1925

Yeah, I drive a few 2 to 4-hour drives per week routinely, along routes I can drive in my sleep, so that’s when I have time. Otherwise I’m with you, I can’t just listen and do nothing.

But damn, the narrator does a great job of making this like a radio play. Makes those long drives something to look forward to.

Since it’s been a few years since book 1, I assume I can get book 4 soon? Granted I have 40+ hours to listen through before I get there.

1926

According to wikipedia, this is the series:

Gentleman Bastard

  1. The Lies of Locke Lamora (June 27, 2006)
  2. Red Seas Under Red Skies (June 20, 2007)
  3. The Republic of Thieves (October 8, 2013)
  4. The Thorn of Emberlain (forthcoming)
  5. The Ministry of Necessity (forthcoming)
  6. The Mage and the Master Spy (forthcoming)
  7. Inherit the Night (forthcoming)

Given that progression I wouldn’t bet on a book 4 any time soon.

1927

Damn, yep. Another GRRM.

Now I’m kind of sorry I encouraged his lackluster progress by buying his 1st three.

1928

On the bright side you’ve got to love that they all have names already. Maybe those names will help you imagine what happens in the next four books when you’re done with the trilogy.

1929

I stalled on the first book and have meant to get back to it, but seeing that it’s another GoT deal I’ll wait.

1930

I personally feel the first book is overrated. I finished it but have had no desire to read anything further by the author. It had some potential but was also flawed and compared to its hype and rep, vastly over-rated IMO.

1931

I felt like it was a book where the author, Lynch, kept showing off, which always bugs me in fiction because I want to sink into the story and forget the writer’s there. That was why I stopped reading it, though I do like caper stories. I’m done with it until Lynch finishes the entire series. I’ll re-evalute it then.

1932

What’s hilarious is that I just re-read The Black Company, after picking up the omnibus version of the original Black Company Trilogy from this thread a while back, and Glen Cook is basically doing the exact opposite of Lynch in his writing. It’s all very clean and workmanlike, with minimal flourishes, letting the story and characters do all the work.

On that note, The Black Company was even better than I remembered. It’s been decades since I read it, and although I suppose you could call it “grimdark” it is so much better than that label often implies. There’s world building under the surface but it’s a foundation, not the main focus. There are characters, but leanly drawn. The emphasis is on the action, story and plot, and yet the character moments that arise (like some of the interactions between Croaker and Raven) are incredibly well earned. Grimdark is typically the opposite of subtle, but Cook is actually very subtle in this book.

Next up is Shadows Linger, of which I have vague memories of dark doings…

1933

I got half way through the second black company book and the grimness had worn me down.

1934

It’s shockingly good, really, for a work that has never really garnered a lot of critical acclaim.

Well, things mostly do work out better in the end. ;^)

1935

I also have the Omnibus and in December read the first novel. It was so lean that I found it an absolute bore, and often confusing. I had to force myself to finish it, and only did so because I wanted to mark another novel completed for my 2020 total.

So with that reaction to the first one, would you say there’s no point in moving on to the second? Or does it pick up?

1936

I dimly recall being confused at the beginning of all three novels in the original series, especially the first two. Each starts with a situation rooted in a history that you, the reader, don’t know, and Cook doles out the necessary background slowly and subtly and over the course of the book, or even the series.

Certainly they are all lean books, especially for the genre. The first novel starts as a sort of gothic horror story (it’s a monster hunt!) and then turns into something like Platoon: a story about a band of brothers in the middle of a war. The second book broadens the scope, though it still takes some time before you realize that the whole thing is an existential struggle in the grand fantasy sense.

If you didn’t like the spare prose of the original, or the way Cook makes you struggle with ignorance like the characters have to, then maybe you wouldn’t like the rest of them. But for me, they’re classics, and I have probably re-read them half a dozen times or more over the years.

1937

I don’t remember being turned off by any of them. I believe I read the first triology back to back to back, which is unusual for me. I think I may have even read the standalone (The Silver Spike) that takes place after the first triology and which I really enjoyed. I did run out of gas a couple of books into the subsequent series. I think a new narrator took over for Croaker and it broke the spell the books held over me.

Oddly, as much as I love the Black Company books I’ve read, I failed to get any traction with his Garrett P.I. series, which is too bad because noir and fantasy should go together like chocolate and peanut butter for me. I think the snark and wisecracks were lathered on a bit too thick.

1938

I’ve enjoyed some of the Garrett books, perhaps mostly because they’re thinly-veiled homages to Rex Stout’s immortal Nero Wolfe. If you want to top a genius detective who is too fat and comfortable to leave his home and actually detect, how about a dead genius detective?

But I agree the wisecracking goes a bit far. Stout makes Archie Goodwin a smartass narrator, but he does it well and Goodwin is endearing rather than irritating. Cook sometimes crosses that line with Garrett, and the result is to make the overall effect of the story a bit lighter than perhaps he intended.

1939

I enjoy Garrett, but I must confess that going back to them later in life there’s a distinct strain of sexism to them that I wouldn’t necessarily ascribe to the author rather than the character, but gets a bit grating.

1940

Interesting. I haven’t read them in years, but it may be another case of Cook not handling the characters with Stout’s deftness. Stout’s Goodwin is definitely a romancer of women, but the female characters who crop up as his interests are generally smart, capable, strong people, and Goodwin never seems like a sexist. Wolfe himself makes it clear that he has little or no regard for women, but it’s obvious to the reader that this is a sort of eccentricity of the character that we aren’t supposed to take very seriously; and indeed there are multiple examples where Wolfe is confronted with strong, smart female characters and has a grudging admiration for them.

1941

I would say the actual female characters are not too bad, generally (one reason I see it as more a character thing than an author thing), but Garrett’s constantly simultaneously horny for them and talking about how much trouble they are, etc.

1942

I find the Garrett work his weakest. The Dread Empire are very entertaining imo, The Instrumentality books are a lot of fun if not as deep. the Darkwar work is also pretty dark. Starfishers is worth reading. None of them feature the character development of Dark Company, but they always feature an excellent viewpoint character.

1943

I was digging around a bit about Cook and I read that his final Dread Empire book was done in manuscript form and a fan he had over at his house stole it. He was so unhappy about it that he went decades before he ever wrote the final book. If he ever got the manuscript back he kept quiet about it.

Also, the penultimate Dread Empire book sold “in the hundreds” according to Cook, so that probably dispirited him as well about the series.

1944

I have heard the same story.

No idea why they wouldn’t sell, they are good work.