What did you just read?

Reread The Shining in anticipation for Doctor Sleep next month.

It had been over fifteen years since I had first read it and it was definitely slower than I remembered. Now that I'm older I have a lot more empathy for Jack not wanting to bail on his job at the Overlook when a few spoopy things happen. The Torrence family has to its name sixty dollars and a VW bug with a dying fuel pump. That's it. It's going to be food stamps, shoveling snow and charity for them to get through a winter in Boulder with no prospects for after the thaw. Seeing some weird shit ain't no reason to bail.

There is an element of determinism (that continues through to Doctor Sleep) that I still don't like at all. Jack's father is a violent drunk with those traits following along the family line to Jack, Danny and even grandchildren. "Good luck staying away from the bottle if grand daddy was a lush" is a shitty, defeatist message.

Middlegame - Seanen McGuire

A young boy and girl on opposite sides of America discover that they have a strange telepathic connection, and seem to somehow complement each other's strengths and weaknesses.

It turns out they are the subject of a secret experiment by a cabal of alchemists, and the alchemists will go to great lengths to ensure the 'purity' of their experiment is maintained.

I really liked this one - I think it's probably McGuire's best work, and I have liked most of her books. The narrative structure is unusual, but really well done - the story seems disjointed, fragmented, at the start and as it progresses the plot seems to whirl around before gradualy coalescing into a coherent whole. It's quite unlike anything I've read in that respect. It'd be notable for that alone, but I also really liked the characters and story.

It seems to be standalone, rather than part of a series, but if there were a sequel I'd grab it immediately.

One Word Kill - Mark Lawrence

Young boy struggling with a cancer diagnosis begins to encounter bizarre correlations between his real life and the game of D&D he plays with his friends, unlikely coincidences begin piling up and then a strange bald man tells him an entirely unbelievable story about the future...

This is quite a change of pace for Lawrence, it's nothing like Prince of Thorns or Holy Sister, this is set in the 80s in the real world - it's a little bit like Lawrence does Stranger Things I guess. I liked it quite a bit and will read the rest of the series.

Demonspawn ( Damned and Cursed 1 ) - Glenn Bullion

Competently written urban fantasy about a guy who is part demon due to an accident with a demonic sacrifice at his birth.

I though this one was ok, although the romance subplot made me want to bang my head on a table. I may continue the series if my backlog starts running a bit low.

Incubus Inc - Randi Darren

This was a super weird book. The demon lord Samerixis gets summoned out of his banishment by a desperate college student wanting to pay off her student loans. They strike a pact that leads to him establishing a permanent presence on Earth, building his power, getting back at his old enemies etc.

So far so good, what was weird is that Samerixis basically wanders around trying ( and variously succeeding ) to have sex with every woman he meets, but while he superificially seems to be in charge of everything, he basically gets led around by his dick by every woman he sleeps with. This leads to, among other things, one of his harem members following her dream of forming a private military contracting company (!?) and some credibly strong action sequences.

I am not really sure what I'd shelve this one under, but I liked it overall despite the excessive sex.


The Wandering Inn - pirateaba


This is a web serial, although the earlier books are available as both audio and ebooks on amazon.

It's a story about various young people from Earth unexpectedly transported to a different world, some intentionally, others seemingly completely accidentally. The story is sort lit-rpg adjacent I guess - the alternate world and it's people are real, and follow real physics etc, but everyone in it is affected by a game-like level and class system. The inhabitants treat it in a semi-religous fashion, but generally just accept people gaining classes and skills as being the way the world works. There's some indication that the class system isn't a natural occurrence, perhaps tied to the suspiciously uniform certainty among the world's inhabitants that the Gods are dead.

The first few books are mainly about a woman, Erin Solstice, who takes shelter in an abandoned inn after escaping various dangers. She accidentally becomes an Innkeeper class after starting to clean up the inn. Other characters from Earth are gradually introduced in their own stories, which eventually begin to twine together with each other as the various forms of cultural contamination begin to disrupt the status quo of the world.

The different characters are *very* different in experiences, outlook and story style. Erin is a bit of an airhead and her story can be quite comical at times, in contrast the Clown's story is pretty fucking grim.

This is the main reason that my update is so short this time - after I got into the first volume of this, I loved it so much that I read all of it from start to finish, which is a rather enormous undertaking. This story is 100% my kind of thing and I'll probably keep reading it as long as the author keeps writing. Now my favorite web series ( I keep up with Mother of Learning, Ward and A Practical Guide to Evil as well ).

