elzbethmrgn's Reviews (667)

Two stars feels unfair to this book, but since I like to stick to the Goodreads rating system and three stars is 'I liked it', two stars it is. It didn't suck, let's stick with that.

I certainly don't feel the book lived up to its amazing hype or time spent on a bestseller list, but I suspect it appeals to those who are either a) Gaiman fan legions, or b) people who don't usually spend time in the fantasy genre. Nothing wrong with either of those, except I am not either of those. Gaiman certainly is someone who can put words together in a sentence in a lovely way, though.

On a completely superficial level it reminds me a lot of Jo Walton's [b:Among Others|8706185|Among Others|Jo Walton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1317792367s/8706185.jpg|6449955] in that the fantasy aspects, while underlying the whole story, don't really penetrate the world in a tangible way.

Yes, these things do happen to this kid, and yes they're supernatural, but he doesn't really remember.

I suspect if this sort of Urban Fantasy was something I liked more, or if I were once a seven-year-old boy, I may have identified with this book in the same way I identified with Among Others.

As it stands, it didn't suck. I don't think I'll pick up any more Gaiman though.

This came up on my radar as being something to fill in the interminable gap between Stormlight Archive installations. Then a Goodreads friend read it and enjoyed it. And the clincher was the book being picked as the June 2015 Sword and Laser pick (which have been mostly miss-and-miss for me the past twelve months, either I've read them or I've been entirely uninterested.)

Turns out, aside from the main story (and kind of the point of the main story, no spoilers), this book is full of both history and religion and I've realised that I love that in a fantasy novel (I love that in real life, so it's hardly a surprise).

It was a fun and enjoyable read, but I doubt I'll pick up [b:City of Blades|23909755|City of Blades (City of Stairs, #2)|Robert Jackson Bennett|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1426255519s/23909755.jpg|43516764]. This works quite nicely as a stand-alone.

Does what it says on the tin.

Aside from a few obvious plot-wagons, I enjoyed this one. It is lovely to be in Nynaeve's POV - she is exactly the ass-kicking lady I like to see in my fantasy. I loved that we barely saw Rand at all, and I wonder how unusual this device was when Jordan wrote the book. I also really enjoyed getting POVs from Mat, since he was a really unlikeable character in the first two novels because of Plot Device. Surprisingly, his

'luck'

didn't bother me either even with the potential for it to become an abused trope. In fact, I'm interested to see how both Jordan and Mat handle it's removal in the future.

The only part that really stood out was that, having come through the whole book without Rand, he gets the climactic scene. The rest of Rand's story in this book was told by other people, and it would have been cool if they could have told his

fight and 'killing' of Ba'alzamon

. Maybe it didn't make sense to do it that way, but it really annoyed me that I had come so far with everyone else, only to have Rand have the 'glory' at the end, rather than everyone else's reactions to it.

This is a tie-in novella to go with Torment: Tides of Numenera. I was a Kickstarter-backer, and the novellas came in that deal. I'm reading them because I don't know anything about the Ninth World, and I don't want any T:TON spoilers.

Sanderson can't write a short story to save his life, but this was a nice interlude.

I actually really enjoyed this, which surprised me. I picked it up because it was cheap, and because it's a series I've been hearing was a fantasy "must-read" and I've been thinking I should catch up with some of those.

Turns out this is a character- rather than plot-driven story and I'm in to that.

This came from a GRRM collection ([b:Dangerous Women 3|21531493|Dangerous Women 3|George R.R. Martin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1407773333s/21531493.jpg|43000942]) and it feels like it (I'm currently (still!) reading [b:Rogues|20168816|Rogues|George R.R. Martin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1404616147s/20168816.jpg|27565413], Shadows has a similar vibe to the stories included in Rogues). Not enough of a story to hinge a whole novella on, but certainly enough to spend 50 pages one afternoon.

As I was reading this book I was reminded of one of Nigella Lawson's cooking porn shows, in which she said she didn't know if she actually liked drinking tea or if she had convinced herself she liked it because she knew it was good for her.

I've attempted Pratchett before and found him hard-going, as I have with Douglas Adams and Ben Elton, who write in the same style. They take a lot of effort and, although I had a lot of I see what you did there moments, and a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments, I don't know that the effort I had to put in was repaid by the enjoyment I got back.

An in-depth but readable look at how the (1215) Magna Carta came to be, and how the provisions in the charter affected different members of Angevin society. I only briefly skimmed the chapters on later reissues and later interpretations and effects of the charter, since it's not relevant to my research interests.