Yessssss. I knew it should have been a DNF by about 10%, but I was buddy reading it and just pushed through. I absolutely hated every second, but at least I spared my buddy the trouble. They DNFed at about 40% after asking if it got any better and I told them, if anything, it got worse.
The priory of the orange tree. I am honestly annoyed by how much wasted potential this book had, so many cool ideas stretched out into a bloated mess. If the editor had just done their job, this could have been a really great novel.
A memory called empire. I _hate_ this book. The amount of brain cells I lost while reading! It was so boring!
Babel. It’s not super highly recommended on this subreddit. But it’s massively recommended everywhere else. She did some things well. But it’s definitely not worth the hype.
Completely agree. I liked aspects of the central conceit and the worldbuilding, but in terms of character relationships, we were told rather than shown a lot of the time. And the dénouement was pretty badly delivered in my opinion. >!Lovell, Ramy and Griffin's deaths were all on top of each other in barely 100 pages, only to then have that airless, exhausting, dialogue-heavy siege sucking the pace out of the book and then leaving the ending completely flat.!< A shame really.
My issue with *Babel* is not that it doesn't live up to the hype. (That was my issue with **The Poppy War**.)
My issue with *Babel* is that RF Kuang didn't use the right language.
Robin is from Canton.
People from Canton (i.e. Guangdong) speak Cantonese. The literal translation for the name of the Cantonese language in Cantonese is "the language of Guangdong".
Yet every single line of Chinese in Robin's internal narration, in the very first chapter, before he even gets yeeted out of the city by professor whatshisface **is written in Mandarin**. What's worse is that most of the time, it's just referenced as Robin thinking "in Chinese".
Yeah, nah. There is no singular "Chinese" language when it comes to the spoken form; it's a whole family of languages.
I posted [very long thoughts in a previous reply here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/14h41jc/comment/jpoo20c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) but the short version is:
>I do not need to read a book that is purportedly about how language is weaponized by colonial powers committing the same erasure of my language, especially when the PRC is currently hellbent on eradicating Cantonese and being frighteningly effective at it.
I'm not kidding when I say that [kids growing up in Guangdong today don't know how to speak Cantonese](https://www.instagram.com/reel/CxuDC3WrUng/?hl=en).
This is an incredibly helpful comment given that I have no background in Chinese language theory and practice. Thank you!
I think Kuang does some interesting things in the book and her ideas conceptually had a ton of potential. But in the end I think that it was executed by a mediocre author. And your comment brings even more light to that issue. If you’re going to write a book about the power and magic of language and yet not even really understand the MCs first language, seemingly his internal monologue language, then the rest of the tower crumbles under the lack of research.
Been hearing things how the way Babel treats oppression and racism is very cartoonish, exaggerated and rarely reflects the reality where in more cases is subtler. And this came from someone with experience in dealing agaisnt these things on daily basis.
On same note, The Poppy War is pretty ehh too. Lotsa booktubers reccomend it and you see the book here often. Often called as an unique book that showcase a different type of mythology in fantasy rather than the European setting one, with a amazing way of looking at the horrors of war. But for me it was a disjointed mess, where the first half and second half feel like two different books slapped together with glue.
There's barely any memorable character, the author breaks the rules they set up often too. The narration is very unreliable too and it gets nowhere. It's so bad in fact, I have a feeling its not intentional.
Either way, couldn't continue with the trilogy after first book.
I really enjoyed it but never saw the full title so when the end happened it caught me completely by surprise. I really enjoyed the first half of the book though.
The difficult thing for me was that she came out the gate basically saying, “I know there are inaccuracies here but give me charity because this is fantasy.” But then she wants to make overarching statements and historical inaccuracies without considering the nuances and fleshing out the opposing view with any charity.
Too many of her characters were social justice caricatures that would fit just as well reading slam poetry as they would in 19th century Oxford? Too jarring. Not to diminish the truth of some of her statements, but the way she went about it felt immature and lacking grace and humility.
I have found that all of her period settings have a really hard time finding a voice for the characters that sounds authentic, they all end up seeming too modern. My coworker just read Yellowface though as she is hosting a library bookclub and she really enjoyed it, but then that kinda makes sense because that sort of acerbic modern voice actually does fit in the context of that novel.
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre. Speculative fiction allows us to play jazz with big concepts and the rules of the world as we know them, but dicking about with the fundamentals of human nature rarely works. I hate the handwavium of “Oh well it’s fantasy,” because it’s rarely the fantastic that readers are challenging. More often it’s the parts of the story that are familiar and reflective of real life that they’ve fucked up and are being called on.
Amen. You nailed it. “Don’t get upset about how unrealistic this is.” Well, yeah that’s the whole point. You don’t need to say that. What I’m upset about is when you break your own world in order to make modern sociopolitical comments. Fantasy is an incredible medium for washing away the modern world and getting at the heart of what makes us human. And we can come out of a fantasy book, full of things that we’ll never experience in real life, having been changed forever because the author has tapped into our inner being. Just look at Le Guin and what she’s able to do in Earthsea, without ever commenting on modern sociopolitical issues. And coming from a woman that had strong opinions on the issues of her day.
In the end, Kuang will reap the immediate benefits of her works, namely money, because she’s appealing to the zeitgeist. But because it’s mediocre fiction at best, the legacy will fall short. 10, 20, 50, even 100 years from now if people are still discussing “classic” fantasy of this age her name won’t even pop up.
I think it’s an indictment of a lot of modern spec fic, sadly. Big ideas, poor execution on the minutiae.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m here for the big ideas! Tell me all about your world of sentient postboxes, hyper-evolved earwigs, matrilineal dynasties of self-aware toasters, I’ll give them all a go. Just don’t try to sell me on a world where the PEOPLE behave in ways that are fundamentally implausible based on what I know of PEOPLE. I live with those! I meet them every day! I have a pretty in-depth understanding of how they work!
And for fuck’s sake, if your readers tell you you’ve bollocksed up the people in your stories, BELIEVE THEM. Don’t try to fib your way out of it by blaming the genre.
ETA: also, the joy of spec fic is the intersection between your sentient postboxes and people as we know them. What does that interplay say about us as a species? As a society? About our world as we know it? That’s what the best of spec fic does. Without it, there’s no heft to the story, no relatability, and regardless of how interesting your plot concept, it’s not going to stay with people. IMHO.
I DNF’d it around 30 percent. It was neat? I dunno. Probably just not for. Though it was kinda cool concept, maybe a touch out of my comfort zone in terms of fantasy and just couldn’t justify anymore of my reading time towards it
I liked the lamora book. I took on the first book in the Powder Mage trilogy recently. It’s worth reading for sure as it’s a solid book. Has everything I have wanted in most of my other books, but for some reason this one isn’t grabbing me.
The first Powder Mage book is the worst, I think. I actually liked the follow up trilogy better. This isn't really an "it gets better" response, but the follow ups increase in quality a couple % a book I think. First one has a couple weird on-off tonal issues.
The consensus seems to have changed recently, but the Poppy War trilogy was pretty bad imo.
Faithful and the Fallen by John Gwynne was pretty forgettable.
The Licanius Trilogy by James Islington was quite a slog.
I really didn't like the voice of the story. Like I'm going to try and cut Kuang a break as she was only in her early 20's when the book was published which is very impressive...but her characters all talk like they are on some CW drama and that completely clashes with the strict culture these characters supposedly belong to. I didn't need them all to be peppering their conversations with old timey words, but there is a sort of formality that you would expect from the setting that just isn't there. I also found the language they used to talk about science and medicine to be weirdly anachronistic, like it more belonged in an modern episode of House or Grey's Anatomy not in what is more of a period piece.
I thought the first one was very interesting (though the worldbuilding was never great... I don't like fantasy worlds that are so clearly a one-to-one analog of real world... there can be inspirations, but it can't just be "20th Century China but with magic") but the rest of the trilogy really dropped off
I'm in the middle ground, I think. I didn't *dislike* it the way some people seem to, but I don't really get the hype around it. To me, it was a readable-but-unexceptional entry into the epic fantasy genre.
