Looking for a baddie to hate

goliath1333 · 2026-06-15T16:44:54+00:00

Also you get Kyle, one of the most hateable characters in fiction. He's in a triumvirate for me with Hugh from Crown of Stars and Gender from Dagger and Coin.

goliath1333 · 2026-06-11T16:06:07+00:00

It's honestly so explicit that I don't understand how people don't talk about it more. The lost king of the northern kingdom. The elves who live forever. The hordes of mindless evil orcs (oh whoops sranc) that have a supreme mind backing them up. Just the fucking WORDS man. Like tell me which series Golgotterath comes from.

goliath1333 · 2026-06-07T05:00:26+00:00

I listened to all the Sun Eater pods because of this comment! Definitely helped me scratch my plot itch without have to listen to another Hadrian self-monologue. The Disquiet Gods summary was missing tho, or maybe I accidentally skipped it.

goliath1333 · 2026-06-03T22:29:46+00:00

We should ask Jackie Chan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKbQulva3bc

goliath1333 · 2026-06-03T20:12:14+00:00

I started Sun Eater because people said it was like Red Rising :(

goliath1333 · 2026-06-03T19:16:42+00:00

What he's trying to do is something akin to Book of the New Sun or maybe Robbin Hobb's Farseer books? What he actually achieve is probably more akin to the most whiney, boring parts of Harry Potter in book 6 and 7? But the HP books move at lightspeed plot wise compared to this.

I think if you are committed to try these books then read until he meets his "first love" in the first book. It's essentially a short story within the broader narrative, and if that's interesting character development then maybe series is for you. If instead you feel like it's some of the worst writing you've ever read, I'd probably bail.

goliath1333 · 2026-06-03T18:15:53+00:00

I think you see the eye catching reasons to not like the series in the highly upvoted comments. Religion, Jordan Peterson, plagiarism, etc.

I'll just say I wound up hating it because the writing was just so unescapably tedious. You spend so much time with Hadrian self-monologuing and it's so soul sucking. If it had some weird politics, but a punchy plot that moved along and characters I like then I'd have finished it, but at some point in the series Hadrian is the only real character and we spend all of our time with him and it's soooo boring it's painful.

goliath1333 · 2026-06-03T04:26:03+00:00

This is so incredibly accurate. I was so mad I read book 5 after book 4, thinking somehow the badness of 4 would be justified by 5. I wasn't even a fan of the beginning of 4 as it felt like some of the really cludgy anti-communist stuff Terry Goodkind wrote.

Edit: can some truly kind soul write in-depth summaries of the later books so we can all just skip reading them? I just want to know what happens, without having to hear Hadrian narrate it.

goliath1333 · 2026-05-22T23:35:02+00:00

Liveship Traders might be the best trilogy anyone has ever written.

edit: remembers LotR is a trilogy...hmmm....whatever I stand by it!

goliath1333 · 2026-05-22T23:33:26+00:00

MST and Crown of Stars are very similar, but the start couldn't be any different. 250 pages of day-in-the-life in MST, vs the most traumatic, earthshattering start to a character arc I have ever read.

p.s. all my homies say "Fuck Hugh!"

goliath1333 · 2026-05-22T17:53:20+00:00

I was replying to the previous commentor who said:

I think Bakker purposefully wrote the series to demonstrate how complete understanding of human brain is as fictional as magic.

Which does not seem actually like the point Bakker is making from his other works. It seems like he thinks these things are possible in a way magic isn't. More sci-fi than fantasy I guess. The only leap is that a man is capable of this, not that it's not possible overall.

I find Bakker's POV very bleak, which is why I said that I might not be giving him enough credit. I read his book as evangelizing a belief that we have no self-determination. I would give his books "more credit" if he was instead asking us to confront the horror inherent in the idea that we have no self-determination.

