J. Natael

Smugness and arrogance masquerading as wisdom

Revisado: 05-14-20

I don't think I've ever encountered a story in which a wise man worried about "passing on his mantle of wisdom." That phrase alone kind of encapsulates this book.

First, the audio of the book is great. The full-cast performance is fun, the narrators are as great as you'd expect them to be, and the sound effects are a cool addition that makes it feel a bit more like story time as a child. This was great.

And the initial stories seemed kind of cool. The setup of the book, the first few rounds of stories, the dynamics of the "wisdom" dispensed; at first I quite liked the premise. With time however it became more and more obvious how shallow the "wisdom" was. And not just shallow but somewhat concerning. The "wisdom" often translated to an encouragement of the reader to be more judgmental of someone for their situation or to glory in the judgment of characters for one another; people who took the approaches often implied by the book would be, frankly, assholes. This mixed with the growing dynamic of the wise man being rather full of himself about his wisdom while simultaneously being an idiot, and finally instances in which the wise man himself seemed to cause pointless strife in ways even a teenager should know better than.

I made it through a bit more than five of the nine chapters and regretted wasting my time that far; if you want wisdom find sources that actually are wise; this story takes the narrative structure of a typical wisdom tradition and fills it with pop-culture pablum and superficiality.

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Disappointing compared to his earlier works

Revisado: 05-26-19

This book was entertaining enough that I finished it and didn't return it (barely), but it was mostly just disappointing. It was a long series of fight scenes that felt a bit repetitive and were mostly solved via deus ex machina kind of endings. The characters made a point, instead of being clever, of solving all problems via cheating (by virtue of being from somewhere else so he didn't know how to do otherwise), and a perpetual talk about how excited the main character was to find a "worthy fight" was in stark contract to the fact that he perpetually got his ass kicked and has his injuries massively talked up, which then again perpetually contracted with the fact that he'd join yet another fight again five minutes later. The point being, nothing was really believable, the the "show don't tell" advice for authors seemed not only to be ignored but to be on conflict as what the characters actually "showed" was in stark contract to the courage, intelligence, or fighting ability that was perpetually attributed to them. So yeah, quite disappointing. I also had a minor complaint, which is that in the opening scenes a fight between two characters was perpetually described with one of the two characters being described as "they." I don't know what this was about, but all it did for me was make the scene very confusing as I kept having to rewind to check and see if someone else had joined the scene only to discover that the plural was in fact being used to apply to a single character, again. Not sure what that was about, but it made an already rather mediocre book start with a rather annoying writing dynamic that made one distrust the narrator in a way that also further detracted from the whole story. This then fed into the sense that what was described about the characters conflicted with the traits they exhibited, leaving one with a broad sense of inept characters and a dishonest narrator both. This made the book frustrating on top of being disappointing.

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esto le resultó útil a 17 personas

Good book, bad narration volume control

Revisado: 05-11-18

This book, while very slow to get going, was quite enjoyable and good overall. What really shifted that for me was the narrator who, while good with the storytelling, had a tendency to shift from whispering to yelling so frequently that listening to the book was a constant experience of turning the volume up and down to hear and to avoid hearing damage! This massively detracted from my enjoyment of the book.

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One of the most important discussions of our time

Revisado: 06-21-16

This is a FANTASTIC book discussing one of the central issues of our time. My only issue with it is that it was too short; I want more!

It was incredibly useful to me though on challenging my views and deepening my understanding of the topic and the current world situation and fomenting good thinking on my perspective about it and dealing with it. I hope many more people read this book.

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Wanted to like this so much. Very mixed results...

Revisado: 06-03-16

I really struggled with this book. I loved the idea of it as a debate between city living and a country life and the inherent worth of each, and really wanted that debate and the author's final answer to resonate. And here and there pieces did; some of the discussion of spirituality in particular felt quite meaningful to me.

The rest of the book though felt forced and inauthentic. The whole thing tried to idolize the author's sister while leaving the reader with a sense that she really wasn't that great after all. She had long standing problems with the author that she refused to resolve, she never really understood her brother, and her abject refusal to face the possibility of her death left her family (and herself) totally unprepared to face it in the end. The author claims that this wasn't cowardice but his justification doesn't sell, and even his telling of the story leaves the reader feeling that the sister, while managing to endure great suffering with a smile, was too immature to face what truly needed to be done and left others to suffer for the result.