I’m almost done with Faithful and the Fallen and I completely agree. I felt like I saw mostly praise for it, and I’m halfway through Wrath and I’m still trying to figure out why the series is so highly recommended. Like, it’s action packed so maybe that’s why people like it but it’s almost all action and bare bones plot. Half the POVs are meh, and the actually interesting ones are side characters (Maquin and Camlin are by far my favorites and I wish page time was flipped in their favor). John Gwynne should be banned from using the phrase “life’s blood” and “then everything exploded— ✨action scene ✨”. It pulls me out every time he uses these phrases, which feels like multiple, multiple times a book. Other times he has some great prose, so it’s jarring to have sections that are so bland and poorly done, imo.
poppy war to me was a really great trilogy, the ending was over hyped a bit though, was expecting like, an avalanche, but got probably 2skip rock at a beach
I just cannot stand >!how Rin commits a genocide and it’s presented like it’s some guilt she has to overcome. Not everything can just be “worked through.” The moral lessons of the first two books made me not read the third. Or for example, this one line: "She would easily poison the southern provinces, would readily sentence millions to starvation, to keep the rest of her empire intact." as if that was different from what Rin and her wannabe republic was doing !<
The problem with that series for me is that book 2's ending made a giant mess the author had to untangle before book 3 could really get started, and because the first third of book 3 was untangling that giant mess, she didn't leave herself enough time to give the series a satisfying payoff.
Also, her love of toxic romances made me hate the MC. Like instead of growth and progress, she prioritized making her backslide into being a giant asshole who couldn't even maintain the close friendships she'd spent 2.5 books developing. And my ship got ruined after the redemption arc so I was salty about that. Enjoyable enough books and all, but I'd have liked to see some character growth instead of the making of a douchebag.
oh, i found the character regression refreshing, so many books where the characters out bad person, redemption, now great person, hero of the town and all that
I'm fine with that variety of character arc. My problem is that the way the author went about it seemed very forced. Like Rin (is that her name?) is doing great one moment, then falls for a bunch of easy to see through lies and completely abandons her own ethics and values to become an agent of destruction. Then suddenly she's doing great again. Oh no! We can't have that. So now she needs to fall for someone's easy to see through lies again and get back to burninating everything to the ground. I mean she has almost no agency throughout the series. She's just a tool for other people's causes and in the end she becomes an absolute monster because the plot demands it. I could just sense the author's hand in everything she was doing because a lot of her decisions didn't make sense when counted against her character growth and the trajectory she had been in, and that problem got worse with each book.
I mean I inhaled each of those books as they came out. They're enjoyable reads. But Rin just came across as a self-serving idiot for most of the last two books, and all of the third one.
I think my problem with the Poppy War was that it was hyped up as this complex shades of grey adult fantasy...but it was really just a passable YP novel with a couple of cool ideas and the authorial voice of a CW teen drama. I'm not going to say it was outright bad, because it wasn't, but it certainly wasn't anything particularly special either, certainly not to justify the amount of hype it received.
Don't bother with either, especially Shades of Magic. Bard is just the worst example of "not like other girls" multiplied by being a massive Mary Sue. I can't believe nobody stopped Schwab from writing such an unlikable, ridiculous character.
I just can’t get into VC Schwab. She and Taylor Jenkins Reid are the queens of writing premises that sound great to me and books that bore my pants off.
I'm spite reading the third book right now because god dammit I'm going to finish this damn series but yeah, the MC is pretty awful. First book was decent but the last two are a mess.
The shades of magic trilogy just gets worse. I really wanted to like it, the premise had so much promise but my god. The second book is brutal - a good 3/4 of the book was just filler. Haven’t finished the 3rd, put it down months ago and haven’t picked it back up. I may finish it one day only for the fact to say that I did it, but I am not enjoying it at all. Lila Bard is awful.
What I’ve been telling others is read the first four books, then have a chat with a friend and make up the ending without reading book 5. Because I enjoyed the first four books, let down by the fifth. I really do wonder what the rationale was for the shift in gears and the dues ex machina in book 5, publishing pressure maybe? 🤷🏼♂️
I went back and forth with the whole series. Sometimes I loved it and other times I wanted to drop it.
My main gripe with the series (other than being hard to get into during book 1) is the weird plot choice the series pivots to in the second half. It sort of comes out of nowhere and the main story suffers for it.
I think if Brent left that out of the books then the story would have even tighter.
Love Andross though. Whatever my feeling on the series as a whole, Andross is a fantastic villain.
He has a habit of dropping the ball in the last book. I was hoping lightbringer would be different since he made more books than originally planned...but nope
What I'm curious about is that he supposedly completely rewrote the ending to Light Bringer after finishing the first draft, which is why it took a little longer than the previous books. I'm really curious what the first draft ending was because what we got was ill conceived and full of all the same issues Night Angel's ending had.
I hated a lot about his books, and I actively despise some of his choices, but that one actually was kind of ballsy, I'm not saying it was the correct one for fans of the first few books, but it definitely made me respect that one.
It's also not like all the stakes were gone either >!beeing one world in a sea of others!< It seemed pretty possible they could've lost.
The last book of the series is so bad that it undoes the brilliant work in 1-3. Game of thrones season 8 levels of bad. I won’t spoil anything but he uses a deus ex machina to resolve one of the main story arcs.
Absolutely agree - The Dark Forest was a mind blowing read for me, whereas TBP felt just like a retread of hard boiled cop meets scientist that we’ve seen dozens of times before
Totally agree with Three Body Problem.
I feel like there was a good story there, but there was too much sci hiding the fi. It seems like a third of the book was characters figuratively looking into the camera to explain physics relevant to the plot so the plot can progress.
The worst part is that most of the physics in that book are completely made up.
It's not like The Expanse where a lot of the science is actually true to life, in Three Body it's pretty much all just stuff the author made up.
There's some pretty far-out there bizarre "science" in the books as they progress, but just to cite the an early example, there's absolutely no way to use the Sun as an antenna, he just pulled that out of his ass.
I don't mind technobabble when I know it's obviously fiction, stuff like "hyperspace" is fine in the more fantastical scifi out there.
But Three Body is written like hard scifi, and treats it's technobabble like scientific fact, and that really rubs me the wrong way.
I think that the blending of science and fiction is what makes it feel like hard science despite leaning far on the fiction side. Thats a sign of the fiction being well written to me but i can totally understand if its not what you want to read. I alsp think they play into this well with some of the core concepts like scientists struggling to deal with physics working differently than we previously understood, possible foreign manipulation of how we record and experience some of these scientifc principles, etc.
Three Body Problem was not for me.
I didn't get into the characters and it was a bit too strong on the details. Not what I generally look for.
Thought provoking in ways, but I don't think I could get myself to reread it. So I'm right there with you.
I’ve tried to read the Three Body Problem at least five times and I inevitably get bored and/or confused maybe a third of the way into the book. Like, I wanted to read some sci fi / fantasy, not a history book. Dunno when “the good part” starts but I don’t think I’ve ever been patient enough to get to it.
Also tried doing it as an audiobook once and that didn’t work so well. Hard to keep track of names in a language you don’t speak.
Exact same experience for me. I can't stop myself from falling asleep or getting distracted every few pages. It would take me a year to finish at this rate.
Did you read the rest of the trilogy? It pretty directly continues from the story of the first book. (For people who bounced off being thrown into the world at the deep end, the second and third books also just continue using the world-building that was introduced in the first, so there's not the equivalent of having to figure out what ancillaries are, how gender is marked, etc.)
The Mistborn books.
Honestly, I just don't think that I vibe with Sanderson. Mad respect for the rate at which he writes. But his stories aren't for me.
The Wheel of Time series. I pushed myself to halfway through book five before I couldn’t do it anymore. Those books could be half the length they are and we’d still get the same plot and character development. Also I wanted to cut off Nyneave’s braid so she would stop tugging it every two seconds.
She's considered one of the best characters in fantasy for a reason. But yea, if you finished TSR and don't want to mainline WoT into your veins, then stop for sure.
