Hello Fellow Journeyers,
The mid-December update brings us to what I'll call a serious strugglebus of the reading slump variety. I've started several books, but have been unable to get into any of them as of yet. So that's why this update exists, to explain the lack of content. Without further ado, here is what is going on with the Journey to Finding the Best Books.
What I'm currently reading (or trying to):
Thoughts so far:
The Pariah is a first person perspective story of a young man who goes from being in the service of a band of miscreants to working as a scribe for a queen. This is mostly deduced from other reviews I've read because I'm about 10% of the way through and I'm waining. There seems to be a lot of worldbuilding that has to go on here and I'm a little too tired to be able to keep up with it.
Queen of Sorcery is the second of The Belgariad and it honestly just is a little too stiff and without much style. The characters are fine as this is the second outing with them, but I find myself wondering where the plot is besides "quest." There isn't a whole lot of reason why they do the things they do and I lost interest fairly early on.
Malice is the first of John Gwynne's famous four part series that is all over Goodreads right now. While it isn't bad, the amount of characters and lack of plot developing early on has me a little underwhelmed and overwhelmed at the same time. I'm having a hard time latching onto anyone in particular and I need to be patient with it.
Finally, we have the one that I'm having the easiest time with, The Wolf of the North. Reminiscent of The Witcher and Viking-inspired tales, this one has easy reading going for it which I'm needing. Problem is, I want to listen to the audio version on Audible but I can't seem to spend one of my precious credits on this one knowing that I may never listen to it again. That being said, I'm enjoying the story, the descriptions are good, it's a comfort read.
Book I'm most excited about:
Sword in the Storm has so far been an impressive first book for me of David Gemmell's. So far hiss masterful characterization and combined worldbuilding and characters work flawlessly. Aside from a few reservations about sexual content being a little too graphic and out of taste for me, this has been a great book so far!
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for future updates and reviews!