Malazan Empire: worry - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

Cause, on 24 June 2026 - 01:49 AM, said:

I like it fine. They're all in one side of a giant scale, and you can't see what's on the other side cuz it's so low -- Imbalance! And nobody can say you were false advertising about the ashes.

Quick catchup:
I read Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. With some time and distance, I've landed mostly in "I didn't like" territory with The Poppy War. Yellowface, in contrast, is contemporary fiction and something of a satire about appropriation in the literary world, and about the literary world more broadly. It's another unlikeable protagonist in first person perspective, but the overall concept makes it much more bearable because she's often the butt of the joke, and she can also be sharp and funny about her experiences. In some places though, it's a little wobbly on how self-aware the main character is -- like there's obviously a lot of self-pity and ego, but maybe there's some self-commentary that's a little more authorial POV creeping in. Anyway, still overall a good book imo.

I read The Martian and then watched the movie. Plan to do the same with Project Hail Mary soon. I don't need to say that much about this, I'm sure, as I'm super late to the game. But yeah the book is quite good, the movie is pretty good, and I look forward to PHM.

I read a book called The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn. Starts off at the end of WWI in southern England (Dorset?). The main character at first is a young girl in a family of what I guess you'd called landed gentry. Their estate is near the seaside, and a big whale corpse washes up on the beach, causing some excitment for her and various others. Eventually a couple more kids arrive on the scene, and they become prominent characters too. There's some unique people and events, but it's not as whimsical as that setup sounds, necessarily. The book is divided into parts, each one lasting a couple years with some big time jumps between, at least early on. So like by Part 2 she's a teenager with a couple younger siblings, and they're putting on plays in the whalebone theatre. Eventually it gets to WWII era, which from what I've inferred had some kind of impact on England (citation needed). In terms of my opinion -- the prose is really nice and playful, the characters are well defined, and the first half of the book is pretty great. The second half still has plenty of good qualities but the 'adult' lives of these characters wasn't quite as interesting for me.

I read Dungeon Crawler Carl book 6 -- The Eye of the Bedlam Bride. Still fun, but not my favorite gaming mechanics on this floor. Story-wise it's definitely a bridging book between the big stuff from last book to the big stuff sure to come in the next one. Not that nothing important happens, but it's definitely clean-up.

Now I'm finally starting Words of Radiance. I'm not mad at the first few chapters, so hopefully that's a good sign. I can't promise I won't pause every couple hundred pages to read something else though.

Yeah that's pretty bad. Being stranded in a strange place is its own kind of nightmare, on top of the injury.

They should call it the Tweety of Versailles, cuz this one's for the birds.