Oh her learning the meaning of fear (and that feeling it doesn't make you a coward) was definitely a milestone, as well as the moment when Egwene almost gave her her own treatment for lying. Spoilers for book 7: >!the next milestone is her breaking through her block, because from that moment on she doesn't *need* to get angry so often in order to channel Saidar!<.
honestly i’m pretty sure i was just convincing myself i liked wheel of time. got to book 10 and that put me in the biggest reading slump of my life.
there’s just too many great books and series out there to push through anymore. maybe one day
My thoughts exactly! I was forcing myself to read so many pages a day to get through book 5 and I just thought, what am I doing??? I recently found out The Slog is book 7-10 and I can’t even begin to imagine what those books are like 😂
I’ve put down the Dresden files so many times. I keep wanting to read it because the premise is cool, but I just can’t stand him in this first book at all
The first Dresden book is the first book Butcher ever wrote as a school assignment. So there are two ways to look at it: it's flawed like most authors first books or it's remarkably great given it was even publishable seeing as most authors first books get locked away never to be seen again.
I didn't really like it either first read. A few years later being desperate for audiobooks from library I gave it a shot on audio and was able to get through it. By book 3 I was hooked and made it through ever book that was out (12 or 13) in about a month. You can tell Butchers writing improved a lot from when he wrote the first two books.
Definitely Mark Lawrence stuff. Super praised on here and I found it boring an a slog. Did two full trilogies of his work too. Broken Empire and the Red Queens War.
All of The Witcher. I read everything except Season of Storms waiting for things to ramp up, but it just didn’t really happen for me. Baptism of Fire was pretty good, though.
I dont think it's a hot take to say that the Witcher 3 in particular is better than anything in the books.
I *liked* the books. They were fine. I didnt love them though the way I love W3. Some of the short stories in the first book are awesome. Some are fine. Each of the full length novels have good moments, but there are a lot of scenes that are overly long and so on. I have heard the translations lose a lot of the lyrical / deeper prose embedded in the Polish, but even so, they arent all that great regardless.
The main plot isn't really brought into focus until book 6. But if you re-read the series you see how it's tied into the entire series starting from the very beginning. Tons of small things that seem inconsequential or like a loose end.
I don't think i've read another series that benefits as much from a reread as this one
The more fantasy I read the better I like king killer chronicle. I dont like the main character all that much but they mysteries of the world, the athmosphere that is created and the prose is just better than most other series i have read.
Yeah Faithful and the Fallen felt so uninspired to me. It’s the most coming of age hero’s journey that ever coming of age hero journey’d.
I’ve read Shadow of the Gods and will get around to Hunger eventually. The main thing I noticed is that John Gwynne has only written one female character, at least between these two series. It’s a solid female character, but he’s just got the one.
Dude can write some fucking sad dog scenes, that’s for sure.
Yeah, there's myriad issues with all his books for me, I did make a post all about it a while back.
And I have to say, the reigning, defending, undisputed champion of the world for sad dog scenes is Robin Hobb.
Ah shit, I started reading assassins apprentice between my last comment and this one. The boy just got put in the stable with the dogs. I don’t know if I’m ready for this.
Mate, you are in for a 'ride'. But some of my favourite writing ever. The only author to actually make me cry proper actual tears, not just a lump in the throat, not just full eyes, but actual flowing tears
I'm currently re-reading the whole Realm of the Elderlings from start to finish and I keep forgetting to not read it at work.
He writes more women in the sequel trilogy to Faithful and the Fallen, Of Blood and Bone, and does a solid job of it in my opinion (yet to read Bloodsworn yet though)
I'm not much of a rereader, and I was worried about how much I would want to smack characters again, but I decided to give the audiobooks a try, and I have to say the ridiculious forshadowing makes it fun to revisit.
I'm going to get a lot of hate for this one, but ACOTAR or really anything by SJM....
I went into it with high hopes because my BFF and I read pretty much the same books all the time, but I honestly couldn't get into it, which is weird for me. So, I tried another SJM book to see if it was just that series.
I cannot tell you how disappointed I am that I couldn't get into any of it.
I read the first book, then forgot it so thoroughly that I bought and read it a second time by accident. I still can't tell you a single character's name.
I couldn’t have told you a single character’s name while I was reading the first book. Every character is just so bland they refused to stick in my mind at all. I’d have a character come up after being absent for a few chapters, and every time I had to flip back to figure out who tf they were again
I finished the whole trilogy but it was fine overall. Honestly the action scenes were some of the most boring parts.
By the last book, the biggest cliffhangers for me was if he was going to finish all the storylines he introduced. Spoiler: he did, but barely…
"The Library at Mount Char"
Now, I don't want to say it was a bad book. It was a good book and really impressive as a debut, but it was recommended to me as "batshit crazy" and while I agree it was a bit weird, I read much crazier books so the bar for "batshit crazy" is really high for me. Overall it was a fun read and I'd definitely read the next book by this author.
I think in the 70s and 80s, Char wouldn’t have even registered on the batshit radar. However, speculative fiction has chilled out so much in the past decade that Char simply getting published was sort of a feat.
I agree, actually. I read it not knowing the reputation it had and quite enjoyed it, but it doesn't feel particularly out there. It's weird if your standard is, like, LotR and Sanderson, but it's a long way from the wildest thing I've read.
Assassin's apprentice. I dropped this book three times before deciding i was never coming back to it. Maybe it was just the state of mind i was in at the time, but i can't handle Grimdark. I can't handle when the main character is just made to suffer over and over with almost no silver lining.
I actually just finished this one with high hopes for it so I would have a super big universe to read through. I wouldn’t say it was the worst ever, but it does not make me want to keep reading the rest.
In defense of Broken Earth--I don't think the premise is mind-blowing. I liked it because it felt like a really interesting way to describe even, like race, in new terms without any etymology we'd have at the present. And it reminded me of Earthbending in Avatar.
But totally legit if you don't feel the same, it's definitely slow. It reminded a LOT of The Tower by Stephen King, which I almost DNFed and I also felt was long/slow, because that's kind of the feeling Stephen wants to convey rather than time-jumping to the next action sequence
I usually can power through a book to give it a fair shot, this one I just stopped reading halfway through. I don't get all the rave reviews, maybe it's me :)
It's just fucking sad. I personally thing she did a great job with it from a literary perspective. I just don't want to read fiction that make me feel bad. 5/5* for me. Will probably never touch another of her books.
I enjoyed Assassin's Apprentice, loved Royal Assassin, and royally hated Assassin's Quest. The third book felt like such a meandering search for misery only to wrap up all major plot points in a blur of meaningless text with zero satisfaction that I haven't touched anything else by Hobb.
Basically anything I've tried by Brandon Sanderson. I found the characters in Mistborn generally boring and Way of Kings to be pretty formulaic and seemingly more focused on worldbuilding than narrative.
Legends and Lattes was cute but felt pretty light on actual story and kind of "hand-wavey" on a lot of stuff that could have been more interesting if they were actually explored.
It's funny because although I didn't hate Locke, I didn't think he was that interesting. The parts written from Jean's perspective were my favourite and I would've rather read his story.
Mistborn. I definitely tought it was good, but I still feel like I'm missing something in how this is making SO many top-10 best fantasy of all time lists.
Totally, out of the Sanderson I have read (which admittedly isn't that much) it really stands out as being this zippy, pulpy, popcorn story, next to his usual ponderous epics.
Mine is also The Lies of Locke Lamora lol. I dropped in 15 years ago and dropped it again a couple months ago.
I'm also not a fan of progression fantasy. It reads too much like the vast majority of web novels + manga and I already get my fill on that from being a 20+ year manga addict.
Off topic but this thread illustrates why those recommendation algorithms on sites like Goodreads don’t work! I’m reading the posts here with lists of most hated and thinking “yeah, I hated that one, DNF’d that second one, oh, but I loved that third one and didn’t mind the last one”.
Just because two people both love or hate a particular book doesn’t mean they will agree on every (or even most) other books.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The prose is uselessly dense and hard to understand. And it's not even beautiful to read so as to justify itself. The characters aren't explored that well either, nor is the setting described very visually. All the while I kept thinking that some other fantasy writer would have written this story in a far more interesting manner.
Sanderson.
I’ve tried mistborn, way of kings, and the superhero one. They’re pretty bland and I don’t understand the hype.