As a footnote, as far as self-publishing quirks go, everything up to the current volume is at a professional level of editing - I'm assuming the author had an editor go through them in preparation for publishing. The current volume has some degree of spelling/grammar issues, although not distractingly so ( e.g. discrete vs discreet etc ).

I'm reading a LITRPG or whatever the kids call this book genre now a days and I am not sure what to think. I'm like 20 percent in to mayor of noobtown and I still can't tell if I am enjoying it or if it's like an MMO treadmill I am going through because he keeps getting skill ups. Anyone read this genre?

One that I like that’s kind of soft litrpg that I hardly ever see mentioned that I enjoyed is STYX


The Land series is decent but very heavy on the RPG aspects which is a distraction at times. I guess it’s the Isekai thing that Ukerric mentioned.

The best cultivation series is hands down Cradle, but honestly not sure why that would be lumped in with litrpg.

Andrew Rowe has a series with some rpg mechanics like mana pool and ranking up (though it’s not litrpg) called Arcane ascension which is good if you ignore the lgbtqqbbqsauce nonsens.

Honestly a lot of the litrpg genre is pretty fucking awful though

This week I read Crash




and High Rise




both by J.G. Ballard.

Crash is about a group of people that are sexually aroused by automobile accidents. Our main character is in a car crash and discovers a new world of sexuality through the merger of sex, violence, technology and celebrity. It's pornographic but also oddly sterile. Perhaps technical is the better description? David Cronenberg made this one in to a movie years ago but I haven't seen it. Honestly it sounds right up his alley. The charismatic and enigmatic cult leader reminded me a little of Tyler Durden at times. It was alright. For a bit I thought it was going to be about a cult killing celebrities through intentional automobile accidents but it leaned more heavily on the body horror.

High-rise is about the residents of a state-of-the-art high rise complex with everything a person could need descending in to Lord of the Flies with no overt cause or reason given. There's just a complete (and voluntary) breakdown of civilization. There's a little class struggle stuff between the top, middle and bottom divisions of floors but not a ton? I found the whole thing really forgettable.

Ukerric said:

It's not litrpg at all, but people tend to associate it with it since it comes from the same russian writers. My biggest peeve is... There's less than HALF OF IT translated yet! That's when I think I should re-learn my russian to read all of it without waiting!

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I know, I’ve been waiting awhile for it to come out. Sucks knowing that it only needs to be translated. And I agree that it’s not really litrpg, It really only has the take “pill”/get power aspect which is a common thing in litrpg but not something that makes it a litrpg. But the MC is transported into a different world that has different rules with different powers, they just aren’t directly rpg rules.

It's a small genre, meaning it's nearly 100% self-published. So you run smack into Sturgeon's Law (90% of anything is crap).

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It just seems that even the mediocre to bad stuff is reviewed well. Maybe the relative lack of quality in the genre means people are willing to overlook more just because they like the genre. Or maybe I’m being too critical, but for most books even if I don’t like them I understand that people with different tastes might.

Ritley said:

It just seems that even the mediocre to bad stuff is reviewed well. Maybe the relative lack of quality in the genre means people are willing to overlook more just because they like the genre. Or maybe I’m being too critical, but for most books even if I don’t like them I understand that people with different tastes might.

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I think it's one of the benefits of the rise in self-publishing - traditional publishing pretty much required thousands of books to be sold to be even worth bothering, meaning there was a big focus on broader appeal - kind of like movies are now. If you had a book that really appealed to a group of a few hundred people it would never get published, even if they would all think it was the best thing ever.

There's a few other reasons though - some of the authors get a *lot* better with practice - the poster child being Aleron Kong I think - his first book, while interesting, is objectively trash tier writing, but he became much better very quickly. So you see book 7 with thousands of 5 star reviews, think it might be interesting, then read book 1 and wonder 'what the fuck were those guys thinking?!'.

velk said:

Middlegame - Seanen McGuire

A young boy and girl on opposite sides of America discover that they have a strange telepathic connection, and seem to somehow complement each other's strengths and weaknesses.

It turns out they are the subject of a secret experiment by a cabal of alchemists, and the alchemists will go to great lengths to ensure the 'purity' of their experiment is maintained.

I really liked this one - I think it's probably McGuire's best work, and I have liked most of her books. The narrative structure is unusual, but really well done - the story seems disjointed, fragmented, at the start and as it progresses the plot seems to whirl around before gradualy coalescing into a coherent whole. It's quite unlike anything I've read in that respect. It'd be notable for that alone, but I also really liked the characters and story.

It seems to be standalone, rather than part of a series, but if there were a sequel I'd grab it immediately.

