Booky things

[woodwindy]

Is anyone reading C.S. Friedman's Magister Trilogy? I want to talk about the third book with someone who knows what's going on... be warned, I have rather strong feelings about it!

Also, whew, up all night last night finishing A Storm of Swords. I still have mixed feelings, and I can see why people were telling me they thought the series started

Comments

[word_geek]

I don't think that many people thought that Storm of Swords itself was bad (although they'll probably correct me if I'm wrong) -- everybody I know who read it was busy being stunned by you-know-what. The "off the rails" feeling came immediately after, and was, I believe, because we had a series that was rolling along nicely, with new installments every two years, and then suddenly the writing ground to a halt. The author changed his plans multiple times, threw stuff out and rewrote, and finally took five years to bring out a volume that had only half the character we wanted to read about, in which very little appeared to happen

[woodwindy]

All of that makes a good deal of sense.

Yeah... I think "Winter is coming" isn't *actually* in English. Really it's in old High Valyrian that just happens to sound like English and if you translate it, what it means is "Sucks to be a Stark, huh?"

[word_geek]

I will admit that I haven't read DWD yet. I got it, my wife read it, I tried when she was done, got 200 pages in, and gave up out of boredom. I put it aside for a few months, and decided to restart the series from the beginning, in the hopes that doing so would give me some momentum, as it were. And wow, Game of Thrones is really, really good (understatement of the year), but it's also speedy -- the plot just flies along. You'll come back to a PoV character and find out that six weeks has passed for him while you were reading other chapters. The later books just don't seem to have that.

[lissa510]

yep, i read it recently!

[lissa510]

Having just read the Black Sun trilogy (after seeing you mention it in a live journal post btw!) i'm going to say that the magister series is definetly not as good. The author also seems to spilt between too many characters during the last book, which, since it has been two years since I read the second book, made it a bit disjointed for me. The fact that I didn't bother to read the second book again should also say something. Not that I didn't enjoy it I suppose, but you are not missing anything fabulous. I did like the first book quite a bit though, but if you don't care I wouldn't bother. The later books also really seemed to just lack the specialness and the OMG neatness of the black sun books.

[woodwindy]

The world is intriguing and I *loved* the basic character setups, but book 2 didn't deliver as much as book 1, and book 3 was just plain disappointing IMHO. Pretty much all of the major ethical issues raised in the first two books were completely hand-waved so we could have a nice happy ending with a pretty shiny bow on it... bleh.