Staying at home is the norm... What are you reading?

[Bartholen]

It took me like 9 months to finish The Darkness That Comes Before. It took me only 10 days to finish its follow-up, The Warrior-Prophet. I have not been captivated by a book like this since I first read ASOIAF. The satisfaction of getting to dive into a work of fiction unspoiled, free of preconception or fan response is immeasurably satisfying. I'm not picturing actors or fanart when I'm reading through the scenes, my mind itself is creating the images. I finished the last 120-odd pages in a single sitting, I simply had to know what was going to happen next.

Unlike the first book, the Warrior-Prophet is very focused and eventful. The cast and world are established, and a lot of stuff happens. And boy, it is brutal. I thought the first book was dark, but the second takes it to a whole new level: mass starvation, sacking of cities, brutal battle scenes, a whoooole lot of rape, and some of the cruelest treatment and fates I've ever seen fictional characters suffer through. It's rough. But I just couldn't stop reading. There's an endless fascination to this world, and we get a lot more magic this time around, which is depicted in all sorts of interesting ways. There's an ever-present sense of impending doom, not just from the greater threat that's rising, but from the characters we follow: despite getting lots of internal monologue from the Chosen One stand-in, he remains as alien to the reader as the actual aliens in the story. The tone is brutal and nihilistic, but never mean-spirited or cynical. Were it not for the need for sleep, I'd already be face first in the third book and ordering the following quadrilogy.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finished El amor brujo. I like my antiheroes, and to a degree admire these diary of a madman narratives, though this dude was beginning to get on my nerves by the end. He basically spends the whole story with his two feet firmly planted on either side of the fence, second-guessing which side is greener - does he stay with his wife and kid or elope with the purty lil thang? It's clear he's not gonna be totally happy either way, and that the decision might end up not even being totally up to him anyway, so that's it for tension. The ending makes up for it though.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Read Martin Chuzzlewit. It's probably my least favorite Dickens novel yet. The parts with Martin and Mark over in America talking with all the ignorant, self important Americans was pretty good, and still relevant today, but a lot of the book felt a little uninspired. When Tom began living with his sister was the absolute low point of the book for me. Every time they were the focus the narrator would go on and on about how wonderful, and simple, and good, and happy they were, it was so saccharine it made me want to throw up.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

I'm visiting my folks and found a 30 year old copy of The Colour of Magic on my dad's bookshelf.

It's been years since I read any fiction and I've never read a Terry Pratchett book, but it's been something I've occasionally thought I should give a go over the decades as I've always liked fantasy and comedy.

I imagine everyone here has read it already, so I won't bother explaining anything about it, but it seems good so far, about 50 pages in and wanting to see where the story goes, good hook. Not laugh out loud funny, but generally amusing and has made my brain wake up a bit on occasion, and it's a rare day that happens.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I've just started Catch 22. It reminds me a lot of Ulysses, which I dropped after about 15 minutes, a lot of people spouting nonsense at each other incessantly, but slightly more bearable due to a better audiobook recording.

Edit: About 1/3 of the way through I'm still perplexed how the title of this book found it's way into the common lexicon. There is a character in the novel named Major Major Major Major, and I think that is proof enough of how absurd the story is.

 

[Bartholen]

I finished The Thousandfold Thought, the third book in the Second Apocalypse series. I initially put it off a bit, because after absolutely devouring the second book, I felt I was binging on too much of a good thing. But I ended reading the last 160 pages in a single day anyway, it was every bit as captivating as the second one. Its biggest flaw is probably its ending: it definitely doesn't end like a trilogy, but rather just a book in a much longer series. The final battle is also very long, nearly a quarter of the entire book, and some of it was getting long-winded.

Beyond that I find little to criticize. These are undoubtedly the best, most enthralling fantasy books I've read since ASOIAF. The prose, the characters, the philosophy, the brutality, it's all just done so well. It's very heavy though, and I can completely understand why this series has flown almost completely under the radar for nearly 25 years: these books are simply too niche for mainstream appeal. It's not just that the story is horribly dark and brutal, the characters morally dubious at best and the worldbuilding complex and full of gibberish fantasy terms. It's that there's a profoundly nihilistic undertone to the world itself. No matter what you look at, or what you do, it feels like the only options on offer are suffering and even greater suffering. There's no plucky Arya Stark or charming Tyrion Lannister to root for, it's all bleak all the way down. Characters don't so much grow as they change, and rarely for the better.