One Word Kill - Mark Lawrence

Young boy struggling with a cancer diagnosis begins to encounter bizarre correlations between his real life and the game of D&D he plays with his friends, unlikely coincidences begin piling up and then a strange bald man tells him an entirely unbelievable story about the future...

This is quite a change of pace for Lawrence, it's nothing like Prince of Thorns or Holy Sister, this is set in the 80s in the real world - it's a little bit like Lawrence does Stranger Things I guess. I liked it quite a bit and will read the rest of the series.

Demonspawn ( Damned and Cursed 1 ) - Glenn Bullion

Competently written urban fantasy about a guy who is part demon due to an accident with a demonic sacrifice at his birth.

I though this one was ok, although the romance subplot made me want to bang my head on a table. I may continue the series if my backlog starts running a bit low.

Incubus Inc - Randi Darren

This was a super weird book. The demon lord Samerixis gets summoned out of his banishment by a desperate college student wanting to pay off her student loans. They strike a pact that leads to him establishing a permanent presence on Earth, building his power, getting back at his old enemies etc.

So far so good, what was weird is that Samerixis basically wanders around trying ( and variously succeeding ) to have sex with every woman he meets, but while he superificially seems to be in charge of everything, he basically gets led around by his dick by every woman he sleeps with. This leads to, among other things, one of his harem members following her dream of forming a private military contracting company (!?) and some credibly strong action sequences.

I am not really sure what I'd shelve this one under, but I liked it overall despite the excessive sex.


The Wandering Inn - pirateaba


This is a web serial, although the earlier books are available as both audio and ebooks on amazon.

It's a story about various young people from Earth unexpectedly transported to a different world, some intentionally, others seemingly completely accidentally. The story is sort lit-rpg adjacent I guess - the alternate world and it's people are real, and follow real physics etc, but everyone in it is affected by a game-like level and class system. The inhabitants treat it in a semi-religous fashion, but generally just accept people gaining classes and skills as being the way the world works. There's some indication that the class system isn't a natural occurrence, perhaps tied to the suspiciously uniform certainty among the world's inhabitants that the Gods are dead.

The first few books are mainly about a woman, Erin Solstice, who takes shelter in an abandoned inn after escaping various dangers. She accidentally becomes an Innkeeper class after starting to clean up the inn. Other characters from Earth are gradually introduced in their own stories, which eventually begin to twine together with each other as the various forms of cultural contamination begin to disrupt the status quo of the world.

The different characters are *very* different in experiences, outlook and story style. Erin is a bit of an airhead and her story can be quite comical at times, in contrast the Clown's story is pretty fucking grim.

This is the main reason that my update is so short this time - after I got into the first volume of this, I loved it so much that I read all of it from start to finish, which is a rather enormous undertaking. This story is 100% my kind of thing and I'll probably keep reading it as long as the author keeps writing. Now my favorite web series ( I keep up with Mother of Learning, Ward and A Practical Guide to Evil as well ).

As a footnote, as far as self-publishing quirks go, everything up to the current volume is at a professional level of editing - I'm assuming the author had an editor go through them in preparation for publishing. The current volume has some degree of spelling/grammar issues, although not distractingly so ( e.g. discrete vs discreet etc ).

Click to expand...

Picked up the wandering inn and already through volume 1 which is pretty long, good stuff so far.

Little Big Man by Thomas Burger - (6/10) This fictional tale follows a young, white boy who is adopted by a tribe of Cheyenne Indians. As he gets older, he returns to civilization, becomes a gun-fighter, plays poker, and hunts buffalo. He returns to the Cheyenne just in time for a very famous encounter between the Sioux and the 7th Cavalry...

I would recommend it to anyone who likes Westerns.

Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay - (8/10) This book was labelled as fantasy, but that seems to have been done so that store employees would know what shelf to put it on. It reads like historical fiction - with a focus on culture, religion and politics. And the interplay between them all. There is a little magic, but it felt shoe-horned in.

Anyway, it follows three characters - a knight, a warrior-poet, and a doctoress. Over a period of about two years, they witness the end of one era, and the beginning of another.

Campbell1oo4 said:

Little Big Man by Thomas Burger - (6/10) This fictional tale follows a young, white boy who is adopted by a tribe of Cheyenne Indians. As he gets older, he returns to civilization, becomes a gun-fighter, plays poker, and hunts buffalo. He returns to the Cheyenne just in time for a very famous encounter between the Sioux and the 7th Cavalry...

I would recommend it to anyone who likes Westerns.

Click to expand...

The movie is great if you haven't seen it.

Arbitrary said:

The movie is great if you haven't seen it.

Click to expand...

I'll check it out!