Moving on from Magician: Master

I finished Magician: Master on Wednesday and I'm still surprised by how fast I blew through it. While four days isn't a speed record for me, I'm still happy. What's more impressive is how much of the book I read in a relatively short amount of time: 324 pages in the span of about 24 hours, give or take. 125 on Tuesday and 199 on Wednesday.

As for the re-read, it was about as good as the one for Magician: Apprentice. Like I said in the previous post, there were plot details that I'd forgotten or had rearranged in my memory so the end result was that I got the same amount of enjoyment out of Master as I did the first time around. I basically forgot about damn near every character in the Kelewan plot line along with the plot itself!

The all too brief exploration of Tsurani and their culture is definitely one of my favorite parts of the book. Their culture is so different from the standard "European Middle Ages" setting of The Kingdom of the Isles and I'm honestly impressed that Feist somehow combined aspects of different real world cultures - Feudal Japan, China during the Sung Dynasty, pre-Columbian Aztecs, and even the Zulu - into a cohesive entity. That's some nice worldbuilding there.

If you want, you can read what I had to say about Magician: Master the first time I read it.

Finished my re-read of Magician: Apprentice last night (spoilers)

And I can honestly say that I enjoyed it as much as I did the first time. I think the re-read benefited greatly from the four years since I read Apprentice the first time. I had forgotten large chunks of the plot and certain events got switched around in my memory. Like, I thought that Pug's capture had happened at the very end, but it doesn't. Instead, he ceases to be the main POV character for the rest of the book and the POV switches over to Tomas, Arutha, Carline, Martin, and briefly a Tsurani. I think this was a very clever way of ensuring that readers would continue reading the entire book back when it was just Magician. It actually becomes an even better hook after the book was split into Apprentice and Master because you're almost compelled as the reader to immediately pick up Master just to see what's become of Pug. The ploy is still effective after a re-read because I'm just about to jump into the next book today!

But yeah, Magician: Master ought to be as good as I remember it. One of the things I'm looking forward to is revisiting Kelawan and the Tsurani culture. Feist says he mixed together elements of Feudal Japan, Sung Dynasty era China, Zulu, and Aztec cultures and it's a major difference from Midkemia, which is the typical European fantasy setting. It's a nice change up and I'm planning on reading the Empire Trilogy (set entirely on Kelawan) later this year, after I finish with the Riftwar Saga.

I'll probably post some of my favorite bits from Magician: Apprentice later today.

Re-visiting Midkemia

So for whatever reason I decided to do a re-read of Raymond E. Feist's Magician: Apprentice, the first (half) book in the Riftwar Saga. I originally read it and it's sequel (second half), Magician: Master back in 2012 and boy, did I ever need a refresher. Like, I'm reading Apprentice and there are just huge, huge chunks of the plot that I simply forgot. I remember important events, but not what happens between them.

An oddity about Magician: Apprentice is that it's only the first part of a book. Both it and Magician: Master are actually a single book call simply Magician, but when it was published in the U.S., it was split into two parts for whatever reason. I'm guessing it was due to size and printing big ass doorstoppers back in the day wasn't optimal. If that's the reason, then it shows how far both book making and the fantasy genre has come because the two halves combined would probably total less than a thousand pages, or one Wheel of Time book. Easily less than a Sanderson. Easily.