trilogies – Page 2 – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Lol.

So I’ve got this new project going where I’m not allowed to buy any books in 2024 other than sequels to books I already own until I’ve cleared my Unread Shelf. The only exceptions are books I preordered in 2023; I’m also not allowed to preorder anything new until this is done. You may note that there are more books on this shelf than there were just seven days ago when I posted my December Unread Shelf; those are Christmas’ fault, as I got some cash and some gift cards and the Barnes & Noble box took forever to arrive.

Also, these aren’t my only unread books. I got into the terrible habit last year of ordering entire series at once if I was convinced in advance I’d enjoy them! There are other unread books that you don’t know about!

Let’s review the carnage here, shall we?

King: One book, no sequel. This is the next thing I’m going to read on account of Martin Luther King day being next week.
Red Rising: Book One of, currently, six; the series is set for seven but that one’s not coming until 2025.
Forged in Blood: Book One of two but the second is TBD.
The Will of the Many: One of three, I think but the others aren’t out yet.
The Bladed Faith: One of three, the third book comes out Tuesday so the series may as well be finished.
A Touch of Light: One of two, both out.
The Night and Its Moon: One of three, all out.
Light from Uncommon Stars: Stand-alone, I think, and if I’m wrong don’t tell me.
Exorcism: Two of three; third isn’t out yet.
Silver Under Nightfall: Stand-alone.
Nevernight: One of three, all out.
Against the Loveless World: Stand-alone.
Bookshelves & Bonedust: Prequel to Lattes & Legends; as far as I know, no more planned.
Sword of Kaigen: Stand-alone.
Mrs. Lincoln: Stand-alone.
The Storm Beneath a Midnight Sun: Two of two, I think.
The Adrian Tchaikovsky books: Volumes Five, Six and Seven of the completed ten-book Shadows of the Apt series. I don’t own the last three yet, but Volume 4 kicked the legs out from under the plot entirely so it was a good place to stop for a little bit.
Sky’s End: Part of a series, I think, but the only one out.
Ravensong: Part two of four, all of which are out.
The Jasad Heir: Part of a series, but just one out.
Kaikeyi: Stand-alone.
The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn: One of three, all out.

But that’s not all! The following entire series are on the bookshelves in my living room:

The Books of Babel, by Josiah Bancroft. Finished Book 3 of 4 yesterday, will probably finish book 4 by Wednesday.
Of Blood and Bone, by John Gwynne. Trilogy.
The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb. Trilogy, but the first trilogy in a cycle of something like sixteen books that I hope to temporarily ignore the existence of.

And if I’m really feeling nuts, I can go back to:

The Stormlight Archive, by Brandon Sanderson, which I have the first four books of but never bothered reading the fourth;
The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson; I bought the first three books in a fit of optimism and got halfway through the first one before bailing; and
The Fucking Wheel of Fucking Time which I am never ever finishing fuck these books.

That is, ignoring the last section, fifty-one books that I need to read before I can buy more. It is always possible that I’ll decide to bail on some of them (a lot of these are book ones from authors I don’t know anything about) but that’s still a shitton of books.

… I’m never going to pull this off, am I?

Middle novels in trilogies can be so Goddamn tricky. This is certainly true as a writer, but somewhat so as a reader and a reviewer as well. I have been super psyched to get my hands on Savage Bounty since I finished Savage Legion a little under a year ago. It jumped to the top of my TBR and I started reading it almost immediately. And I enjoyed it! I enjoyed it a lot!

I just don’t know what the hell to say about it, and I can lay that directly at the feet of it being the second novel in the series. Here’s the thing: Savage Bounty has strengths everywhere Savage Legion had strengths. The characters are fascinating and diverse. Wallace’s worldbuilding is stellar. His prose is clean and effective in a way I want to steal. I want to steal a lot of the things about this book, actually, and have I mentioned Click comes out next week, because it does!

What it doesn’t do is hang together especially effectively on its own. There are four PoV characters (three are women and one nonbinary, by the way) and none of them ever encounter each other, although two are on the same battlefield by the end of the book. The problem is, while I really enjoy these characters and want to know more about them, and I enjoyed the parts of their stories that got revealed in this book, I’m not sure Savage Bounty hangs together as a book as well as it should have. Savage Legion also told stories of characters that didn’t interact very often (moreso than this book, though) but each of them hit a crescendo at the end of the book, and while it was clear that more was coming, it definitely felt like a work in itself. Bounty definitely feels like the middle book; it feels like Wallace is moving his pieces on the map to get everything set up for the big finale, but I can see the gears moving a bit more than I want to, if that makes sense.

(It’s also a hundred pages shorter than Legion, which blows my mind and is not how these things work. We trilogy people like our doorstop books! This could have had more time to breathe, it’d have been okay!)

Now, of course, as a fantasy reader, I’m well used to trilogies; there’s realistically no chance that I’m not buying the third book in this series, and that’s no less true now than it was before I picked the second book up. And I still think Savage Legion is a stellar fucking book, and if you haven’t picked it up yet, you need to get off your butt and go do that. And as a fan of Matt’s in addition to Matt’s books I feel kinda bad that I can’t issue this one the same full-throated endorsement that I did the first book. You should still read it! It’s not like the wheels have come off the series or anything! It’s just that this is definitely the second book in a trilogy, and it has the weaknesses that lots of second books in a trilogy have. If you don’t know this series, go read Savage Legion. You’ll love it and then you will buy Savage Bounty on your own. Just don’t, like, pick this one up out of order and expect to be able to read it without reading the first one too. It’s not going to work.