Pete's Log: Weekend Reading
Entry #2650, (Books, Writing, n such)(posted when I was 46 years old.)
Managed to finish two books this weekend (only had 60 pages left on the first one going into Saturday).
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The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg
This book has some interesting premises about a magical system, but instead of fleshing them out with an interesting story instead gets bogged down into needless detail and excessive descriptions. Like "each of his calves looked like a feast day ham" and "They squeezed against her, tight and tighter, as if she were being run over by an empty buggy with more and more passengers climbing inside it, making its wheels crush her." The book only weighs in at 214 pages as is, and it feels like instead of settling for a short novella, the author tried to bump up the page count by describing everything way more than it needed describing.
Also, it took me until page 62 to realize that all variation of the word fold (folded, folding, folder, ...) were capitalized. And from then on it annoyed me to no end each time I saw the capitalized words.
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Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
Humans forced to participate in an apocalyptic RPG for the entertainment of aliens. It's a bit Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets John Scalzi's Starter Villain meets Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. I tore through it in less than two days and want to go get the sequel. There are seven books in the series (so far?). It is funny and silly and fast-paced but also dark and bleak and violent. And yet hopeful? Maybe? It's certainly not cozy. I'm choosing to think that it's an entertaining work of satire and not the fever dream of a sadistic author. But I'm not positive yet. Also even though I want to read book two, I'm unsure how well the premise is going to hold over seven books without getting repetitive. Guess we shall see.