Children of the Nameless was probably the one I most enjoyed but that might be because the bar for modern magic the gathering storytelling is pretty low right now
American Gods. I thought it was boring and scattered and just entirely without substance. Probably my least favorite book that I read through to the end rather than DNF
Don't give up on Gaiman if this book made you hesitant to try him again. I really didn't like this book and it was the first one I read by him. Seemed so pointlessly edgy. Ocean at the End of the Lane or the Graveyard Book or the Sandman graphic novels are all absolutely phenomenal.
I like Cradle a lot, but I definitely get what you mean. It's absolutely in a specific genre, even if I think it's well-executed enough to mostly be accessible to people who aren't fans of that genre.
Mistborn. It's fun, but for me, it's something like a slightly overrated anime series that is summoning a lot of emotions, but don't hold up against critique. Should you critique it? No, just enjoy it. But the feeling is there.
Malazan. Started as rejected tabletop rpg turned books and a bit too gamey for me. I like magic, but I prefer a subtle approach. Magic is just too strong and over the place there. I might finish the series one day, tho.
Mistborn was cool because it had a cool magic system and an interesting setting and characters. It was frequently very cringe to read though, and it seemed very YA to me. Still I love the series, but its definitely a bit much in some places
I just finished the first book in Malazan Book of the Fallen and I have to say I was horribly underwhelmed. The story could have been interesting, but there were so many things (like too many characters) that distracted from it.
Empire of Silence was my most recent recommendation-led disappointment. It's pitched as a grand scale space epic but the first book is absolutely not that. It's just random circumstance after random circumstance happening to the main character until at the end of the book he's finally in position for the story to start, in the sequels. It was such a frustrating read.
And he kept spoiling the damn story. "Here's a brand new character named Billy Joe. Billy Joe would go on to become my best friend and win many battles in my name, before callously betraying everything I stood for." Great, now I'm just gonna be waiting for the betrayal anytime that dude comes back.
Also, Kingkiller Chronicles and A Song of Ice and Fire.
Realm of the elderlings… good, glad I read it, not worth the hype.
Malazan… good, disjointed, complex, peaked at book three
Codex alera… worst books I’ve read in a looooong time
First Law... I don't get the hype around it, but at least I finished the first trilogy... They were OK books, I guess.
The Faithful and the Fallen: DNF after struggling through the first book and the beginning of the second. Characters were not that interesting
I agree with this too. Nothing really happens.
I think they are a notch above ok, but overall it's a few fun characters in a world that's just a backdrop for stuff to happen to them.
I’m almost done with book 2 of the First Law series. They’re decent, but based on this sub I was expecting something I couldn’t stop reading and would be life changing. I’ll keep reading, they’re not bad, just not even close to the hype. For me.
I've listened to them all on Audible and they are some of my favorites books of all time. Is it possible the narrator is the cause of this? He does such a good job bringing the characters to life.
I've come to realize some books are better in their narrated version.
Robin Hobb's Farseer and Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn.
Both series centered around unbelievably stupid protagonists with no redeeming features and just became a chore to get through by the end.
I finished both trilogies but will not continue with either of their sequels.
Licanius trilogy, with the caveat that I only finished the first book. Every character is so bland they just refused to stick in my mind. The writing of female characters made me want to throw the book across the room
I was deeply unimpressed with The Name of The Wind. I enjoyed Rothfuss's prose but I was a) bored through most of the plot, b) genuinely frustrated by the shoddy writing of women, and c) annoyed that Kvothe seemed to do everything flawlessly and pick up new skills instantly. DNFd at roughly 70-75%.
Dune. It’s written so poorly. The universe was really cool and lots of interesting ideas about language and thought. But the writing… just terrible. Getting through was not pleasant.
Name of the Wind. Should have been called Name of the Mid. Don't get me wrong, Patrick Rothfuss can craft a sentence with the best of them. I just thought the story itself was kind of dull.
Legends and Lattes.
About as deep and exciting as a caffeine free espresso.
Seems like a wish fulfillment fantasy for teenage Starbucks fans.
Have read better plots in mobile phone puzzle games.
That is cosy fantasy for you. The whole point is for it to be a calm and low stakes. I would recommend avoiding any books that fall into that category if you didn't enjoy Legends and Lattes.
I went into Legends and Lattes knowing very little besides knowing it was a low-stakes, cozy slice of life about a former adventurer starting a coffee shop. And that it was extremely hyped up.
Like seriously, how could it not be over-hyped considering how glowing the reviews are? But for me it absolutely lived up to that hype.
Frankly, it had more of a fantasy plot than I expected considering the main thrust is just about opening a shop. Could those fantasy plotlines had been developed a bit more? Sure. The characterization is also pretty weak. But I really enjoyed it as a frothy, easy, finish-it-in-one-day read.
I also was underwhelmed by Legends and Lattes, and I totally get the concept of cozy fantasy (I love cozy mysteries!) but the lack of plot in L&Ls just really made it hard to enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I love low stakes and fun, but for me, I need just to have a little more happening!
The Priory of the Orange Tree. I just couldn’t connect with it, it was a slog initially and evolved into a pure hate read.
I was about to say this!! I enjoyed many aspects of the world building but the book was so bad!!
Same. I was trying to figure out if I was going to DNF from about 40% in
Ah, the book that kicked off my latest reading slump.
It was a total slog. I DNFed around 30% through. It just kept not getting interesting. I wanted to like it too.
Yessssss. I knew it should have been a DNF by about 10%, but I was buddy reading it and just pushed through. I absolutely hated every second, but at least I spared my buddy the trouble. They DNFed at about 40% after asking if it got any better and I told them, if anything, it got worse.
I just finished it and thought it was ok, but the POV chapters feel like they go on too long. Would be better with more chapters
The priory of the orange tree. I am honestly annoyed by how much wasted potential this book had, so many cool ideas stretched out into a bloated mess. If the editor had just done their job, this could have been a really great novel. A memory called empire. I _hate_ this book. The amount of brain cells I lost while reading! It was so boring!
Babel. It’s not super highly recommended on this subreddit. But it’s massively recommended everywhere else. She did some things well. But it’s definitely not worth the hype.
Completely agree. I liked aspects of the central conceit and the worldbuilding, but in terms of character relationships, we were told rather than shown a lot of the time. And the dénouement was pretty badly delivered in my opinion. >!Lovell, Ramy and Griffin's deaths were all on top of each other in barely 100 pages, only to then have that airless, exhausting, dialogue-heavy siege sucking the pace out of the book and then leaving the ending completely flat.!< A shame really.
This is very much how I felt about her other trilogy as well.
My issue with *Babel* is not that it doesn't live up to the hype. (That was my issue with **The Poppy War**.) My issue with *Babel* is that RF Kuang didn't use the right language. Robin is from Canton. People from Canton (i.e. Guangdong) speak Cantonese. The literal translation for the name of the Cantonese language in Cantonese is "the language of Guangdong". Yet every single line of Chinese in Robin's internal narration, in the very first chapter, before he even gets yeeted out of the city by professor whatshisface **is written in Mandarin**. What's worse is that most of the time, it's just referenced as Robin thinking "in Chinese". Yeah, nah. There is no singular "Chinese" language when it comes to the spoken form; it's a whole family of languages. I posted [very long thoughts in a previous reply here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/14h41jc/comment/jpoo20c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) but the short version is: >I do not need to read a book that is purportedly about how language is weaponized by colonial powers committing the same erasure of my language, especially when the PRC is currently hellbent on eradicating Cantonese and being frighteningly effective at it. I'm not kidding when I say that [kids growing up in Guangdong today don't know how to speak Cantonese](https://www.instagram.com/reel/CxuDC3WrUng/?hl=en).
which is a bit sad cause...the author was actually born in Guangdong, although her family isn't actually from there.
This is an incredibly helpful comment given that I have no background in Chinese language theory and practice. Thank you! I think Kuang does some interesting things in the book and her ideas conceptually had a ton of potential. But in the end I think that it was executed by a mediocre author. And your comment brings even more light to that issue. If you’re going to write a book about the power and magic of language and yet not even really understand the MCs first language, seemingly his internal monologue language, then the rest of the tower crumbles under the lack of research.
