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Notes -
So what are you reading?
Working on my annual re-read of Battle Cry of Freedom and staring the Stormlight Archive.
About a hundred pages into my second read of Unsong. I previously read a print-on-demand edition of the web serial version, but when Scott announced an official print edition with some significant edits, I bought a copy. So far, the edits seem fairly mild: everything I liked and disliked about the version I previously read seems to have survived intact. The Kabbalah stuff is great, the alternate history stuff is great, the intensely literal-minded apophenia-laden interpretations of passages from the Torah and Talmud are great - but the glurgey interactions between the protagonist and his MPDG "t3h penguin of doooom!!" love interest positively make my skin crawl.
Just finished my first read.
I enjoyed it a lot, and a lot more than I was expecting. I went in pretty much blind other than having read Scott's blog, so I wasn't expecting so much humour, and the rationalist/utilitarian references that I assumed would be present were thankfully reasonably scarce and understated. I think my favourite part was Dylan Alvarez's entrance and the idea of placebomancy.
I'm not much of a fantasy reader but this one pulled in a lot of the parts I can enjoy (a bit of Ted Chiang, a bit of Douglas Adams, a bit of Terry Pratchett) and left out almost all the parts that totally put me off fantasy writing (excessive and self-indulgent world building and lore). The last fantasy book I read was the Northern Lights trilogy which was trope heavy YA shite.
My only grumble was that after such a good book the ending was only "good enough", but good enough is good enough.
Yeah, the ending feels a lot like Alan Moore's Promethea (or, tbf, a lot of Douglas Adam's works, like the Dirk Gently books). There's an absolute ton of pins that were lined up, and then the bowling ball never really came, so they fell over anyway. Which is praising with faint damns when it all still comes together! But feels like something that could have been improved in the editing pass since initial release.
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