Yeah. Definitely a great book. I love the fact that the voice in this book is a doctor/cleric and a record keeper. He reminds me of Stephen Maturin. High praise from me. Which reminds me that I haven’t finished that series yet. First world problem to be sure. :)
Jonathon Lethem’s brilliant Fortress of Solitude is on Bookbub today for $2.99. If you’re not on Bookbub, I think this link may work to get you the price.
What’s a Bookbub?
Bunch of paper stuck together dummy!
It’s a discount ebook marketing service. They’ll email you bargains every day. Lots of self-published crap but sprinkled with enough quality book bargains that it’s worth getting the emails. Free to join. Google Bookbub.
I’ve gotten so many books via Bookbub it’s insane. What a wonderful service.
Yes, every once a while something good will pop up. I think they had the first Conan book the other day for 1.99. (Not sure whether that qualifies as good or not). A lot of times there will be a discount on the first book in a series to try and hook you.
This has worked many times. I have an entire “collection” in Kindle of series I plan to finish because of this.
I really want to get into these, since I own the whole series. What is the hook for you, so far? Is it the doctor/main character? You like him and want to know what happens to him next? Or is it the twists of the plot that’s got you looking forward to reading more? Etc? I’m just trying to find a hook for myself, and maybe I can use your hook.
I like the characters. They have memorable individual quirks. Descriptive names. The writer makes you care about them, what happens to them. The magic is fun. The fact that the Black Company members have a strong morality even though they are, mostly, deeply flawed. Cook skips the minutiae of the battles for the focus on the interplay between characters. He’s almost the opposite of George R. R. Martin who can wax poetic for ages about the stonework over a door.
Actually finished it today. Ordering the second book from Amazon soon.
I think the narrative voice of Croaker is very well done, and that’s the main hook for me. Beyond that, the sense of the Company, its history, its declining place in the world. The Company is the vestige of Something Great, which they know from the Annals, even if none of them can comprehend what the oldest entries even mean. And the premonition of looming disaster keeps you moving forward.
Indeed, the names are genius. Cook doesn’t spend one minute on inventing plausible time-and-place character names for the main cast. He just gives them all nicknames based on how he wants you to see character. He rationalizes that by saying they’re all people who ran away from something, so they abandoned their real names, but it works for him as a writer and for the reader.
A couple years ago I grabbed Chronicles of the Black Company with a gift card to B&N that someone gave me. I should really get around to reading it.
So many things to read. I picked up The coming of Conan the Cimmerian when it was on sale, volume 1 of the Adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. I figure I would try to read all the influences Gygax listed for D&D.
If you’re looking for D&D influences, especially on the magic system, don’t miss Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth (and sequels…Cugel’s Saga is just excellent. One of the first and still best fantasy antiheroes.).
Thanks. Just grabbed Tales of the Dying Earth which has all 4 books.
George RR Martin edited an anthology tribute to Vance, “Songs of The Dying Earth”. I enjoyed it. https://www.amazon.com/Songs-Dying-Earth-Short-Stories-ebook/dp/B003P9VOIU/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536683815&sr=1-10&keywords=dying+earth
Oh cool, I love the Dying Earth books. And as someone who doesn’t generally do fantasy, I think the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books are really good. The Conan books too, for that matter.
Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games is on Bookbub today for $1.99. This is 900 pages of the what could be the best police thriller of the last decade, for two bucks. I guess this is because of the Netflix adaptation, but the book is so much better than the show.
Heh, I love that NYT quote. It’s not often you see a blurb admitting that a book is hard to pick up.
Well, it is 900 pages. I read it in hardcover and at times it felt like it weighed ten pounds.
I own and love tons of paper books. But nothing works better at night, when I can’t sleep and don’t want to wake the wife, than Kindle in night mode on my iPhone.