Booktalk

Post Series Sadness

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been back in my happy place each evening of curling up on the sofa with my laptop and usually a cat and listening to an audiobook while I played copious amounts of Path of Exile. There is just something about having two different parts of me engaged at the same time that brings me joy. Mechanically I am happily grinding away at whatever objective I am focusing on in the ARPG, and then mentally I am having a story told to me. It brings me back to happier days as a kid of doodling while listening to storytime. Yesterday however was a bit of a sad day because I started the morning thinking that I would go home that night and start the next book in the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi after finishing up the previous one Sunday night. Then I realized… I had no more books in that series. For whatever reason I was thinking that another “space opera” series by that author was connected.

That bummer moment however should not blunt the joy I felt consuming this series. Looking back at my Bookwyrm account, I started the first book on August 26th and wrapped up the last on September 17th. So that was most of a month of chilling out with an ARPG and a book and enjoying life. I guess really if you think about it there is a primary trilogy, a book that retells the last book in that series from a different perspective, and then two different anthologies fleshing out the world from a wide number of different but connected perspectives. Through all six books, a cohesive tale is told, even though no single book keeps the same central character throughout the entire story. This is legitimately my favorite part of the series. It is telling a story of a world more than it is telling a story of a single person, even though the same cast of characters keeps popping up regardless of the scenario.

In many ways, it reminds me of another obsession of mine from when I was a bit younger. I stumbled onto Santiago in a battered paperback form at a used bookstore in college and I mostly picked it up because I liked the cover and the “A Myth of the Far Future” tagline. To the best of my knowledge that “major motion picture” never happened. In truth, the novel was something like the 11th book in the “Birthright” series where Resnick created this entire universe out of disconnected novels. Each one focuses on a specific legend of the far frontier, so you might be hearing about a character in one book… and then pick up the next in the series and it is from their perspective. The thing is… Scalzi is just a better writer and gives his characters far more depth and personality.

I didn’t particularly care about any of the characters from Santiago or any of the other dozen or so novels I read in that series, I cared about the world. With Old Man’s War, I feel like I have a personal relationship with each character that the story focuses on. Even when someone seems outwardly evil, you find out that maybe there is a bit more behind that story. There were several times in the story where an entire alien race was considered to be the villain… but we as the reader were given a viewpoint into one particular member of that race to help explain their actions. This elevates the storytelling past hero/villain iconography to something grounded in experience and emotion. My sadness when I realized I was out of books… comes from the fact that I wanted to know more about these rich characters.

Before this year I had never consumed anything by John Scalzi, I am taking a break from his work and diving into another author that I had never read anything from. I am not entirely certain why I chose Mistborn over any of the other series by Brandon Sanderson, but I did and started it last night. It took me a few chapters to switch gears from space opera to fantasy thieves but I think I am on board now. I know absolutely nothing about this series other than the name that kept popping up periodically in my timeline. So far it reminds me a little bit of Locke Lamora, but not enough to shape my opinion. There are already a few characters that I like, and a few others that I dislike but I feel like that is probably intentional. The mythology of the world seems rich, so I am probably going to enjoy it. That is very much a thing for me… I need thick worlds filled with cultures and symbology to keep me going.

Anyways… time for me to wrap this up and move on with my day. If you have never read the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi it is most definitely something that I would recommend. I am sure in another month’s time when I have consumed all of the books available in Mistborn series I will give you my opinions of that as well.

Old Men Warring

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Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.

I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.

I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.

This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.

Windswept

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A very groggy morning to you all. Wait maybe not everyone is sleepwalking through the morning. We had a big wind storm last night, enough so that we got alerts on our phones about it. This happened around 1 am and I managed to sleep through the first wave of it. The second wave around 3 am woke me up, and enough so that I did not manage to get back to sleep until maybe 4:30. Even then I am not sure if I actually slept or if I just laid in bed thinking thoughts with my eyes closed. I will have to do the walk around the house to check for damage later, but my wife sent me this photo as she was leaving for work with some damage at the rental house across the street. We didn’t lose power, but around the time I went upstairs at 3:30 we lost internet and I spent a truly dumb amount of time cycling the modem before it came back. The cable company website claimed everything was fine, but I assume in truth… something happened due to the storm damage. It is back currently and I am hoping it stays that way.

