Book of the Month is going to be Monika Kim’s The Eyes are the Best Part, followed closely by Hammajang Luck and The God of the Woods.
Tag: shelfie
Unread Shelf: February 28, 2025
A couple of these arrived today, and I almost didn’t include them in the picture until I realized I had two books called “Gilgamesh” (one a new translation of the epic, the other a historical fiction) and two featuring the rather improbable combination of the words “blood” and “promise” in their titles.
Monthly Reads: January 2025
Book of the Month is going to be Gaytheist: Coming Out of my Orthodox Childhood, by Lonnie Mann and Ryan Gatz.
Unread Shelf: February 1, 2025
Call this the Brandon Sanderson edition if you like; this is what happens when you spend the whole month reading books that weren’t on your TBR shelf while all your Christmas books pile up.
Five down
I don’t have a ton to say about Dawnshard, the second of the two-so-far novellas in the Stormlight Archives. It’s a fun little story and gives a lot of screen time to Lopen, one of my favorite characters, although it introduces yet another set of adversaries and uses the word “Cosmere” too much. I’m finding that I don’t have a ton of patience for BrandySandy’s desire to knit each and every one of his books together into the same universe, particularly since the most obvious transfer so far has been the sword from Warbreaker and that was my least favorite of his books. I’m sure I’ve missed other bits here and there; it’s been forever since I read any of the Mistborn books and I don’t think I ever finished the second trilogy, but … blech. There’s no reason for it to be here and much like Lift and her constant use of the word “awesome,” It really doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the series. Hell, it didn’t fit the tone of its own book, if I remember right, although I may not.
At least the cat didn’t piss on this one.
Four down
Brandon Sanderson, you son of a bitch.
I made it 450 pages into Oathbringer when it first came out back in 2017. I was pissed when I decided I had to DNF it– but it had taken me a rather astonishing twelve days to make it those 450 pages (for comparison’s sake, on this reread, during a week where I was working, I finished the entire 1240-page thing in a week) and not only was I not having any fun with it I was finding myself slowly convinced that the book was on the side of the bad guys, and I wasn’t in the right headspace for it one way or another.
Well.
Oathbringer is boring as hell for 900 pages.
I mean, that’s really all there is to it. I can’t recommend reading this book to anyone. I can’t tell anybody to endure nine fucking hundred pages of wheel-spinning and navel-gazing and characters that desperately need to invent antidepressants and irrelevant subplots that could be excised in their entirety without affecting the overall structure of the book. It is exactly the type of bloat that so frequently settles into this type of megaseries, especially when the author has already proven themselves to be someone who could shit on a series of napkins, bind them between two covers, and sell a million copies. Sanderson’s untouchable, and I mean that as a compliment. He doesn’t need to write good books anymore. He can do whatever he wants.
I do not feel bad about abandoning this book on the first pass. I damn near didn’t make it on the second.
And, if anything, the most frustrating thing about this miserable slog of a novel is that the last, oh, 300 pages of the book are some of the most exciting shit he’s ever written. Somewhere toward the end of Part Four or the beginning of Part Five, this motherfucker steps on the gas and he absolutely does not let off until the book is done.
Which meant I was really Goddamned irritated when one of my fucking cats jumped on my chest while I was reading– not in itself a surprising event– and, with about 80 pages left, pissed on my fucking book.
It was a splat, not, like, a full-blast stream, and she somehow managed to not get a single drop on me or on the chair I was sitting in, but my cat fucking pissed on my book while I was reading the fucking thing and I somehow did not immediately kill her or throw her outside in retaliation.
And then, upon discovering Amazon can’t get me another hardcover copy for a couple of weeks and the only other new bookstore in town didn’t have any copies, I had to fucking finish the book after doing everything I could to, more or less unsuccessfully, soak everything up and banish the cat piss smell from my book.
The cat? Seems to be fine. I would immediately suspect a UTI, right? But I’ve had cats get UTIs in the past, and it generally involves lots of little pee accidents and a general feeling that maybe they’re struggling when they do pee, and this little asshole seems completely fine. We’re keeping an eye on her, obviously, and they were all due for vet appointments anyway, but right now I’m assuming this is some deeply weird and unexpected bit of shitheadery and not a sign of something more alarming.
This marks the second pet I’ve had that has ruined one or more of my books by pissing on them, but Hector at least did it while they were on the shelf and close to the floor and not in my Goddamned hands.
Christ.
At any rate, 3601 pages down, 2845 to go.
Three down
Not much to brag about, I know— the Edgedancer novella is only around 40,000 words and the “prologue” is actually a chapter from Words of Radiance, so this took a couple of hours at most to get through today. I didn’t really love it; Sanderson says in the afterword that Lift is one of his favorite characters in the series, but the word “awesome” really doesn’t fit the tone of the first three books, and while it was okay to see it in that one interlude chapter, seeing it over and over and over again in this book gets kind of jarring.(*)
As far as Words of Radiance goes, I would compare it to A Clash of Kings; when you’re following up on one of the best fantasy novels out there, you can have a pretty serious drop off in quality and still be a really good book, and that’s what happens here. You start seeing the world really opening up in this book and a whole lot of different characters and organizations (there are at least three different groups, I think, who are trying to kill Elhokar? Four, if you count the Parshendi?) and I think you can be forgiven if your head is spinning a bit at the end of the book, particularly since a whole lot of major stuff happens in the last hundred and fifty pages (out of, remember, 1080) of the book. Even with all of that we’re still seeing some bloat; despite being the focus character in the book, Shallan doesn’t have nearly as much to do in this book as she did in the first one, and Kaladin kind of spends a lot of time spinning his wheels as well. There are also issues with plot armor; Kaladin being near-unkillable is a plot point so that’s not as big of a deal, but two other major characters are killed and then resurrected in this book. It still retains the propulsive energy and readability of the first book, though; I’ve read 2353 pages in five days, not counting whatever I manage from Oathbringer today, and I didn’t mean to finish Words of Radiance until today but chose to finish it instead of sleeping last night. And, again, it’s not a bad book, it just suffers in comparison to the first one.
This week will be the pivotal one. I don’t remember how far exactly I got into Oathbringer the first time but it wasn’t very far. If I finish it this week I think I’m probably good with finishing everything that’s been released. If I hit a brick wall again … we’ll see, I suppose.
(*) I’m also real real worried about that thing that that other thing says to Szeth at the very end of the book. And the thing itself also worries me. WordPress doesn’t support spoiler text AFAIK or I’d say more.
Two down
Edgedancer isn’t very long, so there will be a longer post later today, but as of midnight last night I’m done with the first two books. I’ll finish #3 today and give myself next week to get through Oathbringer.
Also, this was taken in exactly the same spot as the previous picture and the difference in the wall color is kind of fascinating.