Winter Arcane > Recent Status Updates

This whole school of magic taught by demons thing is a great premise, and Mara is certainly an interesting main character, but 190 pages in its getting a little old that virtually every significant problem is both caused by and often resolved by the fact every male demon who spends five seconds with her is desperately horny for her.

SPOILER: I was not expecting the Female MC to be both a sadist and a rapist, but here we are...

I am not surprised at all that this book makes Chuck Palahniuk references. If you told me he wrote this and released it under a pseudonym because it was some of his weaker work, I wouldn't doubt it.

A couple stories in, it's clear they're really more like poetic prose with the barest hints of narrative.

That's just an observation, not a criticism. I rather like it.

I really hope this is building towards something that brings everything together, because as the individual chapters go on they feel more and more the same (not helped by them all pretty much having the same ending). At this point, seeing the way the stories overlap and connect is more interesting than the stories themselves. If it pays off, then awesome...well done. If not, I'm going to feel like I wasted my time.

This is a really interesting concept, short horror stories tied together not just by being set in the same building but also by the fact that each story has a character that gets an invitation to the party that presumably will serve as the final story. It's going to be interesting to see how much these characters own stories affect the final story, if at all.

Made it to Chapter Six. The first couple of chapters were a bit of a bore, as the MC Teddy doesn't have a lot to interact with. It's mostly just an old man puttering around in the rain, with little bits of foreshadowing here and there. Once his friend Teddy shows up, though, they actually start being somewhat proactive about their situation and things start becoming a lot more interesting and enjoyable.

Chapter 10, 6h18m left

As much as I like grim and dark, this book is starting to hit the point where the hopelessness has been layered on so thick, so early that I'm having trouble staying invested in what's going on. I kind of wish humanity would go ahead and end (in the book, not real life) so that I could mark this finished and move on to listening to something else.

I don't know why I'm so slowly plodding through this book, because I do really enjoy it...but I can't seem to stay invested in it. Perhaps because it has the most whiny protagonist I can recall among all the reading I've ever done and I can only take so much of him despite my interest in the story itself.

I was not expecting this to get so supernatural, but I'm diggin' it.

Going to have to hang this up a while at the beginning of Chapter 12. This was my first attempt to listen to an audio book on Chirp and the experience has been terrible.

Man, I'm trudging through this book so slowly. Probably because it's been almost 200 pages and very little has really happened. So when I put it away, I'm never in a hurry to come back to it.

I'll eventually finish it...because I finish everything eventually. I just wish it didn't feel so bloated with padding. The premise is good...the main character is interesting...but fuck this is bring 90% of the time.

It is taking me way too long to get through this.

Still finding this very interesting. While it's certainly fun to hear some scientific support to the relationship/family model I've been gravitating towards my entire adult life, I am going to have to do some fact checking later. I suspect some of this is more akin to psuedo-science than hard science. Even so, it's not as though what our ancestors did necessarily has to inform our modern behavior.

Just finished the starting chapter that lays down the idea of agreements before getting to the specific agreements. So far I am ambivalent about the book. I like what it says about the way we agree to many things growing up that we never question, but I find the thick layer of new age wankery undermines the strength of the core premise it's presenting.