I spent most of my weekend screwing around with my Lightning Arrow Raider build, but I’ve written two other blog posts about that which each come with their own companion video. I am really looking forward to Friday, and hopefully, I don’t jinx it… but I went ahead and took the day off work. I know this is usually a bad idea when a game launches… but generally speaking a Path of Exile League Launch has been smooth as butter. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well the early mapping goes with this build. If evidenced by the red maps, I think it is going to be really solid and should give me enough time to look for upgrades along the way. Fixing my resists is probably the thing that I am the most worried about, that and trying to find a Vaal Lightning Arrow early. If I can solve those problems… I should be good to go with this build. Thankfully the colors that I ultimately need on the bow should be pretty straightforward to hit.

At some point yesterday afternoon I took a break from ARPGs to pop into Final Fantasy XIV and do the seasonal quest. There is no way I was going to turn down having a Power Ranger outfit. More specifically I think this is going to be my monk Transmog from this point forward. You have to dye it green, however, because everyone wants to be the green ranger. I guess I could go for Ninja as well and then try and find some daggers that look like the Green Dragon Dagger. I wish I could get back into this game. I saw my friend Bear had created a new character, and I contemplated doing this just so that I could get back into the swing of the game. I need to figure out what content I need to complete to unlock the newest Deep Dungeon.

Other than that I am still screwing around a bit in Diablo IV Season of the Malignant. While I am still pretty nonplussed by the seasonal mechanic, the state of the game does feel considerably better than it did. I am now mostly just trying to figure out an easy path to level and then I can complete the keystone dungeon and move to World Tier III. At that point, I will feel like I have at least progressed a bit further and can start doing Helltides. I am trying to catch the World Boss whenever I can, but in truth… it doesn’t seem like it rewards that much experience, and anything I get loot-wise is going to be upgraded rapidly. I seem to be having way more issues maintaining a good amount of gold than I did previously. Not sure if they rebalanced gold drops, but it feels much tighter than I remember it being.

Apart from the storms last night… it was a pretty solid weekend overall. I am really happy about the state of Lightning Arrow and looking forward to the league start on Friday. I have not really been in the mood for Baldur’s Gate 3 lately… mostly because it requires more thought than I am willing to give it at the moment. I’ve needed gameplay that I can mostly turn my brain off for, which for me is ARPG gameplay in general. Anything that I can commit to muscle memory and instinct… allows me to free up the rest of my brain to consume content on the side. I think more than anything that is the part of this league I am looking forward to the most. I’ve stalled out super hard on book consumption over the last few months, and listening to an Audiobook while playing Path of Exile is sort of my happy place.

I hope you all have a great week ahead of you, and I hope that we don’t have anything much in the way of damage from last night’s storm.

Twenty-Five Books

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Good Morning Friends! I just realized this morning how long it has been since I did one of my “Book Talk” round-up posts. Originally I had set myself a goal of reading Twenty books this year, and I have long since blown past that. I credit easy access to books through the Library system as the thing that spurred off this renaissance of catching up on books that I had intended to read but never got around to doing so. In a normal year I would read somewhere between two to five books, and this year… has been considerably more focused than that. I’ve been tracking my journey over on Bookwyrm, a federated book tracking site along the lines of Good Reads that is part of the Fediverse and plays nicely with Mastodon. This morning I am going to catch the thread up of sorts and talk about the books I have read over the last month.

The Hunger of the Gods – John Gwynne

I’ve technically written a bit about this book in the middle of another blog post, but I opted to go ahead and include it in this run-down since it never quite made its way to a Book Talk series post. Once again I had every intention of starting the next book in the Iron Druid Chronicles series when I last posted in the Book Talk thread, but then my hold on this book came open and I dove straight into the second part of this series. It is rare that the second book in the series is better than the first, but I consider that to be the case with Hunger of the Gods. I think maybe this is a side effect of so much of the first novel setting the stage for the central conflict and introducing all of the characters, and this novel just being wall-to-wall plot navigation. Once again if you played a Nord in Skyrim… and really really enjoyed it… then this might be a book series for you. The third book is supposed to be coming out in October… as is seemingly EVERY series I am waiting on a book from. I know without a doubt I will be picking up the series and continuing forward with it. Highly recommend it, but it is a bit of a dense read given how much specific language is associated with their world, which you may not be familiar with unless you have a Norse fetish.

