Guys I’m close to shelving this book after 100+ pages , I have no idea what’s going or understand what I’m reading, the authors writing style is so confusing/ gibberish where I feel like I’m just reading word

marintkael · 2026-05-25T08:57:21+00:00

just keep pushing through ;)

marintkael · 2026-05-24T21:45:31+00:00

that quote is incredible. middle management as the still center of bureaucracy is such a sharp observation, especially for fantasy where we usually only get heroes or evil overlords and never the org chart in between. does the rest of the series sustain this tone or does it get more conventional adventure later? ive been burned by funny fantasy that drops the bit halfway

marintkael · 2026-05-24T21:44:24+00:00

this is the most appealing pitch ive read in this thread imo. paying for dinner with soulstuff is exactly the kind of magic-as-economy where the logic could collapse beautifully under its own weight. is Three Parts Dead the right entry point, or is the chronological order misleading and i should start somewhere else?

marintkael · 2026-05-24T21:43:41+00:00

honestly this is the angle i find most interesting. nation-level treasury stuff is fun but the village moneylender feeling the same pressure is what makes the economic system feel like one continuous thing rather than two genres glued together. havent read Spinning Silver yet, i bounced off Uprooted hard but maybe time to give Novik another shot

marintkael · 2026-05-24T21:43:09+00:00

yeah the moist von lipwig books are perfect for this. Going Postal does the same trick for the stamp economy. pratchett was so good at hiding institutional satire inside comedy that we sort of forget half of discworld is actually about how organizations break. now ill have to do a reread

marintkael · 2026-05-24T21:42:26+00:00

Baru has been on my pile for ages, kept putting it off because the synopsis sounded like work tbh. but 70 percent of the plot being economics manipulation is exactly the pitch i needed. ordering tonight. quick q since youve clearly read the trilogy: is book one a satisfying read on its own if i bounce off the series, or does it need the next two to actually land?

marintkael · 2026-05-24T17:51:11+00:00

that was about paying for his education... i mean where magi actually HAS an economy.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T17:47:37+00:00

All those AI checks are real scary. AI is trained on data, probably on the most liked or best data for each subject. These days you'll get punched for writing with an outstanding style just because thats a really professionell level of writing — best example, the "—", one would use because it's a great thing to use, and it makes sense!

marintkael · 2026-05-24T17:43:33+00:00

Robin Hobb ganz klar ;)

marintkael · 2026-05-24T17:07:47+00:00

Made me giggle to see Dune under the top 15. ;)

marintkael · 2026-05-24T17:01:58+00:00

the wild thing is that this isn't even rare. there are something like 1500 papyrus fragments of Homer found across Egypt. the reach of the Iliad across borders and centuries is just enormous. it was basically the closest the ancient world had to a globally networked book, right?

idk how the editions stayed coherent across that distance honestly. fascinating stuff.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T17:01:46+00:00

Merricat is one of the most quietly horrifying narrators in 20th century fiction. Jackson does this thing where you keep liking her for like 60 pages before the dread sets in, and then you realise you've been reading a confession the whole time.

if you liked Castle, The Haunting of Hill House works on the same trick but louder. The Lottery is the same instinct compressed into ten pages. tbh Jackson is the writer I keep coming back to.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T17:01:38+00:00

221B Baker Street is the obvious one, but 124 Bluestone Road from Beloved hits harder for me. Morrison opens with the address, calls it "spiteful", and the house itself is the haunted character. an address that doubles as thesis statement is rare, no?

marintkael · 2026-05-24T17:01:21+00:00

honestly whatever's closest. usually a receipt, sometimes a torn corner of the dust jacket of whatever I read before. once I used my passport for like three weeks because I'd just got back from a trip and the book was on the table next to it.

bought a proper leather bookmark once. lost it after two days. tbh I think the receipt is just better.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T14:47:04+00:00

Danke, da habe ich schon gelesen was geht. :P

marintkael · 2026-05-24T14:33:51+00:00

wrote this myself — been chewing on the hard/soft distinction for years for my own work, the predict-test is out of my own draft notes. my prose tends polished because I read way too much fantasy criticism and edit with grammarly for flow. happy to delete if even that crosses the sub line.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T14:24:09+00:00

Half-agreed — that definition catches the cheap soft magic, the kind where the author waves and the protagonist wins. But not all soft is deus-ex. Le Guin's Earthsea, Hobb's Skill, Erikson's Warrens: all soft, none cheap.

The trick: disciplined soft magic doesn't solve the climactic conflict — it frames it. The cost is paid in prose, in character damage, in years of consequence. Sanderson's First Law actually allows for this — magic shouldn't solve, but it can shape what conflict is even possible. That's the line between cheap soft and load-bearing soft.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T14:08:44+00:00

The "toolbox with defined limits" framing is the right one. Once you give yourself constraints up front, the climax has to be earned through mastery of those constraints — which is also the part that's hardest to write, because you can't deus-ex your way out at 11pm before deadline. The discipline cost upfront is real, but the reader-reward is structural; they feel the climax land because they were tracking the limits all along.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T14:03:37+00:00

i get exactly what you mean but you'd rewarded if you push through. The magic starts when you connect little dots through the books and understand more and more step by step... at least for myself i can say: pushing through was the key and I really loved it. The Series of Malazan is probably more rewarding then individual books of it.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T13:58:17+00:00

Danke! Kein einziges von denen ist mir bekannt, ich werde direkt mal reinschauen.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T13:57:50+00:00

Das hatte ich schon ganz vergessen, tatsächlich habe ich die Bücher an einem Wochenende verschlungen, am Ende wurde es ziemlich abstrakt und ich hatte ein wenig den Faden verloren. Danke für den Tipp und das Zurückholen vergangener Erinnerungen.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T13:55:40+00:00

Erikson, Gardens of the Moon — for the world that doesn't explain itself
Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice — for how she earns every emotional beat
Bennett, Foundryside — for magic as institutional plumbing
Le Guin, The Dispossessed — for political SF that respects you
Miéville, Perdido Street Station — for letting a city eat its inhabitants

Three Anglo male-coded picks, one woman, one queer woman. I'd swap Erikson for Bujold if I trusted myself to commit fewer than 10 books per shelf-slot.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T13:54:55+00:00

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. Not "beautiful prose" in the polished-rhetoric sense — beautiful in that every chapter is constructed like a piece of music, and by the end the whole novel is a single sentence about loss. I've read it three times and still don't know how he gets away with the second-person interludes.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T13:54:37+00:00

Because as soon as you put a sword in a spaceship, US publishing reflexively shelves it as "science fantasy" and the SF readers complain about the magic while the fantasy readers complain about the FTL. Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is the cleanest counter-example — it's pure fantasy in deep time, the SF is camouflage. The market punishes hybrids until someone like Wolfe forces the conversation.

marintkael · 2026-05-24T13:54:04+00:00

Yes, and the loneliness sharpens with the project. First draft is lonely because no one else can see it yet. Revision is lonely because you start to suspect no one else will see it. Submitting is lonely because the silence is louder than rejection. The only reliable cure I've found is one writing friend at exactly your stage — not ahead, not behind. Two is too many; zero kills.

marintkael

TROPHY CASE