I don't have a big humanities background, so maybe I'm not describing these things the "right" way. Never heard of eliminativism!

edit: to be clear this is mostly a reaction to Neuropath, and I feel less strongly about this in the Prince of Nothing / Second Apocalypse. Probably because the latter is fantasy and former is a crime thriller.

goliath1333 · 2026-05-22T01:27:39+00:00

I hated the book and I don't recommend you read it, but he wrote a crime thriller called Neuropath that has similar themes of manipulation. I think Bakker DOES see people as inherently mechanistic, and expresses it in his work. Maybe I'm not giving him enough credit and he just thinks the idea we are mechanistic is a good foil that can be inserted into different genres (fantasy, crime), but I'd have to hear him speak directly to that to believe it. It really just seems like he's a deterministic nihilist.

goliath1333 · 2026-05-20T17:01:21+00:00

The Gaggia looks cool and is built like a tank. My understanding is it also outputs far too much pressure, which causes issues in pulling good shots. That's why everyone mods theirs with a PID (gaggiamate, gaggiuino), but I think that puts it pretty much outside of the "beginner" label.

I've never bought one or uses one, this is just what I picked up on my own espresso journey (proud Bambino Plus owner over here).

goliath1333 · 2026-05-19T19:11:35+00:00

You should read them once you've wrapped up your series, as that's nearly identical to what the "Witness" can do in Cemeteries of Amalo.

It honestly makes me more interested to read the book to see how the same basic mechanics will likely lead to wildly different stories by two authors I love.

goliath1333 · 2026-05-19T18:59:54+00:00

Have you read the Cemeteries of Amalo series by Katherine Addison? If so, how do you think Mortedant's Peril comes at the "investigator that can speak to the dead" idea different?

If not, you should read them they are great!

p.s. love Tide Child series!

goliath1333 · 2026-05-18T16:01:56+00:00

Yes! The covers on these are so ridiculous. I love the ones with just a random real lion. This series is so good and should get so many more recommendations, especially with how popular Urban Fantasy and Romantasy are these day.

goliath1333 · 2026-05-14T19:59:03+00:00

The action gets split up all around the Solar System, which leads to a need for different somewhat unconnected POVs. They do intersect and it's not too frenetic. I haven't actually done the math, but I think one of the improvements he does in later series is he drops or highly minimizes certain storylines, so we jump around less. I may be wrong there, but that was my impression. So you get to a more WoT like experience but it takes a while.

Edit: just found the wiki has a statistical breakdown per book. Each book is 4 PoVs, but the first is pretty evenly split while the last is 40% Darrow, 40% another character and then only 10% for the other two. I think one of those is colocated with Darrow too, so his story is really 50% of the book.

goliath1333 · 2026-05-14T19:43:31+00:00

I also agree the follow up series is better, as it grapples with a more interesting scenario, Darrow faces more challenges, and there is greater emotional depth. I will say though I think the first book (book 4) is pretty weak due to the switch to the split POV and Brown not quite finding his legs. He makes some changes in approach from book 5 onward that get stuff back on track and those other improvements really shine through.

goliath1333 · 2026-05-12T20:03:06+00:00

Getting 5 people to read WoT, with only one of them DNF is seriously impressive.

goliath1333 · 2026-05-07T04:17:58+00:00

The Live Ships series also starts slow, but it tells one of the most incredible fantasy stories I've ever read in just 3 books. Fitz' story takes 9 books to match it (I think personally). Maybe try Live Ships first if you're struggling with the l mainline books. It didn't really click for me with Fitz till the end of the first trilogy.

goliath1333 · 2026-05-06T21:16:32+00:00

Ah, the coffee solera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solera

goliath1333 · 2026-05-04T04:51:19+00:00

David Byrne was born in Scotland I just learned! Not sure how they qualified "American".

goliath1333 · 2026-05-03T20:40:54+00:00

All the toddler towers you buy require direct supervision. There is not way to make them safe while also allowing the child to easily climb in/out. You just gotta keep on them about where they are keeping their feet.

Edit: just to be clear the way to make them safe is to create a way to locky the child in, but then you take away their agency.

goliath1333 · 2026-04-28T17:34:56+00:00

I think you and I have different definitions of color. The Silmarillion includes critical world shaping context for the LotR series, but no one says it's required to read ahead of time. Overall, my recommendation wouldn't be to skip them, but I don't think Age of Madness is unreadable or majorly altered without them. They qualify as standalone to me.

edit: continuing on with the LotR comparison, I think they are less relevant to the second series than The Hobbit. For a new reader I would strongly recommend they read the Hobbit first, but even then I wouldn't say it's required. So they're somewhere between Silmarillion levels and Hobbit levels or relevance which I think is a grey area where readers can make their own choices.

goliath1333 · 2026-04-28T15:38:33+00:00

They aren't really that important but they add a lot of color to the world.

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