "short memory" nonsense. I love the in depth stories that are well done.
😆 Isn't it wild to think about the range of writing we read and time frame? Like I've read various translations of Bible, etc and up. Stories and fables from Before Christ and all those stories published after 1900's.
There was a super smart part in Children of Time? You mean, insects being intelligent?I also bought Mother of Learning when it was on sale. It has a solid Royal Road/internet following. To be decided if I'll join the like train. 😎
Mod
The spiders were kinda cool, but that story was a SF fail for me.
Soo wrote: "I'm gonna be upset if the older styles of writing that embellish setting and all dies based on the "short memory" nonsense. I love the in depth stories that are well done...."I think we'll still get this style of story for our lifetimes since I expect Sanderson and several others that write like this to basically keep writing until they're dead. It does seem to be less fashionable these days though.
It's interesting--Osten Ard & Stormlight have been some of my favorite audio reads this past year. I really enjoyed having all the description read to me instead of reading it myself--made for some nice cozy feels.
Mod
I don't think Sanderson is a good example for descriptive settings, etc. He's is ok, but not to the point that it's vivid. I have to give props to Janny Wurtz, Raymond Feist, Guy Gavriel Kay, Anne Rice (some of her historical detailing is amazing), Robin Hobbs, Tad Williams (his epic fantasy more than his other works), etc are better examples for me.
Mod
Not gonna spoil the ending, but it was surprisingly definitive in some respects... no redos... while probably opening the door for the next chapter of the story...
Looking at the Audible reviews: I agree the female voices are the narrators weak point (some frequent characters have annoying voices)...
The review titled "Momma's Boy Goes to Mage School" makes me question if they even read the book... MC is hardly a momma's boy... he can't stand his family, really, only likes his 9 year old sister really, and the mom barely appears in the story past the first chapter and repeats of the first chapter in future loops...
ANYWAY... on to my next book... I picked up ARCs 2-4 and some other books, and will definitely be continuing soon...
Mod
I had a few of these before, and bought the rest for like $2 each during Black Friday sale:
Lost Soul
Buried Memory
Dead Ground
Dark Magic
Shadow Land
Midnight Blood
Twilight Heart
Faerie Storm
Night Hunt
Grave Night
Final Magic
Purgatory Blood
Thirteen Bones
The books are 4-6hrs on audio, mostly under 5hrs, some just under 4hrs, only 1 over 6hrs...
I think I abandoned the series last time because I was a bit sour on UF amnesia stories... Hellequin Chronicles, Drafter, I read a number of them, and struggle to think of one I didn't eventually get annoyed with...
Fantasy Buddy Reads
Books mentioned in this topic
The Perfect Run (other topics)Beware of Chicken 5: A Xianxia Cultivation Novel (other topics)
The Wayward Bard (other topics)
Beware of Chicken 5: A Xianxia Cultivation Novel (other topics)
The Wayward Bard (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Nathan Lowell (other topics)Nathan Lowell (other topics)
Nina Bangs (other topics)
Book 3 doesn't come out until the end of this month... book 4 is May... book 5 is July... I think... not re-checking right now...