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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm going through al-Ghazali's Arrangement of the Litanies. So far it is surprisingly interesting, given that I thought the practical aspects of worship would be boring for a non-Muslim. Backlog has been stuck for a while.
Mother of Learning. I'm 40% into Arc 2, and I'm starting to dislike it. Arc 1 had some actual (though flat) characters and plot development, and while I can accept the necessity of some downtime in a story, Zorian has been grinding his skills and marking down high-level sidequests to be done later for too damn long. Domagoj's taken "progression fantasy" too literally.
It's like Groundhog Day, but you have to watch Phil Connors painstakingly learn the piano and chainsaw carving and the rest of the stuff he needs to win Rita's heart.
upd: Okay, just as I wrote this, the protagonist finally returned to the city, and the plot is slowly moving forward again. I guess I'll see how much plot steam there's left.
The progression details never got me to "starting to dislike it" territory, but I do agree that they were the parts of the story I least enjoyed. They felt like they were killing the pacing and my interest.
I can't call them "the worst" or even "my least favorite" parts of the story, though, because when my son read it he ate most of that stuff up, and "repetition is the mother of learning" is exactly the mantra that smart lazy people need drilled into us.
I don't know if the book actually reinforces the idea that "repetition is the mother of learning" well. Zorian has spent around four years in the time loop. Let's make it equivalent to eight years of regular learning, since he has an inherent motivation to study twice as hard. Minus two years to complete the basic education (he's a third-year student), that makes six years. Or three master's degrees. And yet he's already an extremely dangerous magical ninja: a mind mage, an alchemist, an artificer and a battlemage in one. And a few more subclasses sprinkled in for good measure.
The real advice that the book is giving to smart lazy people is "spread your attention as wide as you can, it's not too hard to become better than average at everything if you're good at learning, when you have a massive toolset, you only have to find the right tool to solve any problem; deeply specialize only in the things you're unnaturally good at". Sure, there are some sentences about shaping exercises and regularly casting magic missiles sprinkled in, but so far, he hasn't defeated anyone because he's been practicing one kick 10000 times. On the contrary, it's because he has learned 10000 kicks.
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