King Crusoe > Recent Status Updates

I am coming to the conclusion that if this book is middle of the road for the series that I very well might *love* the series.

Obviously I still have 40% to go, but man. It's just so good.

Read the Prologue, Excerpt, and first 2 Chapters...

...ngl, surprisingly overwhelming pretty much immediately, and I don't think it'll get easier anytime soon haha

First Act for the re-read done. On to Emesh.

Very slow progress as of recent. Still more or less on track with what I wanted, but would like to get further over the next week.

Now finished with all the poems. I'll tell you what: the back end of the poems in the collection is filled with BANGERS.

This session had a lot of great stuff compared to this morning. First off, The Raven (easy 4 star), which is definitely the most advanced in rhymes of Poe’s work, if the most simplistic and structural (honestly it’s better for it.)

Others, such as To Miss Louis Olivia Hunter” were beautiful; To ___ ___ ___ in free verse was near, but “In the Earth” was simple and real in a way only a 2 line poem can be.

Several more poems read this morning. A couple of them are stand-out in that I want to go back to them to dig deeper. Most of them however were kind of misses.

Now portions of the party are separated from one another and we're starting get POVs from characters that aren't Rand. I can already tell this is about to get so much bigger, and some of these scenes are so interesting.

I see no chance that this doesn't end as my favorite in the series, even still.

Oh well that's not quite the shit-hitting-the-fan I expected.

One specific scene (chapter 16) has me suddenly understanding why some people may not like Nynaeve LMAO

Otherwise, there's some good stuff in the last couple chapters as per usual so far.

Made my way through a baker’s dozen poems tonight.
Several were just kinda meh/forgettable 2-3/5’s: Israfel, Hymn, Enigma, Serenade, The Coliseum, To F______
Some more had a little more going for them, more like 3.5/5’s: To One in Paradise, F____s S. O_____d
Some were substantial, 4/5’s: The Sleeper, The Valley of Unrest
The others were fantastic 4.5-5/5’s: The City in the Sea and ESPECIALLY Lenore.

Starts off surprisingly strong; also had forgotten that this starts literally hours after Book 4 ended, thus furthermore proving my point in Book 4's review that these two are really just 2 parts to one longer book.

A little over a quarter of the way through. Still as engaged as ever. YAY!

Story took yet another shift, going deeper on the character interactions - yet again, the violence - but also now incorporating a new...element let's say, that I'm actually interested in seeing more of.

The developments of the story are now looking quite different with said element.

Epic shit in chapters 11-13 tbh. Immediate expanding of the world and some of the other concepts as well. I see myself getting a hefty chunk read this weekend.

I know I said this last update, but all the hints that modern-day Hadrian sprinkles here and there just hit so much different after having read through Ashes of Man and all but 3 of the short stories currently available.

I can’t imagine how much MORE different it’ll hit after Book 7 and all the other side material, not to mention reading with the Diamond Edition revisions.

I must say...

Chapters 7-8 were INCREDIBLE. I'm 100% invested, and greatly look forward to binging a lot this weekend, as I'll be too busy the next two days to get much read.

Well, the story definitely shifted a little bit. Rather than be the same philosophical discussions and arguments between the narrator and Wolf Larsen...these chapters are more about actually interpersonal interactions - many of them violent - as a way of personifying some of the ideas, while not necessarily being too ham-fisting with it.

Interesting shift.

I am continually amazed - flabbergasted, even - by the amount of philosophical discussions in this. It is a novel much less focused on plot or characters than it is the ideas that these characters discuss, and I find it all incredibly fascinating, even when I heavily disagree with the takes of Wolf Larsen for example.

Also, there's no way in hell this isn't a deconstruction of 20K Leagues. Too many parallels.