Finished: Storm Front (Dresden Files) by Jim Butcher and what to read next

When we last left our hero, he had just begun the task of reading The Magicians, but somehow he ended up re-reading Storm Front instead. What happened?!

Honestly, I just could not get into it. I could read the words and turn the page and read the words and so on and so forth, but I was seriously lacking any interest to. I didn't want to get stalled in my reading right at the beginning of the year, so I switched over to finishing my re-read of Storm Front. I'm going to try and come back around to The Magicians later this year and see if I want to read it then, otherwise I'm not going to worry about it.

Anyways, Storm Front was as good as I remembered it being when I first read it like seven or so years ago. I can't believe it's even been that long. I had started the re-read late last year, then got distracted by other books. I was already like a 139 pages into Storm Front, so I decided to finish it off, which took only about a day and a half. What can I say? I like The Dresden Files. I plan on reading the others again over the course of the year, except for maybe Summer Knight because it's still pretty fresh in my memories.

After finishing Storm Front, I decided to switch over to military science fiction and I'm in the homestretch to finish the second of the pair, Fortune's Pawn. After that, I'm sliding back over to fantasy. I'm not sure what to read, but I have some choices:

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
Mistborn also by Sanderson
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
The Magic of Recluce by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

I get the feeling that there will be people screaming for me to read the last one.

And that's how you troll a troll

Credit: Stepan Alekseev.

I get the feeling that there are a lot of DMs and players who will look at this picture and go "Yeah, that's happened before."

I would certainly hate to meet her in a dungeon!

Credit: Spacefriend-T.

Because there is no doubt that she would kick my ass up one corridor and down the other. I really like the choice of a war pickaxe, since you don't see those used in fantasy fiction much at all. No idea how prevalent they are in gaming.

Credit: Spacefriend-T.

Stardust's finished, time for The Magicians

Well, I wrapped up reading Neil Gaiman's Stardust yesterday. I had planned on finishing it on Monday, but real life sank that battleship. Stardust was really a great book and I would highly recommend it. Like I mentioned in a previous post, Stardust was written in a pre-Tolkien style of fantasy and has a fairy tale feel to it. There's no mega-quest or big bad, but there's plenty of enchantment and interesting characters. I'll write a separate post about it later, but I give it two thumbs up.

Moving on, I've already started to dig into Lev Grossman's The Magicians. One of the reasons why I picked it is because Syfy's adaptation is set to premiere later this month and I want to read the book before it airs. The other reasons are that I've had the book for years and I've heard nothing but praise for it. Might as well give it a whirl.

Well, so much for Shannara

I had planned on starting 2016 off by reading The Sword of Shannara, but had to ditch that plan about a week ago because the book is starting to fall apart; the perils of paperback library books. Seeing as how several of the pages decided to divorce themselves from the binding, I just have to wait until I can get my own copy before I can resume following the adventures of Shea and Flick. So what am I reading now?

I bought this something like ten years ago and never read it until now, aside from one abortive attempt when I first bought it, but that was like five years before I finally became a fantasy addict.

Young Tristran Thorn will do anything to win the cold heart of beautiful Victoria—even fetch her the star they watch fall from the night sky. But to do so, he must enter the unexplored lands on the other side of the ancient wall that gives their tiny village its name. Beyond that old stone wall, Tristran learns, lies Faerie—where nothing, not even a fallen star, is what he imagined.

If the premise of the book sounds familiar, it was turned into a movie back in 2007 starring Claire Danes, Robert De Niro, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Good movie.

It's pretty excellent so far. Gaiman wrote Stardust in the vein of pre-Tolkien fantasy, like Lord Dunsany's "King of Elfland's Daughter" and such, so there's no like epic, high, or grimdark elements which is actually a nice change of pace after what I read last year

One of the reasons I picked Stardust besides having it for ten years, is because it clocks in at only 248 pages. I have at least fourteen more books to read before year's end, so starting off with a fairly short book that I can finish quickly will hopefully help motivate me to keep going. After I finish Stardust, I'm going read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. After that, maybe a break from fantasy to read either scifi or just plain fiction. My overall strategy is to focus on books that are less than 500 pages (preferably in the high 300 to low 400 range) in order to clear them out of the way before tackling the door stoppers. The latter's going to be a bitch for sure because I have both Jordan and Sanderson AND Martin in the pile. Yeah.