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Wounded, Wasted, Scarred | The Wounded Land | Book Review

Countless millennia have passed, and the Land has been Wounded beyond recognition. All peoples are now isolated into closed off tribes, each Stonedown fighting for their own. They engage in regular human sacrifice in order to live off of the land that is now unrecognizable, even from the nadir experienced at the end of the last series. Lord Foul's control is so totalizing, and so corrupting, that his presence is felt even in the real world. This is the setting of The Wounded Land, the first book in the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. For Covenant, ten years have passed, and his experiences in the Land have changed him utterly. He has written a number of new books, and they all reflect his changes. But his ex-wife returns to him, and she seems possessed. Lord Foul claims her, and uses her to get to Covenant. The exact nature of this is not understood yet, even by the end of the book. The next element of the story is just as significant. A new character, Linden Avery, is introd...
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The Second Apocalypse Book Tag + Major Development With No-God Series?

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Recently, a group of booktubers decided to do a livestream where they went through a series of questions related to R. Scott Bakker's fantasy series The Second Apocalypse. They didn't tag anyone because they didn't think that anyone would want to take part, but I figured I might do it, just for fun. I was further driven to this video when I found out that Bakker had recently started posting on his blog again. All of the entries are about AI and are political in nature, but in one comments section, he actually responds to some comments about the No-God series that may or may not be coming out in the future. I have a number of the comments highlighted, and I decided I should probably discuss that in a video. This video is the result. A book tag, plus a discussion of his recent comments about the No-God series. Do you have hope? Why did you decide to read The Second Apocalypse? [SPOILER FREE] I originally decided to read The Second Apocalypse through the channel Slowly Red, wh...
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Marketing a Book Into Failure | A Scanner Darkly | But It's Not a Review

I read my third Dick novel. At this point, I am a bit fatigued. I am beginning to recognize the patterns in how Dick writes novels. Worse, I don't think I can actually write a true review. I did not write a review of Ubik, mainly because there wasn't much to say beyond blind praise. I did enjoy that one, so I at least did a short talk about it. I also read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I was confounded by some aspects of that one. I did write an extended review of that one, and I talked about some of my frustrations. It is in that review that you will find the foundations of my criticisms for this book. They are my criticisms of Dick in general. However, in this post, I just want to talk about a frustration that I have with the marketing of this book. I feel like it could have compromised my ability to like this novel and even write a legitimate review in the first place. Book Description The back cover description of the book was incredibly misleading. This is fairl...
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First Guy Gavriel Kay Novel . . . Bad? | —————— | Book Review

TIGANA. This is a book that I picked up, not because of the book itself, but because of the author. Guy Gavriel Kay is a widely recognized author in the booktube space, especially for his prose. Not only this, but he writes fantasy standalones, and the lack of commitment is less intimidating. But what is this book actually about? Tigana is about a particular principality in a peninsula that seeks to liberate itself from a sorcerer's curse. The name of their province has been stripped away, from people's minds, from history, from everything. Whenever the name is spoken, it is simply not heard by those who were not born there before the spell was cast. In the Afterword, Kay compares this to the communist attempts to erase certain figures from history. There are the famous (or infamous) examples of photos that have been edited to remove figures who have been deleted from Soviet history books. In Kay's eyes, there is more to human loss than suffering. People can be unpersoned; ...
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Disgusting Cockroach Lifestyle! | The Metamorphosis | Book Review

I remember being assigned The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka as reading in high school. I didn't read it then, of course. I do remember the general idea. I remember some of the questions I got wrong when being tested on whether I read it. But I especially remember the opening line. This was originally written in German, so the exact manner in which the line gets translated differs, but it starts by dropping the bomb: that Gregor, the main character, has become a giant bug. And this is what the book is known for. The book then follows the consequences of this fact. Before, he was a traveling salesman. He would wake in the early hours of the morning and sustain the family, but we quickly find that he is not able to do this now that he is a giant bug, or vermin, as some translations render it. I think there are two main points that I want to talk about in this review: namely the theme, and then the perspective. Theme When I went to look at some of the interpretations of the novel, it wa...
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Would You Take In A Migrant? | A Better Life | Book Review

Let's talk about immigration. The fun topic. We can brush up on shit-hole countries, invasions, people in need, and whether we should be more empathetic on this topic. In other words, we can talk about the recent novel, A Better Life, by Lionel Shriver. I have already reviewed one book by this author, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and to this day I consider it among my favorite novels ever written. It has probably some of the best character work that I have ever read, and it compares to Better Call Saul, actually. Just know that she did it first. If you are familiar with Better Call Saul, then you know that Jimmy's development into Saul over time—his corruption—may or may not have been caused by his brother; it is all ambiguous, and this is on purpose. We Need to Talk About Kevin has the same complexity with the central question that it asks: did the mother drive her own son to commit a mass shooting? The reader is left to think over the questions, and put the evidence together....
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Why Brevity is the Soul of Wit | Responding to THE Devil's Advocate

There has been a long-running debate among writers between how to best write prose. Simplifying a little, it can be broadly characterized as a division between those who argue for minimalism and those who argue for more ornate prose. Both sides have been derided—the former as "beige" or "dry," the latter as "purple." But I would say that minimalism is probably the most common form of writing, if only because it is easier. As a result of this, the debate almost always takes the form of someone like myself criticizing Sanderson for his prose, and a fan of his replying that his prose doesn't need to be ornate or poetic to be good. In other words, I usually find myself on the snotty "ornate" side of the debate. But I recently came across a few videos by Joseph V. Logsdon that seem to embody the literal caricature presented by the simple prose side, and I find myself on the other side of the argument. Now I want "minimalist" prose. Obvio...
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