Last October I posted a review of 11/22/63. In that post I wrote:
This was 900 pages of wasted time. I enjoyed most of it. But the ending ruined every good feeling I had about this book. Why did I read it? Nothing changed at the end of the story. Nobody got a happy ending; not even a smidge of one. It feels like a betrayal. It feels like a sucker punch right to the face.
There is a lot of hype around Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, and I’ve always wondered why. I knew from the summary that it was LitRPG, and those are hardly ever “mainstream.” I’ll be honest and say that I was never really won over by the hype or the concept of the books themselves, despite having a soft spot for LitRPG novels. I just couldn’t really get myself that excited about a man and his cat going dungeon crawling. Add in that there was some odd rumblings online about there being some sort of romance between the MC and the cat. Those are false, thankfully, but honestly at this point I’d kind of be happy if those rumors had been true.
I’m in a bit of a reading slump and have been for almost a month. It’s not unusual, I’ve talked about it a few times before, as I do tend to go through these from time to time.
This time I seem to be conducting a little self reflection experiment. As I find myself less and less interested in reading, I find myself spending more time taking in shortform content on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Obviously, this is horrible. Replacing reading with mind-numbing, mind-rotting, TikTok is not conducive to good mental health or productivity.
I have an odd situationship when it comes to audiobooks. I used to swear by them. I still enjoyed actually reading the words, but when I worked out in the public, I would almost always have an audiobook playing in the background.
But now I work from home, and I don’t use my audiobooks as much as I used to. (On a side note, I also don’t listen to podcasts as often as I used to either).
I have a long history of adoring long books. When I first started reading, I quickly moved away from kids books to what I charmingly called “chapter books, mama”. I read my first Tom Clancy book in fourth grade. Why did I choose it? Because it was big.
There was something in my brain that was quite impressed with myself for reading a book that was almost too heavy for me to carry.
After my lukewarm experience with Mistborn I didn’t really think I’d ever go back to Brandon Sanderson. But Tress of the Emerald Sea was really good, so I decided to get back out of The Cosmere, and go back to Sanderson’s Special Projects, this time with The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England.
This book is much more science fiction than fantasy, which is a good thing, I think. It is so different from Mistborn, that I didn’t feel any lingering bad thoughts about the author that I might have if it had more similarities. Overall, I really liked this book. It is unlike any other book I’ve ever read, and it is phenomenally easy to read. It does what Tress did: it makes the entire book digestable and enjoyable without having to read a 1,000 page monster book.
So, I used to read a lot more. The last two years I’ve slowed down some, mostly because of some truly epic reading slumps. I’m kind of back on track right now, but I still have days where I just don’t want to read a book. Sometimes I want to read some fanfiction or just watch a movie.
This got me thinking about the pressure I feel to read every day and to read a lot every year. I wondered where that feeling comes from. And the answer is social media. I like to follow book YouTubers and Instagramers, because they give me ideas and it’s entertaining to watch other people’s reading journey. But they all read a hundred books a year or more, and often read 7 books a week if they push themselves. It’s not all of them, but if you get into BookTube, you’ll see the number of super readers on there far outpaces the normal paced readers.
I’ve been trying to read the Dresden Files for over a year now. I love wizards. Harry Potter is one of my favorite series of all time, despite the many qualms I have with it. I’ve read many other books with wizards. Why? Because magic is effin’ cool.
So, I thought I’d be able to pick up the Dresden Files and have a good time. But I didn’t. I really, really, did not. Let me explain.
I’ve finished my reread of Ready Player One, which was this month’s book of the month for The Bookies, so I’ve moved onto another book on my list. I’m still very much starting The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, and I’m actually kind of getting into it. I’ve blatantly ignored all the reviews that are trying to stir this book up as “too woke”, and just trying to enjoy it as a fantasy book about dragons. I can always get behind a book about dragons.
Stephen King has never written an ending I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve read many of his books, most of them from his younger days, and I’ve never really left any of his books satisfied. There is a fundamental disagreement Mr. King and I have. I truly believe that the ending of the book should never make the journey feel worthless. What I mean, is that you should never write an ending that makes the reader feel like they’ve wasted their time, and with almost every King book I’ve read, I’ve felt that the ending just didn’t quite make the story worth my while. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, as they say.