Gorm Ingerson and his crew will fight a Liche, a super-powerful undead wizard who uses Marketing to scare and defeat his living enemies.
I was prepared for a bloodthirsty fantasy because the first part was one. Yet, the second part was not that. You have an actual character and relationship development here, with some of the heroes transforming quite a bit. There are funny moments. Zombies with feelings. Skeletons with goals. The downside is that the POVs change so smoothly that you never know what you’re currently reading. I found that annoying and remove one start because of it.
Overall, this was a better book than part 1. I may read part 3 as well.
Last month I made an off-by-one error and posted the list on August 30th, leaving a day not covered. The Troll Mountain was read on August 31st. So technically, I read 9 books last month but this post will cover 10.
Best books from last month:
Dodger – there are books you can imagine when you close your eyes. The imagination takes you to a warm place. Dodger has that feeling. I gave it 5*, and it sits like that.
Bion 1&2 – looking forward to book 3, which is supposed to be 70% complete, according to the publisher
The Sunlit Man – Brandon Sanderson got a boost by the nice cover and illustrations
Worst book:
The Sum of All Men – I gave it 4/5 but all that I remember in the weeks following the completion of that book is the horror of the main magical skill. The forceful extraction of people’s skills. I wouldn’t touch the continuation with a flagpole.
I read this book out of order. Should’ve read Dawnshard first.
The world of Canticle has a sun so close that it melts the rocks and causes a constant fire storm that travels around the world with the day. A somewhat advanced civilization exists in a constant motion, running away from the dawn. Nobody can see the sun because they’ll immediately burn. The legends tell the story of a Sunlit Man, who can survive the sunlight and bring great change.
Brandon Sanderson experimented with The Sunlit Man. It has too much of everything. Magic, explanations, aliens. It won’t become my favorite Sanderson book but it’s fine and the world is magical.
These books were part of my Alley of Books harvest.
In a post apocalyptic world, one intact city remains habitable. Everything else is a radioactive desert. The survivors are highly dependent on a mythical high-tech building called “The Factory”. The further you go from it, the more destroyed the environment is. However, The Factory is clearly evil, and a resistance movement is forming.
A few very deep observations:
Part one is for 15+ audience, part two is for 16+. Part three can be expected to be for 17+ 🙂
Part one is a comic book. Part two introduces a robot girl with big eyes and some reviewers say it’s Manga
Late 90s or early 2000s, I was part of an IRC fan club of Terry Pratchett, called #ankh-morpork. I maintained a website built with html and iframes, dedicated to his works and the IRC channel. As part of this, I translated (poorly) a short story, a pretty grim one, and also pretty short, called Theatre of Cruelty. It showed poverty and death. The Discworld series shows cheerfulness, life, and dodging the bullet. It has trolls, dwarves, vampires and such, living together. But the Theater of Cruelty was just sad, grimdark, cruel. There was no hope in that story.
Dodger is a romance in the Theatre of Cruelty world. One that threatened to be a Romeo and Juliet story. We can speculate how much of Dodger was a result of Pratchett’s declining health but back in 1993, Terry and Lyn Pratchett were already producing that kind of works. Like sticky spots on a clean white table cover. The increased darkness of the Discworld series felt like a gradient, starting with the The Colour of Magic, with 100% cheerfulness and 0% darkness, and ending with the pure horror of his last works.
Dodger was published in 2012. It can be appreciated with no prior knowledge of Discworld. But the final fifth star requires some background. The language is shocking compared to his previous books. It has romance, which is also quite unusual. We had the grimdark world in 1993, long before 2007 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer. And Tiffany kissed the Wintersmith in 2006.
Speaking of which, there are maybe 2 or 3 of the Discworld books I missed, and Wintersmith is one of them.
5/5, a great book. A blast from the past, and beautifully published with hard covers.
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