Still reading The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson. Book 2 in the series. I am more than halfway through, so should be able to finish it this week.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

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  • limer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    7 days ago

    I’ll try this later.

    They can vary even by the same author: I felt burned by the “he who fights with monsters” series whose 1st book is simply awesome in my opinion, but by book 10 has devolved

    • JaymesRS@literature.cafeMEnglish
      2·
      7 days ago

      Yep. It takes a certain amount of skill to be able to ramp up the power and abilities of your protagonist without the story getting away from you.  That’s kind of why I described what I could recommend as series because there’s a few where the first few work well HWFWM being one of them but after that, there’s a pretty significant drop off in quality of the overall narrative.

      And even one of those that I’d say that I recommend (Ready Player One/Two) works pretty well but more so for a subset of readers that I just happen to be part of (those whose main cultural media experiences were between the 70s and the 90s.) and while the series works moderately well it’s definitely written to a specific subset of readers.

      As an aside because I already mentioned two of the three I recommended in the original comment, I should probably also recognize the third just for posterity. It’s the four book trilogy, This Trilogy is Broken by JP Valentine.

      • limer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        Thanks for talking about broken, it’s on my next read list.

        I did enjoy ready player 1; never did ready player 2 out of fright it would not be very good

        • JaymesRS@literature.cafeMEnglish
          2·
          7 days ago

          It’s mostly fine… It kind of suffers similar flaws to the second Hunger Games book by being a “let’s do that again”-style rehash of the first. But the series makes a cohesive whole.

          I think one of the reasons Broken works fairly well for me is it doesn’t feel the need to tie off every loose thread by the end. I still end up wanting to return to the world without the story being anti-climactic.