David Traver Adolphus > Recent Status Updates

It's been a long time since I read a good fantasy mercenary company book, maybe way back to Annals of the Black Company. It's a good read.

Ohmigod four pages of Fantasy Card Game. This better be the last sequence in the book.

Engaging and lively, but if I never have to read another fantasy card game again in my life, it'll be too soon.

Just and endless list of names and places, intolerably boring so far.

.... As a personal pique, there's also what I call the L.E. Modesitt Jr. Problem: incessant italics. The page I happen to be on uses them nine times. It's a kind of crutch that gets really old. Again, really more of a failure of editing, which I think is the core problem. Ancestral Night is 499 dense pages, but probably could have been a tight 200 pages shorter.

It's probably talking too long to get to the point--I'm still enjoying the writing and the big concepts, but there is a lot of very slow and unnecessary exposition, and a long middle section that drags badly It definitely would have benefitted from tighter editing.

Still hard reading, but also asking very difficult questions about free will and self-determination.

There's far too much discussion of things that would be too commonplace to discuss or notice. I understand it from a plot and worldbuilding point of view, but it doesn't make sense in context.

An asexual protagonist is very welcome but again, I'm not sure they'd go on about it so much in internal monologues. Show, don't tell.

This is terrible. Nowhere to go but up, right?

Where did this book COME from? It's strikingly interesting. And reminds me in a roundabout way of Varley's "Red Thunder."

Oh hell yes. He's starting a magical nonprofit.

More subtle than Three Parts Dead, but just as powerful and majestic.

How has Patterson sold any books, ever? His writing is a literary equivalent of an epileptic seizure.

Very choppy. I don't understand the use of innumerable small chapters.

I should not be reading this while I have the flu, because all this laughing sure keeps making me cough.

This is great. It's exactly what I didn't know I needed.

I'm not surprised by the far right/libertarian attitude in a military fiction. But wow, the racism sure is intense. With more than a dash of pedophilia! Gross!

It's really taken me some time to come to terms with the fact that, yes, they're talking about old napkins.

Why has no one commented on the huge type size? It's like a large print book, but it isn't.

There is so very much to love about this book, which is, amazingly, the best in the series. But it is the little flashes of genuine, laugh out loud humor amidst the darkness that elevate it to the extraordinary.

When I really want to be sure I won't be disappointed in a book, Charlie Stross is one of the authors I turn to. There are so many things to like about Singularity Sky. Complex, funny, insightful, great character building. It's great.

It's Brandon Sansderson, so it's very readable, but it's also strange and kind of experimental. I know it was written a decade ago but it's settings and post-psychedelic magic feels like a throwback to 30 or 40 years ago.

I'm having very mixed feelings about Empire of Silence. It is an interesting, engaging plot, well told; but it is also very obviously by a very young author. There is also more than a whiff of the incel about it, and of entitlement. It's readable enough for me to stick with it, but I'm worried about where it's heading.

Foundryside is so relentlessly, deeply original. It's rapidly becoming my favorite book of the year.

This thing just cooks along. What a delight.

Oh this is very good.