The highlight for me is probably the barbarian character, Cnaiür urs Skiötha. He starts out as a pretty typical fantasy barbarian: rough and tough, superb combatant, despises weak city folk, super messed up ideas about honor and such. But it doesn't take long to realize that he's not your typical barbarian, but a genuine madman. And we're talking the kind of madman whom you could see Cannibal Corpse write songs about. His descent into full blown insanity in the third book is some of the most fascinating and unsettling psychological exploration I've seen on the page, and it's a miracle he stays engaging. You get a lot of internal monologue from him, and there is a method to his madness, albeit one utterly beyond normal human comprehension. It says a lot about a writer's skills when a sentence like "He would crack the sky with his hate" doesn't come across as infantile edgelordery, but a genuine, weighty description of the thought process of a crumbling psyche.

This series has a very interesting magic system that feels genuinely original. Magic is present a lot in the books, and is talked about like a combination of philosophy and language, which gives it a very distinct feel from other depictions of magic I've seen. There are several different schools of magic with their own methods and practices, and they're explored in interesting ways. Magic users are incredibly powerful, but learning magic takes a lot of skill and practice, which makes sorcerers rare. There are also the chorae, artefacts that can kill sorcerers with just a touch, which creates an interesting dynamic in the battle scenes: sorcerers are basically one-man armies against normal troops, but every army has a dedicated corps of basically snipers meant specifically to take out mages. So one well-placed arrow or crossbow bolt can change the tide of battle.

I've already got the next four books arriving any day now. I'm so happy.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I'm reading Foe by J.M. Coetzee. It was published 1986 and it's hard to describe without resorting to trite 2026 marketing buzzwords like "reimagining" or "reinterpretation" or even "fanfiction", but it is basically all of that in regards to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. In this version a woman, Susan Barton, become a castaway on Crusoe's island 15 years into his own isolation and is rescued along with Friday a year later. Back in society, she pitches her story to writer "Foe", who goes on to write the story we all know and tolerate, much to Susan's displeasure.

I'd never read anything by Coetzee, even though I went to one of his lectures. So it's very satisfying to finally become acquainted with how he writes, and that I should enjoy it so much.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

I finished The Colour of Magic a week ago. It felt like 3 fantasy short stories in one novel, which I think it basically was, connected by Rincewind and Twoflowers.
It was however, pretty entertaining and spurred me on to order the next 4 books from an online 2nd hand store. Currently about 1/4 way through Light Fantastic.

I'm also reading The Bhagavad-Gita. The many terms in Sanskrit etc get a bit confusing, lots of flicking back to the glossary to try and remember what words mean. All the dharmas, karmas, gunas, Atmans, Brahmans etc do get mildly confusing but broadly speaking I'm getting the gist of it. I think.

 

[Ezekiel]

Dune Messiah.

Spoiler

The atomics that blinded Paul is kind of dumb, I'm sorry. A unique affinity for eyeballs, burning no other flesh.

 

[Gordon_4]

I recently finished Sharpe's Tiger, the first (chronological) book in the Richard Sharpe series. Good fun, historical fiction. In my case I'm helped by the fact I've watched the television film series. So when I read the dialogue, I hear Sean Bean, Pete Postlethwaite, Daragh O'Malley, etc. Helps give me a hook. I need to get a hold of the next one. Or I read Ringworld.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Apparently when Nigel Kneale wrote the script for Sharpe's Gold, he paid very little attention to the book, which I believe didn't have Aztecs fighting in the Napoleonic Wars.

 

[Gordon_4]

Apparently when Nigel Kneale wrote the script for Sharpe's Gold, he paid very little attention to the book, which I believe didn't have Aztecs fighting in the Napoleonic Wars.

Yeah that episode was fucking weird. Like, off its chops weird. Although, they weren't Aztecs but (descendants of?) Spanish conquistadors who had seemingly gone completely fucking nuts and converted to some kind of Mayan/Aztec religion.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finished Foe. It's very good. Give this dude a Nobel. Oh, he has one already? Nvm.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I finished Catch-22. This is probably the most unhinged novel I've ever read. It's dark absurdist comedy, not told in strictly chronological order, and I actually liked it a lot. The tone swings wildly between serious and absurd so quickly you are constantly kept off-balance. You might read about a horrific accident where a soldier on the beach who jumped off a raft to touch an extremely low flying plane got his upper half chopped up by the propeller and everybody is screaming and vomiting as his legs float up to shore where they lay rotting for months because nobody will clean them up, then read about how the pilot of the plane does not land and his trainee pilots jump out with parachutes before he commits suicide by crashing into a mountain, then we learn that the doctor of the base is declared dead because his name was fraudulently listed on the flight log so that he could collect extra pay for spending a required number of hours in a plane without actually doing so. None of the military officials will admit that he is still alive, despite the fact that he is standing next to them, he stops getting paid, and his wife collects about 5 insurance policies and government pensions for being a widow.