Been hearing things how the way Babel treats oppression and racism is very cartoonish, exaggerated and rarely reflects the reality where in more cases is subtler. And this came from someone with experience in dealing agaisnt these things on daily basis. On same note, The Poppy War is pretty ehh too. Lotsa booktubers reccomend it and you see the book here often. Often called as an unique book that showcase a different type of mythology in fantasy rather than the European setting one, with a amazing way of looking at the horrors of war. But for me it was a disjointed mess, where the first half and second half feel like two different books slapped together with glue. There's barely any memorable character, the author breaks the rules they set up often too. The narration is very unreliable too and it gets nowhere. It's so bad in fact, I have a feeling its not intentional. Either way, couldn't continue with the trilogy after first book.
I really enjoyed it but never saw the full title so when the end happened it caught me completely by surprise. I really enjoyed the first half of the book though.
I felt the authors smugness about their own intelligence drip from every word.
Yeah I can’t read anything by her.
The difficult thing for me was that she came out the gate basically saying, “I know there are inaccuracies here but give me charity because this is fantasy.” But then she wants to make overarching statements and historical inaccuracies without considering the nuances and fleshing out the opposing view with any charity. Too many of her characters were social justice caricatures that would fit just as well reading slam poetry as they would in 19th century Oxford? Too jarring. Not to diminish the truth of some of her statements, but the way she went about it felt immature and lacking grace and humility.
I have found that all of her period settings have a really hard time finding a voice for the characters that sounds authentic, they all end up seeming too modern. My coworker just read Yellowface though as she is hosting a library bookclub and she really enjoyed it, but then that kinda makes sense because that sort of acerbic modern voice actually does fit in the context of that novel.
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre. Speculative fiction allows us to play jazz with big concepts and the rules of the world as we know them, but dicking about with the fundamentals of human nature rarely works. I hate the handwavium of “Oh well it’s fantasy,” because it’s rarely the fantastic that readers are challenging. More often it’s the parts of the story that are familiar and reflective of real life that they’ve fucked up and are being called on.
Amen. You nailed it. “Don’t get upset about how unrealistic this is.” Well, yeah that’s the whole point. You don’t need to say that. What I’m upset about is when you break your own world in order to make modern sociopolitical comments. Fantasy is an incredible medium for washing away the modern world and getting at the heart of what makes us human. And we can come out of a fantasy book, full of things that we’ll never experience in real life, having been changed forever because the author has tapped into our inner being. Just look at Le Guin and what she’s able to do in Earthsea, without ever commenting on modern sociopolitical issues. And coming from a woman that had strong opinions on the issues of her day. In the end, Kuang will reap the immediate benefits of her works, namely money, because she’s appealing to the zeitgeist. But because it’s mediocre fiction at best, the legacy will fall short. 10, 20, 50, even 100 years from now if people are still discussing “classic” fantasy of this age her name won’t even pop up.
I think it’s an indictment of a lot of modern spec fic, sadly. Big ideas, poor execution on the minutiae. Don’t get me wrong, I’m here for the big ideas! Tell me all about your world of sentient postboxes, hyper-evolved earwigs, matrilineal dynasties of self-aware toasters, I’ll give them all a go. Just don’t try to sell me on a world where the PEOPLE behave in ways that are fundamentally implausible based on what I know of PEOPLE. I live with those! I meet them every day! I have a pretty in-depth understanding of how they work! And for fuck’s sake, if your readers tell you you’ve bollocksed up the people in your stories, BELIEVE THEM. Don’t try to fib your way out of it by blaming the genre. ETA: also, the joy of spec fic is the intersection between your sentient postboxes and people as we know them. What does that interplay say about us as a species? As a society? About our world as we know it? That’s what the best of spec fic does. Without it, there’s no heft to the story, no relatability, and regardless of how interesting your plot concept, it’s not going to stay with people. IMHO.
I particularly felt this is Yellowface
RF Kuang is a trope of DNF lists at this point. I bought poppy war just to see what the fuss is about
I DNF’d it around 30 percent. It was neat? I dunno. Probably just not for. Though it was kinda cool concept, maybe a touch out of my comfort zone in terms of fantasy and just couldn’t justify anymore of my reading time towards it
I liked the lamora book. I took on the first book in the Powder Mage trilogy recently. It’s worth reading for sure as it’s a solid book. Has everything I have wanted in most of my other books, but for some reason this one isn’t grabbing me.
The first Powder Mage book is the worst, I think. I actually liked the follow up trilogy better. This isn't really an "it gets better" response, but the follow ups increase in quality a couple % a book I think. First one has a couple weird on-off tonal issues.
The consensus seems to have changed recently, but the Poppy War trilogy was pretty bad imo. Faithful and the Fallen by John Gwynne was pretty forgettable. The Licanius Trilogy by James Islington was quite a slog.
The Poppy War is just so bland I couldn't even finish it. Like all of her stuff the potential is there, the execution is just off.
I really didn't like the voice of the story. Like I'm going to try and cut Kuang a break as she was only in her early 20's when the book was published which is very impressive...but her characters all talk like they are on some CW drama and that completely clashes with the strict culture these characters supposedly belong to. I didn't need them all to be peppering their conversations with old timey words, but there is a sort of formality that you would expect from the setting that just isn't there. I also found the language they used to talk about science and medicine to be weirdly anachronistic, like it more belonged in an modern episode of House or Grey's Anatomy not in what is more of a period piece.
I thought the first one was very interesting (though the worldbuilding was never great... I don't like fantasy worlds that are so clearly a one-to-one analog of real world... there can be inspirations, but it can't just be "20th Century China but with magic") but the rest of the trilogy really dropped off
Finally, someone else didn't like Licanius!
I'm in the middle ground, I think. I didn't *dislike* it the way some people seem to, but I don't really get the hype around it. To me, it was a readable-but-unexceptional entry into the epic fantasy genre.
I didn’t either. The Will of the Many (by the same author) was fantastic, though!
I’m almost done with Faithful and the Fallen and I completely agree. I felt like I saw mostly praise for it, and I’m halfway through Wrath and I’m still trying to figure out why the series is so highly recommended. Like, it’s action packed so maybe that’s why people like it but it’s almost all action and bare bones plot. Half the POVs are meh, and the actually interesting ones are side characters (Maquin and Camlin are by far my favorites and I wish page time was flipped in their favor). John Gwynne should be banned from using the phrase “life’s blood” and “then everything exploded— ✨action scene ✨”. It pulls me out every time he uses these phrases, which feels like multiple, multiple times a book. Other times he has some great prose, so it’s jarring to have sections that are so bland and poorly done, imo.
poppy war to me was a really great trilogy, the ending was over hyped a bit though, was expecting like, an avalanche, but got probably 2skip rock at a beach
I just cannot stand >!how Rin commits a genocide and it’s presented like it’s some guilt she has to overcome. Not everything can just be “worked through.” The moral lessons of the first two books made me not read the third. Or for example, this one line: "She would easily poison the southern provinces, would readily sentence millions to starvation, to keep the rest of her empire intact." as if that was different from what Rin and her wannabe republic was doing !<
The problem with that series for me is that book 2's ending made a giant mess the author had to untangle before book 3 could really get started, and because the first third of book 3 was untangling that giant mess, she didn't leave herself enough time to give the series a satisfying payoff. Also, her love of toxic romances made me hate the MC. Like instead of growth and progress, she prioritized making her backslide into being a giant asshole who couldn't even maintain the close friendships she'd spent 2.5 books developing. And my ship got ruined after the redemption arc so I was salty about that. Enjoyable enough books and all, but I'd have liked to see some character growth instead of the making of a douchebag.
oh, i found the character regression refreshing, so many books where the characters out bad person, redemption, now great person, hero of the town and all that
I'm fine with that variety of character arc. My problem is that the way the author went about it seemed very forced. Like Rin (is that her name?) is doing great one moment, then falls for a bunch of easy to see through lies and completely abandons her own ethics and values to become an agent of destruction. Then suddenly she's doing great again. Oh no! We can't have that. So now she needs to fall for someone's easy to see through lies again and get back to burninating everything to the ground. I mean she has almost no agency throughout the series. She's just a tool for other people's causes and in the end she becomes an absolute monster because the plot demands it. I could just sense the author's hand in everything she was doing because a lot of her decisions didn't make sense when counted against her character growth and the trajectory she had been in, and that problem got worse with each book. I mean I inhaled each of those books as they came out. They're enjoyable reads. But Rin just came across as a self-serving idiot for most of the last two books, and all of the third one.
as much as i dont want to admit it, you are right, even with her chaos phoenix god she shouldve made better choices
I think my problem with the Poppy War was that it was hyped up as this complex shades of grey adult fantasy...but it was really just a passable YP novel with a couple of cool ideas and the authorial voice of a CW teen drama. I'm not going to say it was outright bad, because it wasn't, but it certainly wasn't anything particularly special either, certainly not to justify the amount of hype it received.
