Mark Lawrence > Recent Status Updates

All good so far.

Vikings (with a Russan flavour) and monsters - has a lot in common with other Gwynne books I've read, and that's a good thing.

Great stuff so far!

Enjoying it, but boy, is there a lot of Tolkeinesque description.

Every journey requires a detailed description of the geography day by day by day. We get somewhere and we learn about every corridor and courtyard and tower and ... and I find myself wanting the fast forward :D

The Bookshop Book (loosely associated with The Library Trilogy) comes out in October. So better get this one read if you've got a copy!

Or get a copy if you haven't already :)

I last read this around 40 years ago.

It stands up well. The writing is very good, though with perhaps a few too many $10 words.

The situation (main character suffering from leprosy and ostracised in our world) is fresh and interesting.

Knowing that the infamous scene/event is coming soon puts a different spin on everything and I'm already thinking "just don't", whilst recognising that it's a huge turning point.

The story is about a native of Low Town coming back after a long absence.

The meta story is that Daniel Polansky is coming back to Low Town after a long absence.

It's good stuff - has reminded me how much I liked Polansky's writing and how good a setting Low Town is.

I'm enjoying this - a swords and sorcery tale without any sorcery. It's an entertaining collection of mercenaries, each with their own story, shown to us with the arrival of a new potential member and a big mess.

It feels familiar in its broad strokes, but fun in the details.

On Goodreads the description for this book starts, "Dark, thrilling, and hilarious..."

The "hilarious" put me off reading it, since I'm not really a fan of comedic fantasy, and it has to be worldclass for me to merely think it 'good'.

But actually, so far, apart from an undercurrent of humour that shows itself mostly just in the manner that some things are expressed, there's no hilarity. And that's fine with me.

Continues to be a very engaging tale.

Because it's all through the eyes of essentially one animal it draws comparisons to the small number of adult books that are written this way - Watership Down being the most famous example.

It has more gore, more magic, more weirdness. But the traveling, being in danger, talking to other animals, doing animal stuff vibe is there.

Very interesting so far. Very unlike Library at Mount Char, though I've just reached a bit that has more of a familiar vibe.

The start has had more of a Richard Adams flavour to it. Almost Watership Down with fewer rabbits and more gore.

Came to see whar the fuss was. Stayed because I'm having fun.

Any of you reading it? Read it? Reviewed it?

Let me know how it went :)

Page 1 and already we have a crow!

It does what it says on the tin.

What a book :o

Everyone should buy 6 copies now that it's out!

Continues to be great stuff - Mr B has another hit here, for sure!

In one sense it's a long ramble - this thing happened and then this and then this, with only a minor overall direction to it.

However, it's so entertaining that I'm very happy to keep reading and finding out what the next thing will be.

The Kinch-Galva banter continues to be top notch, as do the various indignities and misfortune heaped upon our narrator.

Oh no! I'm nearly a third of the way through.

Great so far - it's the follow up to the Blacktongue Thief and carries on immediately after that book. Same characters, same humour - waiting for the sting in the tale since I know this author goes dark here and there.

I have some significant reservations about the 3rd part.

With hard SFF where pages are spent exhaustively explaining systems, I feel that it's fair to speculate about the science, just as with historical fiction there are people who focus on historical accuracy.

The idea that this populaton of 3 billion, after 5,000 years still can't match our microchips (which they have examples of along with info) is ... wrong.

It's a big fat book, broken into 3 parts that could each be a smallish book.

I'm in section 3 which takes place much later. Huge amount of "world building" (excuse the pun) about world building, reams of detail about how this or that system works.

I did enjoy the urgency and drama of the closing sections of the previous part.

It has a lot of the detail porn that made me DNF Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.

I just waded through pages and pages detailing the controls and maneuvers for two pods to spin around on a tether. I don't mind a little, but this is a lot.

However, I'm still engaged because:

a) it's still not as dry as Red Mars
b) the doomsday scenario makes it all more tense and emotional and interesting.

I'm enjoying the story, though I have major technical objections.

I can't see that it is possible to break the Moon into 7 big pieces - fragmentation would start immediately.

If it were possible it would take hours at most, not 7 days, for scientists to note the inevitable catastrophe.

It's orders of magnitude easier to survive underground in bunkers than in space.

The Moon blows up on line 1 :o

continues to be very strong - thrills, spills, complexity, shock!

Very good - opens with a 100 page battle in a monster-overrun town, which has lots of variety and character stuff to leven it.

More of the book 2 allied character conflict - which feels totally real, groups argue, a lot. And in this book there's more resolution with a bunch of insightful/touching moments.

Could be my favourite of the trilogy, and the first two were fine books.

As with all of these “something huge and mysterious has arrived” stories, there is a struggle to prevent the MC asking a sequence of structured questions that will in a big info dump bring us all up to speed. It’s logical but not good storytelling. I’m enjoying the mystery.

I've finally got around to this one and realised that I shouldn't have slept on it - the writing is very good and the mystery is interesting.

Just reached a bit that feels a lot like several films I've watched where they "assemble the scientists" to deal with a new phenomenum ... but fair enough ... let's see what happens next.

There's a very clunky romance in this. The particpants are 23 and 22, but behave as if 13 and 12.