What are you reading?

[Jinsai]

Hell House by Richard Matheson. This is a fun book.

[allegate]

For the next >24 hours (I don't know when the sale started) all books by author Will Wight are free on Kindle and then only $2 to add narration via audible. I recommend the Cradle series - the last book comes out next week, hence the sale - if you like fantasy books set in a somewhat feudal China but with magic.

This review sets the series up well enough:

Cradle falls into a genre that I've been aware of for some time, but that I wasn't necessarily sure of a name for, and until relatively recently I'm not sure it even had one that was agreed upon. Now, it does. Progression fantasy. The idea being that it falls into a sub-genre of fantasy in which the main character(s) steadily increases in power and/or skill as the series progresses. You typically see stories like this in anime, in xianxia/wuxia-inspired web novels, etc. So its emergence into the western sphere is more recent, and Wight's Cradle series is often pointed at as a good a place to dive in if you're craving that type of story. I am, in fact, craving that type of story.

Unsouled is not written in stand-out prose. Wight does not have a mastery of language, and he is not writing characters of limitless depth. But what he clearly does have is a mind for stories, a solid foundation for world-building, and a penchant for fast-paced plotting. I say it all the time; not every book has to have everything. Most just have to do one thing well enough to be engaging, and I think Wight achieves that here.

I started reading the series for the first time on March 3rd and finished the last (at the time) book on April 14th so they're very fast reads. If you like over-powered anime fights you will probably like the series. I give them a 3.5 or 4 overall because they are fun, just missing some real stakes at times.

[Jinsai]

I realize I probably read too much Stephen King, but I find his stuff entertaining. I'd never read The Dark Half, and I'm about 75 pages in, but this feels... more twisted from the start than his other stuff. I hear that after writing this, he sobered up. Maybe he was struggling with some really messed up demons when he did this book. I wonder if it's one of the ones he doesn't remember writing.

[leftshoe18]

I lost my copy of The Witcher: Time Of Contempt so I started re-reading Alices Adventures In Wonderland. That book really captures the absurdity of what it feels like while dreaming and I love it.