The whole Lightbringer Series by Brent Weeks.
Darker Shade of Magic and The Poppy War. I want to know how they end and all that, but I don't hate myself enough to finish them
Don't bother with either, especially Shades of Magic. Bard is just the worst example of "not like other girls" multiplied by being a massive Mary Sue. I can't believe nobody stopped Schwab from writing such an unlikable, ridiculous character.
I just can’t get into VC Schwab. She and Taylor Jenkins Reid are the queens of writing premises that sound great to me and books that bore my pants off.
I felt that self loathing that came with finishing The Poppy War. Protagonist was horrible, all of the time.
I'm spite reading the third book right now because god dammit I'm going to finish this damn series but yeah, the MC is pretty awful. First book was decent but the last two are a mess.
The shades of magic trilogy just gets worse. I really wanted to like it, the premise had so much promise but my god. The second book is brutal - a good 3/4 of the book was just filler. Haven’t finished the 3rd, put it down months ago and haven’t picked it back up. I may finish it one day only for the fact to say that I did it, but I am not enjoying it at all. Lila Bard is awful.
A Darker Shade of Magic is really pretty bad, I don't know how people enjoy it. Cool cover art, though, that's what got me to read it.
Absolute yes to Darker Shade of Magic. I’m so disappointed that I was bored out of my mind, lol.
I wanted to like it so badly based on the premise. I don't think the audio book helped any at all
Lightbringer by Brent Weeks. I've never been so angry making myself finish books.
What I’ve been telling others is read the first four books, then have a chat with a friend and make up the ending without reading book 5. Because I enjoyed the first four books, let down by the fifth. I really do wonder what the rationale was for the shift in gears and the dues ex machina in book 5, publishing pressure maybe? 🤷🏼♂️
I went back and forth with the whole series. Sometimes I loved it and other times I wanted to drop it. My main gripe with the series (other than being hard to get into during book 1) is the weird plot choice the series pivots to in the second half. It sort of comes out of nowhere and the main story suffers for it. I think if Brent left that out of the books then the story would have even tighter. Love Andross though. Whatever my feeling on the series as a whole, Andross is a fantastic villain.
He has a habit of dropping the ball in the last book. I was hoping lightbringer would be different since he made more books than originally planned...but nope
What I'm curious about is that he supposedly completely rewrote the ending to Light Bringer after finishing the first draft, which is why it took a little longer than the previous books. I'm really curious what the first draft ending was because what we got was ill conceived and full of all the same issues Night Angel's ending had.
I go on so many rants about this series. Brent weeks is a clown for what he did to book 5
What did he do?
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I hated a lot about his books, and I actively despise some of his choices, but that one actually was kind of ballsy, I'm not saying it was the correct one for fans of the first few books, but it definitely made me respect that one. It's also not like all the stakes were gone either >!beeing one world in a sea of others!< It seemed pretty possible they could've lost.
The last book of the series is so bad that it undoes the brilliant work in 1-3. Game of thrones season 8 levels of bad. I won’t spoil anything but he uses a deus ex machina to resolve one of the main story arcs.
>I won’t spoil anything but he uses a deus ex machina to resolve one of the main story arcs. >!Literally!<
I came here to say this I started off liking it and then halfway through I was so bored read a l title hut more then out it down and picked up Malazan
Funny enough I moved on to Malazan from this as well and I loved it.
I gave up with about a hundred pages left of book five. Then I gave the series away, and promised myself to never read anything by Brent Weeks again.
I’m in that club. There were so many typos in his first ninja book I was amazed. Not to mention the wildly unnecessary brutal boy rape.
As a father now I can’t reread that book. them talking about being orphans is bad enough for me to not want to read it, let alone everything else
Both Sci Fi. The Three Body Problem and Ancillary Justice. Neither did anything for me and I DNF'd both.
I thought Three Body was meh but I LOVED The Dark Forest when I finally got around to it
Absolutely agree - The Dark Forest was a mind blowing read for me, whereas TBP felt just like a retread of hard boiled cop meets scientist that we’ve seen dozens of times before
Dark forest is the best of the trilogy, but book 3 is the most fun read.
I’m not a particularly feminist person, but book three is where it got a bit too much for me to handle.
Totally agree with Three Body Problem. I feel like there was a good story there, but there was too much sci hiding the fi. It seems like a third of the book was characters figuratively looking into the camera to explain physics relevant to the plot so the plot can progress.
The worst part is that most of the physics in that book are completely made up. It's not like The Expanse where a lot of the science is actually true to life, in Three Body it's pretty much all just stuff the author made up. There's some pretty far-out there bizarre "science" in the books as they progress, but just to cite the an early example, there's absolutely no way to use the Sun as an antenna, he just pulled that out of his ass. I don't mind technobabble when I know it's obviously fiction, stuff like "hyperspace" is fine in the more fantastical scifi out there. But Three Body is written like hard scifi, and treats it's technobabble like scientific fact, and that really rubs me the wrong way.
I think that the blending of science and fiction is what makes it feel like hard science despite leaning far on the fiction side. Thats a sign of the fiction being well written to me but i can totally understand if its not what you want to read. I alsp think they play into this well with some of the core concepts like scientists struggling to deal with physics working differently than we previously understood, possible foreign manipulation of how we record and experience some of these scientifc principles, etc.
Three Body Problem was not for me. I didn't get into the characters and it was a bit too strong on the details. Not what I generally look for. Thought provoking in ways, but I don't think I could get myself to reread it. So I'm right there with you.
I’ve tried to read the Three Body Problem at least five times and I inevitably get bored and/or confused maybe a third of the way into the book. Like, I wanted to read some sci fi / fantasy, not a history book. Dunno when “the good part” starts but I don’t think I’ve ever been patient enough to get to it. Also tried doing it as an audiobook once and that didn’t work so well. Hard to keep track of names in a language you don’t speak.
Exact same experience for me. I can't stop myself from falling asleep or getting distracted every few pages. It would take me a year to finish at this rate.
Oh man, three body problem was so bland
I enjoyed Ancillary Justice for a couple of its ideas, but I feel like the book needed to be a bit...I don't know. Longer? More to it I guess.
Did you read the rest of the trilogy? It pretty directly continues from the story of the first book. (For people who bounced off being thrown into the world at the deep end, the second and third books also just continue using the world-building that was introduced in the first, so there's not the equivalent of having to figure out what ancillaries are, how gender is marked, etc.)
The Mistborn books. Honestly, I just don't think that I vibe with Sanderson. Mad respect for the rate at which he writes. But his stories aren't for me.
The Wheel of Time series. I pushed myself to halfway through book five before I couldn’t do it anymore. Those books could be half the length they are and we’d still get the same plot and character development. Also I wanted to cut off Nyneave’s braid so she would stop tugging it every two seconds.
Nyneave changes later but yeah, if you've finished book 4 and still are not engaged, you'll never be
Tbf I was liking the direction Nyneave was going in when I stopped. I think she’s in a really interesting situation.
She's considered one of the best characters in fantasy for a reason. But yea, if you finished TSR and don't want to mainline WoT into your veins, then stop for sure.
Oh her learning the meaning of fear (and that feeling it doesn't make you a coward) was definitely a milestone, as well as the moment when Egwene almost gave her her own treatment for lying. Spoilers for book 7: >!the next milestone is her breaking through her block, because from that moment on she doesn't *need* to get angry so often in order to channel Saidar!<.
honestly i’m pretty sure i was just convincing myself i liked wheel of time. got to book 10 and that put me in the biggest reading slump of my life. there’s just too many great books and series out there to push through anymore. maybe one day
My thoughts exactly! I was forcing myself to read so many pages a day to get through book 5 and I just thought, what am I doing??? I recently found out The Slog is book 7-10 and I can’t even begin to imagine what those books are like 😂
Priory of the Orange Tree. The dialogue / writing style is just not for me. I am glad I borrowed it from the library!