Legends and Lattes – Travis Baldree

Then after finishing Hunger of the Gods, I finally got that “light read” that I felt I needed to recover from the density of that world. Legends and Lattes is maybe my favorite book that I have read this year so far. It is a story of an Orc Warrior that decides to hang up their sword and introduce the world to coffee… a gnomish invention that no one has really heard of up to that point. A delightful read about friendship turning into family and whether or not destiny and luck are really forces in the world or something we just imagined along the way. Again the next book in this series I believe is coming in October, and of the wealth of things that I will have to choose from that month… this series is going to take precedence over everything else. I would die to protect Thimble, and after reading this… you probably would too.

Broken Earth Trilogy – N.K. Jemisin

A few AggroChat’s ago we had a quick topic at the end of the show discussing some of the books and series we had been reading. I talked about the Bloodsworn series and Legends and Lattes and Thalen talked about the Broken Earth series that he had started. His description was enough to interest me, and that night after the show I dove into the series and did not surface until I had finished consuming all three volumes. This is the story of an apocalypse, lived out through a culture… that is used to having apocalypses happen on a fairly regular basis so much so that they have a term for them… The Fifth Season. There are certain aspects of the series that remind me of Dune, or more specifically the Bene Gesserit but if they were denied their basic humanity and treated as property. The novel deals with some really dark themes about humanity, and what happens when a society ostracises an entire group of people.

The Fifth Season is one of those books that I feel like maybe it was originally going to be a singleton, and about halfway through the first novel it was turned into a series. The totality of the series was phenomenal, but only really the first book stands on its own as a complete work. The second and third outings only really serve to fill in gaps from the first novel and move the wider global story arc forward. There is a trick that the first novel does of shifting between timelines, and it was maybe the single best use of that mechanic… but also a trick that only really works once. The second and third novels are considerably more straightforward in the way that the narrative unfolds but ultimately needs to be. This is an exceptionally dense read, but once you get five or six chapters your brain adapts to its patterns. This book deserves the time you devote to it, and will ultimately pay you back for that attention.

Redshirts – John Scalzi

After reading through three dense novels… I once again needed a bit of a break. I had been holding Redshirts by John Scalzi in my back pocket for such an occasion and dove in happily. By the title and branding… you know without a doubt this is going to be a bit of a parody of Star Trek. I was expecting something light-hearted along the lines of Galaxy Quest, Orville, or even The Lower Decks cartoon. I did not expect this to be one of the weirdest meta-narrative rides taking common Science Fiction tropes and taking them in some truly odd directions. Like I finished the novel section… and it was pretty great… but then I read the Codas and lord some stuff happened. I enjoyed the book immensely but also I am not entirely certain this is going to be for everyone.

The Power – Naomi Alderman

Some time ago one of my friends suggested this novel, and I added it to my Library hold list. It was described as a novel where Women suddenly develop superpowers, which leads to a bit of a gender-flipped Handmaid’s Tale. They also warned that the novel was rather graphic at times… and I was thankful for that the first time I encountered a rape scene. I have to be honest… I am not sure if I enjoyed this novel or not. That is not to say that I don’t believe that it was worth reading, but it also isn’t going to be something I probably actively suggest to anyone who is not already prepared for this. There is an Amazon Prime series that is actively releasing episodes currently, and I expect that it probably going to sanitize things a bit. There are a lot of messages that one can take from this novel, but I think the most important would be that Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. Twisted abuse of power is not an inherently gendered thing, just that one gender has traditionally held the locus of power in our society.

No Predictions

I wrapped up The Power last night, and usually at this point I would make some prediction about what novel I am going to start next. So far this has been wrong each time I have done so, and as a result, I am just going to skip this practice. I figure by tonight I will have chosen something, and that will be entirely dependent upon my options at the time and how fleeting they might be. Right now I am leaning towards Old Man’s War, but who knows where I will be by the end of the day. I am still wishing I had sorted out my Library Card and easy access to digital lending years ago because I have greatly enjoyed this year in reading so far.