The book does a really great job at setting up jokes, then letting them rest until you've almost forgotten about them, then suddenly paying them off when you least expect it. I still don't really understand what Catch-22 is supposed to be, despite it being mentioned several times throughout the book, though. Maybe I missed something while reeling from the absurdity of everything, probably if I hadn't been listening to an audiobook I would have understood a bit better, but it's not super important.

Overall I would recommend the book, as long as you don't mind the occasional dark and disturbing subject matter, like the impromptu rape and murder of an innocent cleaning woman.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Reading Notes From the Underground by Dostoyevsky. I've read very little Russian lit because I always get stumped picking a translation. Here I picked a not particularly modern one by Constance Garnett. It be what it be. Why do I even bother reading this in English actually, Russian is no more connected to it than Spanish.

 

[gorfias]

Really pleasant good read.

 

[Bartholen]

I've been continuing to devour Second Apocalypse, which feels like binging on 50 pounds of five-star filet mignon: utterly delicious and I can't stop, but at the same time I feel like I'm not really stopping to appreciate all the flavours. Which is why i might just read through the series right again after I finish it.

The fourth book, The Judging Eye, takes place about 20 years after the first trilogy, and things have changed drastically. It's actually kind of ingenious, because it's basically starting after a point where a typical fantasy story has finished: The Chosen One has ascended to the throne, become a demigod, united all the world's peoples under his banner, and is spearheading an all-out assault on the Evil Land. Meanwhile his wife is dealing with all sorts of trouble at home, while another character is setting out on a quest of their own in another part of the world.

It's much like the first book of the series, in that it's mostly setup, and establishing new characters and dynamics. Not all of it is top-tier: there's a POV character who's a prince of a conquered people, and his musings on his new station as a hostage of his conqueror do get rather long-winded at times with not a lot of action. The scope of the story is also much broader this time, and the first series is by no means some small-scale story. Here we have several different POVs in altogether different parts of the world running their own plots without much of them influencing one another. This does give it a more splintered feel, and I did find myself preferring some parts over others, while the first trilogy stayed pretty much with the same characters and events throughout.

The best part of the book are easily the new characters, which is really saying something because the first books had such strong characters. But the new additions like the daughter, Kelmomas and Cleric offer up really interesting new dynamics and expand the worldbuilding in interesting ways. They feel like they slot into the story instantly and seamlessly, and I can't wait to find out how their stories progress. Kelmomas in particular is an incredibly fascinating and terrifying character: A seven-year old child, possessing near-godlike power and a homicidal instinct to match, but without the necessary maturity to understand it.

But there is a specific part of the book that is easily the best sequence of the series so far, and now one of my favorite sequences in any piece of media ever: the journey through Cil-Aujas. It's a very on the nose homage to the Mines of Moria, right down to a blizzard in a mountain pass barring the characters' way. But the way Bakker writes it is an absolute masterclass. It dives straight off a cliff into all out fantasy horror, and as weighty as the series is, reading those scenes the book might as well have been made of lead. There's so much worldbuilding, atmosphere and mystery oozing out of every page that I simply didn't want it to end. It's incredibly tense, helped greatly by being written in part in present tense which really drives home the urgency and desperation of the situation. And the way it ends opens up a slew of interesting questions and implications.

 

[Gordon_4]

Since Sharpe's Tiger was an action and intrigue heavy romp I decided that my next literary foray would be "The Animals of Farthing Wood". To answer some obvious question; yes this is a children's book. Yes I am reading it because I watched the animated series on TV in the 90s.

The major differences are that when the cartoon was made, presumably for balance, a few of the more prominent characters were made female: specifically Adder, Kestrel, Owl and Weasel. For Kestrel and Owl, this really changes bugger all. Weasel gets the worst of it because they made her the annoying loud character; props to her VA for being able to produce that fucking laugh on demand though. Adder on the other hand is the best character other than Fox and I'll hear nothing further on the matter.

Anyway, its funny animal story for kids on the surface, but then shit like the Butcher Bird happens. I'm not going to use the word traumatised but I remember being pretty thrown for a loop when that happened in the show and I don't imagine the swerve was any smoother in the novel.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Yeah, they did like nasty things happening to the characters in the tv show.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finished Notes From the Underground. It really is some kind of brilliant what Dostoevsky does for this sort of personality, fantasizing about victories over perceived slights and braving slice of life in a constant state of victimhood. Nominally this dude is pathetic and insufferable, but the fact that we go down every avenue of every branching or intrusive thought makes the read practically hypnotic. We get the sense that the fact the dude can lovingly walk you and himself through his train of thoughts is a point of pride and somehow justifies his constant suffering and embarrassments.