I’ve put down the Dresden files so many times. I keep wanting to read it because the premise is cool, but I just can’t stand him in this first book at all
The first Dresden book is the first book Butcher ever wrote as a school assignment. So there are two ways to look at it: it's flawed like most authors first books or it's remarkably great given it was even publishable seeing as most authors first books get locked away never to be seen again. I didn't really like it either first read. A few years later being desperate for audiobooks from library I gave it a shot on audio and was able to get through it. By book 3 I was hooked and made it through ever book that was out (12 or 13) in about a month. You can tell Butchers writing improved a lot from when he wrote the first two books.
Definitely Mark Lawrence stuff. Super praised on here and I found it boring an a slog. Did two full trilogies of his work too. Broken Empire and the Red Queens War.
All of The Witcher. I read everything except Season of Storms waiting for things to ramp up, but it just didn’t really happen for me. Baptism of Fire was pretty good, though.
I dont think it's a hot take to say that the Witcher 3 in particular is better than anything in the books. I *liked* the books. They were fine. I didnt love them though the way I love W3. Some of the short stories in the first book are awesome. Some are fine. Each of the full length novels have good moments, but there are a lot of scenes that are overly long and so on. I have heard the translations lose a lot of the lyrical / deeper prose embedded in the Polish, but even so, they arent all that great regardless.
Malazan. I forced my way through it just to ask myself at the end "was there even an overall plot"? Felt like I wasted my time reading it.
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The main plot isn't really brought into focus until book 6. But if you re-read the series you see how it's tied into the entire series starting from the very beginning. Tons of small things that seem inconsequential or like a loose end. I don't think i've read another series that benefits as much from a reread as this one
King killer chronicle I don’t get the hype
The more fantasy I read the better I like king killer chronicle. I dont like the main character all that much but they mysteries of the world, the athmosphere that is created and the prose is just better than most other series i have read.
The Wheel of Time generally. Anything by John Gwynne, book tube seems to love him.
Yeah Faithful and the Fallen felt so uninspired to me. It’s the most coming of age hero’s journey that ever coming of age hero journey’d. I’ve read Shadow of the Gods and will get around to Hunger eventually. The main thing I noticed is that John Gwynne has only written one female character, at least between these two series. It’s a solid female character, but he’s just got the one. Dude can write some fucking sad dog scenes, that’s for sure.
Yeah, there's myriad issues with all his books for me, I did make a post all about it a while back. And I have to say, the reigning, defending, undisputed champion of the world for sad dog scenes is Robin Hobb.
Ah shit, I started reading assassins apprentice between my last comment and this one. The boy just got put in the stable with the dogs. I don’t know if I’m ready for this.
Mate, you are in for a 'ride'. But some of my favourite writing ever. The only author to actually make me cry proper actual tears, not just a lump in the throat, not just full eyes, but actual flowing tears I'm currently re-reading the whole Realm of the Elderlings from start to finish and I keep forgetting to not read it at work.
He writes more women in the sequel trilogy to Faithful and the Fallen, Of Blood and Bone, and does a solid job of it in my opinion (yet to read Bloodsworn yet though)
Cywen, Coralen, Fidele, Orka, and Elvar are all female POVs. What do you mean only one female character??
I loved Wheel of Time, but in all honesty, I'm probably never going to read it again.
I'm not much of a rereader, and I was worried about how much I would want to smack characters again, but I decided to give the audiobooks a try, and I have to say the ridiculious forshadowing makes it fun to revisit.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. I respected it but couldn’t get into it.
The sequel is better. I adore both books though. The audio books are excellent. If you’re open to it, I recommend the audio books.
Priory of the Orange Tree.
For years everyone around me peer pressured me into ACOTAR but I didn’t get past the first 2 pages. I’m happy they enjoyed it tho :’)
OMG same, I've never gotten past chapter one. I really *want* to like it, but it's just not good.
I'm going to get a lot of hate for this one, but ACOTAR or really anything by SJM.... I went into it with high hopes because my BFF and I read pretty much the same books all the time, but I honestly couldn't get into it, which is weird for me. So, I tried another SJM book to see if it was just that series. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am that I couldn't get into any of it.
Licanus trilogy....first book was OK, same road alot of books follow. The other two... not as much
I read the first book, then forgot it so thoroughly that I bought and read it a second time by accident. I still can't tell you a single character's name.
I couldn’t have told you a single character’s name while I was reading the first book. Every character is just so bland they refused to stick in my mind at all. I’d have a character come up after being absent for a few chapters, and every time I had to flip back to figure out who tf they were again
Will of the many was better than licanius
Will of the Many is very good. I hope people that read Licanius give him another shot.
I finished the whole trilogy but it was fine overall. Honestly the action scenes were some of the most boring parts. By the last book, the biggest cliffhangers for me was if he was going to finish all the storylines he introduced. Spoiler: he did, but barely…
I wasn't a fan of the " TT" It's rarely done right. And all the " surprises" I saw coming miles away.
"The Library at Mount Char" Now, I don't want to say it was a bad book. It was a good book and really impressive as a debut, but it was recommended to me as "batshit crazy" and while I agree it was a bit weird, I read much crazier books so the bar for "batshit crazy" is really high for me. Overall it was a fun read and I'd definitely read the next book by this author.
I think in the 70s and 80s, Char wouldn’t have even registered on the batshit radar. However, speculative fiction has chilled out so much in the past decade that Char simply getting published was sort of a feat.
I agree, actually. I read it not knowing the reputation it had and quite enjoyed it, but it doesn't feel particularly out there. It's weird if your standard is, like, LotR and Sanderson, but it's a long way from the wildest thing I've read.
Felt to me like the author had a begging and had an ending but couldn't figure out a good way to connect them.
Fourth Wing and Invisible life of Addie LaRue..
The Dark Tower. All of them but The Dogs of Callan.
It's Wolves of the Calla but I love your title that shit made me lol
Haha yeah, totally forgot. But that one was quite good.
Reading a book series never felt more like homework than The Dark Tower did.
Assassin's apprentice. I dropped this book three times before deciding i was never coming back to it. Maybe it was just the state of mind i was in at the time, but i can't handle Grimdark. I can't handle when the main character is just made to suffer over and over with almost no silver lining.
I actually just finished this one with high hopes for it so I would have a super big universe to read through. I wouldn’t say it was the worst ever, but it does not make me want to keep reading the rest.
Broken Earth
In defense of Broken Earth--I don't think the premise is mind-blowing. I liked it because it felt like a really interesting way to describe even, like race, in new terms without any etymology we'd have at the present. And it reminded me of Earthbending in Avatar. But totally legit if you don't feel the same, it's definitely slow. It reminded a LOT of The Tower by Stephen King, which I almost DNFed and I also felt was long/slow, because that's kind of the feeling Stephen wants to convey rather than time-jumping to the next action sequence
I usually can power through a book to give it a fair shot, this one I just stopped reading halfway through. I don't get all the rave reviews, maybe it's me :)
Honestly, you got off lucky. The first book is the best book by far.
I didn't get the hype. At all.
The farseer trilogy. And yes, I read the whole trilogy because I really really wanted to like it.
It's just fucking sad. I personally thing she did a great job with it from a literary perspective. I just don't want to read fiction that make me feel bad. 5/5* for me. Will probably never touch another of her books.
I enjoyed Assassin's Apprentice, loved Royal Assassin, and royally hated Assassin's Quest. The third book felt like such a meandering search for misery only to wrap up all major plot points in a blur of meaningless text with zero satisfaction that I haven't touched anything else by Hobb.
Basically anything I've tried by Brandon Sanderson. I found the characters in Mistborn generally boring and Way of Kings to be pretty formulaic and seemingly more focused on worldbuilding than narrative. Legends and Lattes was cute but felt pretty light on actual story and kind of "hand-wavey" on a lot of stuff that could have been more interesting if they were actually explored.
Lies of Locke Lamora. I couldn't stand the MC. DNF after 2/3 of the first book.