The result of that feeling inauthentic was to detract meaningfully from the author's final perspective shift on small town living. He had thoughtful discussions of what it means to put down roots and build real connections that were interesting and thought provoking to read, but he left unresolved so many of the issues he'd set up earlier in the book about why he'd left home in the first place.

This all leaves you with a sense that the author moved home to build roots, and did so because he'd reached a point where wanting that outweighed the meaningful problems he and his family might face by living there. It did not solve or really even address any of those problems, and the final pages of the book even discussed how unresolved some of those issues with his sister were. The author leaves them unresolved in the absence of alternative choices but the reader is left feeling like the author's sister was rather petty and small minded with her own brother.

As someone who wanted this book's message to resonate, this was a deeply unsatisfying result. I agree with large piece of his premise but I wish he'd executed it in a way that made you feel like the characters were likable instead of just inflexible, ignorant, or immature.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

So much for this series

Revisado: 04-20-16

I have enjoyed the characters of this book and this author in the past, but in this book they kind of go off a cliff. Not in any dramatic (or literal) fashion, but ironically in exactly the fashion the author's preface says he hopes not to do. They've become two-dimensional caricatures of themselves instead of real people.

Royce is the "always scary, always fantastically skilled but moody" killer despite not really earning his scariness nor always actually being good at killing (and his moodiness seeming almost petulant at times). Hadrien is the "always sunny amazingly skilled soldier" despite his sunniness seeming like random and pointless naïveté and his soldiering skills not actually proving that useful or effective.

And the story, while having some interesting and promising aspects, leaves you largely uninterested in the characters (unexpectedly killing off one of the main exceptions to this midway through) and ends up abandoning the promises of the early plot in favor of stupid twists that all leads up to a rather lackluster and pointless final battle, which you don't even see the main climax of. This is followed by a denouement that so clearly wants you to feel for the characters a pain at loss and leaving that has in no way been earned.

And finally, peppered throughout is an excessively preachy tone in which the author explains his perspectives or what you should think about his characters to cover over the lack of real depth in them. This gets annoying.

I've always had some frustrations with this author's writing skill and less than fully developed characters, but they felt rounder before and at the frustrations were made up for with genuinely clever moments or scenes that made it all worth it. In this book though, it all fell apart into a mess I should have simply avoided.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Good narrator, bad narration editing

Revisado: 05-07-15

The story was fun and more or less what I expected. The narrator was actually pretty good too. Whoever edited this though did a terrible job. They seem to have spliced in long pauses or taken chunks of the narrator's voice and split them apart. The result is a lot of awkward pauses thrown into the narration at weird places. I was never quite sure when a sentence finished. It decidedly detracted from the experience.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Good story, but targeted at teenage girls

Revisado: 03-13-15

A friend of mine recommended this book and overall I quite enjoyed it, with one major caveat. The target audience of this book is clearly teenage girls. This means that while the story is fantastic, an inordinately large portion of the telling is spent on characters "gazing into eachother's eyes with longing." To the point that for me, parts of the story were immensely frustrating as I waited for plot progress, and in a few places I skipped sections.

I'd still recommend the book to others though, the story is great, the characters interesting, and the world fascinating, but I'd recommend going into it with open eyes about who it's aimed at to help manage your expectations.

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Too easy

Revisado: 07-21-14

The earlier books were enjoyable, but the trend that began in them, of solutions to problems magically (literally or metaphorically) appearing just when needed, has grown to an annoying extent in this. You don't understand the basis of the magic, you aren't aware of sub plots going on, problems are set up, and then just when they start to seem hopeless a miracle happens and they're done. A curse suddenly fixes things, a magical downpour suddenly fixes the world, a confrontation with the enemy results in his death while the character is literally unconscious, an all powerful villain suddenly is easy to beat. It gets to a point where you just wait for the expected magical solution to arrive.

So if you're looking for some mindless escapism with some interesting characters this isn't bad, but if you're looking for real plot instead of deus ex machina look elsewhere.

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Dull, suggestions for better alternatives

Revisado: 08-07-13

I listened to about forty-five minutes of this book (almost a fifth of it) only to hear several long lists of what various characters ordered in restaurants and a long description of the basis of the opinion that imagination is better than travel. After that I gave up.

If you were drawn in by the title, like I was, I would recommend skipping this actual book and instead going for The Art of Pilgrimage or Vagabonding, either of which delivers much better what this one's title promised than it does.

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esto le resultó útil a 12 personas