Bryan Applegate > Recent Status Updates

I feel like a graphic novel novice. There's a whole lot of weird in this that I need to re-read to get on board with. The overall arc and shape of the story is massive and wonderfully brought on - p455! is a lot of pages - but some details and names are confounding. Translation difficulties, maybe?

It alleges to be the ultimate in science fiction master pieces. It certainly is confusing at times. My copy was my "reward" for the Kickstarter that said we'd help get the massive thing translated from French.
First I crawled through to make it last. Now I'm burning through it since the "team" that's come together is pretty wonderful actually despite my still be a little confused. More on all that soon.

Cruising into familiar territory with new purpose and characters with more experience. Old mysteries become new plots and provide tactics. Comfortable safety of old positions and standing is now threatened, and some situations feel quite dire early on! A wizbang of an entry to the series with breakneck pacing to something unpredictable I think.

Another, more head spinning conclusion in the order of a hundred pages but with triple crosses and four different groups to track - 😬 - it's smarter than me! The double-double crossing has me wondering if that was necessary. I also took a massive break, which was a mistake. The two formerly bad guys do get some good exposure center stage. Ambitious, to say the least.

Clearly missing Alfred in this installment, but choc full of world building grit and grain for the D&D setting this didn't become. Perhaps too few new characters introduced as has been the format is another disappointment to some readers. We meet a few old cast members in order to turn pages to the big second act where it's All vs. Serpents 🐍

I'm at an ending of the main story arc that just keeps giving and giving! The pacing is incredible since there are still over one hundred pages to go!? ☺️

I'm just blasting right through it and really enjoying the balance of multiple narratives. The other book in this universe, Grone, seemed to use multiple narratives in a clumsier way than this installment, but it's been a while.

So delighted! We were a little stuck at the moment inside a small portion of the larger universe, but the writing is nice, and we're beginning to get shades of that larger world building skill Cumby has.

Not gonna lie. It's been a long time since I read the first book. I'm vaguely remembering the very creative and unique structure that combines gameworld with the real world and blurs everything that separates the two within those worlds. Colorful cast, high octane pace, just enough guessing and where's-he-going -with-this mystery to super charge my reading.

This fourth in the series is more poetic than predecessors. I'm racing through mensch chapters, but only just. Tension between two older factions has never been stronger, and the world building concludes with this fourth world of water. Still as captivating as ever and delivering answers and settling storyline only halfway through. Loads more narrative devices introduced, too. Such clever pacing!

Fresh, operatic, how DO they keep it moving? Read if you love footnotes that use extra fantasy to further explain the fantasy.

I think it's frustrating me that I don't know what's at stake for the characters in this story. The writer has some clever secrets for us to discover, but I might not have the patience to be his kind of reader.

It's a guy writing as a girl. That always irks me a little bit because it's not like cross dressing where you don't have to take the presentation seriously. It's meant to be the ideas of an adolescent girl, and I'm having a tough time buying into that.

It's such a gorgeous work! I'm trying to read it so slowly, but it's smartly written and paced and beautifully illustrated! Big challenge to treat it like fine dining. I can easily see this was over five years in the making.

This is a very difficult book for me because nothing is straightforward.The characters don't trust each other.There's gossip, there's secret histories and societies, and ulterior motives and combative interactions. Egomaniacs abound. It's like a melodramatic reality show. That appeals to some, but I am struggling!

"Knowledge is Carnage," was just said.

Bedtime story for kids - about two chapters at a time. It's just scary enough to keep them quiet, smart enough to keep them confused, fun enough to keep them listening and fast-paced enough to get them guessing about what will happen next.

Can the author pull it off? The synopsis sounds like it would make for a fascinating and very engaging short story or novella. But this is three hundred pages of one simple philosophical discussion about morals. We'll see....