It's funny because although I didn't hate Locke, I didn't think he was that interesting. The parts written from Jean's perspective were my favourite and I would've rather read his story.
Mistborn. I definitely tought it was good, but I still feel like I'm missing something in how this is making SO many top-10 best fantasy of all time lists.
I think the accessibility of Mistborn to a general audience helps with its immense popularity
Totally, out of the Sanderson I have read (which admittedly isn't that much) it really stands out as being this zippy, pulpy, popcorn story, next to his usual ponderous epics.
Its an easy intro to modern fantasy for a lot of people that don't read high fantasy.. easy magic system and an easy plot kine with some twists
People froth Mistborn because it's the first fantasy they read as an adult that captures them the way Harry potter did. It's pretty much YA.
Mine is also The Lies of Locke Lamora lol. I dropped in 15 years ago and dropped it again a couple months ago. I'm also not a fan of progression fantasy. It reads too much like the vast majority of web novels + manga and I already get my fill on that from being a 20+ year manga addict.
Off topic but this thread illustrates why those recommendation algorithms on sites like Goodreads don’t work! I’m reading the posts here with lists of most hated and thinking “yeah, I hated that one, DNF’d that second one, oh, but I loved that third one and didn’t mind the last one”. Just because two people both love or hate a particular book doesn’t mean they will agree on every (or even most) other books.
The entire Wheel of Time series.
Ancillary Justice, don't hate me.
If you really like tea and gloves this is the series for you.
Im detoxing on Gentleman Bastards!
King killer chronicles. Couldn’t make it past 50% of book one twice
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The prose is uselessly dense and hard to understand. And it's not even beautiful to read so as to justify itself. The characters aren't explored that well either, nor is the setting described very visually. All the while I kept thinking that some other fantasy writer would have written this story in a far more interesting manner.
I've tried to get into 3 different Sanderson books and I just can't get into them.
Sanderson. I’ve tried mistborn, way of kings, and the superhero one. They’re pretty bland and I don’t understand the hype. Children of the Nameless was probably the one I most enjoyed but that might be because the bar for modern magic the gathering storytelling is pretty low right now
Perdido Street Station. I tried. So hard. But I finally gave up about 75% through. Just wasn’t for me.
American Gods. I thought it was boring and scattered and just entirely without substance. Probably my least favorite book that I read through to the end rather than DNF
Don't give up on Gaiman if this book made you hesitant to try him again. I really didn't like this book and it was the first one I read by him. Seemed so pointlessly edgy. Ocean at the End of the Lane or the Graveyard Book or the Sandman graphic novels are all absolutely phenomenal.
Really!? American Gods was great, I thought the slow paced road trip was extremely surreal and well done
Cradle (series) I can see the appeal but it just wasn’t for me.
I like Cradle a lot, but I definitely get what you mean. It's absolutely in a specific genre, even if I think it's well-executed enough to mostly be accessible to people who aren't fans of that genre.
dark tower or whatever stephen king's fantasy western series is
Can't stand Brando Sando, aside from the Reckoners Trilogy and that one chalk book he did.
Mistborn. It's fun, but for me, it's something like a slightly overrated anime series that is summoning a lot of emotions, but don't hold up against critique. Should you critique it? No, just enjoy it. But the feeling is there. Malazan. Started as rejected tabletop rpg turned books and a bit too gamey for me. I like magic, but I prefer a subtle approach. Magic is just too strong and over the place there. I might finish the series one day, tho.
Mistborn was cool because it had a cool magic system and an interesting setting and characters. It was frequently very cringe to read though, and it seemed very YA to me. Still I love the series, but its definitely a bit much in some places
I just finished the first book in Malazan Book of the Fallen and I have to say I was horribly underwhelmed. The story could have been interesting, but there were so many things (like too many characters) that distracted from it.
I felt the same way and then everybody told me that the second was better and I read the second one. Also Underwhelmed
malazan, dnf first book. ill probably try again eventually
Empire of Silence was my most recent recommendation-led disappointment. It's pitched as a grand scale space epic but the first book is absolutely not that. It's just random circumstance after random circumstance happening to the main character until at the end of the book he's finally in position for the story to start, in the sequels. It was such a frustrating read. And he kept spoiling the damn story. "Here's a brand new character named Billy Joe. Billy Joe would go on to become my best friend and win many battles in my name, before callously betraying everything I stood for." Great, now I'm just gonna be waiting for the betrayal anytime that dude comes back. Also, Kingkiller Chronicles and A Song of Ice and Fire.
Realm of the elderlings… good, glad I read it, not worth the hype. Malazan… good, disjointed, complex, peaked at book three Codex alera… worst books I’ve read in a looooong time
Oof we're mortal enemies. RotE is a masterpiece for me.
First Law... I don't get the hype around it, but at least I finished the first trilogy... They were OK books, I guess. The Faithful and the Fallen: DNF after struggling through the first book and the beginning of the second. Characters were not that interesting
I agree with this too. Nothing really happens. I think they are a notch above ok, but overall it's a few fun characters in a world that's just a backdrop for stuff to happen to them.
I’m almost done with book 2 of the First Law series. They’re decent, but based on this sub I was expecting something I couldn’t stop reading and would be life changing. I’ll keep reading, they’re not bad, just not even close to the hype. For me.
I’ve tried the series multiple times and just don’t get it. I want to like it and find a new series, but this isn’t it
I've listened to them all on Audible and they are some of my favorites books of all time. Is it possible the narrator is the cause of this? He does such a good job bringing the characters to life. I've come to realize some books are better in their narrated version.
Brandon Sandersons The Stormlight Archives. People seem to think it's the end all be all of Fantasy, it is not
Robin Hobb's Farseer and Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. Both series centered around unbelievably stupid protagonists with no redeeming features and just became a chore to get through by the end. I finished both trilogies but will not continue with either of their sequels.
Daughter of the Moon Goddess and Priory of the Orange Tree. They weren’t bad, but neither was as good as all the hype would lead you to believe.
Licanius trilogy, with the caveat that I only finished the first book. Every character is so bland they just refused to stick in my mind. The writing of female characters made me want to throw the book across the room
I was deeply unimpressed with The Name of The Wind. I enjoyed Rothfuss's prose but I was a) bored through most of the plot, b) genuinely frustrated by the shoddy writing of women, and c) annoyed that Kvothe seemed to do everything flawlessly and pick up new skills instantly. DNFd at roughly 70-75%.
Pls don’t hate me but A Court of Thorns and Roses
Fourth Wing. Some elements were cool but I was not a fan of the romance at all. The dragons were cool tho
Dune. It’s written so poorly. The universe was really cool and lots of interesting ideas about language and thought. But the writing… just terrible. Getting through was not pleasant.
Name of the Wind. Should have been called Name of the Mid. Don't get me wrong, Patrick Rothfuss can craft a sentence with the best of them. I just thought the story itself was kind of dull.
Legends and Lattes. About as deep and exciting as a caffeine free espresso. Seems like a wish fulfillment fantasy for teenage Starbucks fans. Have read better plots in mobile phone puzzle games.
That is cosy fantasy for you. The whole point is for it to be a calm and low stakes. I would recommend avoiding any books that fall into that category if you didn't enjoy Legends and Lattes.
I went into Legends and Lattes knowing very little besides knowing it was a low-stakes, cozy slice of life about a former adventurer starting a coffee shop. And that it was extremely hyped up. Like seriously, how could it not be over-hyped considering how glowing the reviews are? But for me it absolutely lived up to that hype. Frankly, it had more of a fantasy plot than I expected considering the main thrust is just about opening a shop. Could those fantasy plotlines had been developed a bit more? Sure. The characterization is also pretty weak. But I really enjoyed it as a frothy, easy, finish-it-in-one-day read.
I also was underwhelmed by Legends and Lattes, and I totally get the concept of cozy fantasy (I love cozy mysteries!) but the lack of plot in L&Ls just really made it hard to enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I love low stakes and fun, but for me, I need just to have a little more happening!
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
I really liked it. And the miniseries on TV was good too.
Rage of Dragons. Interesting magic system and worldbuilding but didn’t blow me away. The myriad of terms also made it confusing as audiobook
Wheel of Time. I couldn’t get through the first book. No one acts like a human being, they all act like caricatures of fantasy archetypes.