Flynn Castellanos

9/10

Revisado: 04-05-24

Loved the difference of perspectives from both sides of the conflict, bit of a double edged sword as it did make it difficult to keep track of certain individuals especially in the middle act. Most gripping during the last act and once again really pleased with Abercrombie's excellent character work. Gorst was my favorite viewpoint and I doubt that's a controversial opinion, but I was also impressed with Calder and Beck's views. Still liked Best Served Cold more but this is a very good follow up. 9/10

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Fantasy Hong Kong, Loved it

Revisado: 01-15-23

*Note, I forgot to write a review after this book so I'm writing this after I've finished the sequel, Jade War.

Everyone online kept recommending this book (mostly booktubers and r/books and r/fantasy) but they were not always specific and I think the reason why is that there's a lot of cool stuff to take away from this series.

This first book really grabbed me with the setting. The crime family drama, the Hong Kong city vibe, the magic economy, this was the best parts of Boardwalk Empire and Legend of Korra smashed together. I spent a semester studying abroad in Hong Kong so any and all stories that feature an asian foundation city that meets clashing of new culture and tech will always been cool to me. The characters were really second to me in this book, even though there are only about 4-5 primary PoV characters I just liked them but not as much as I loved the setting which really carried this whole first book to me (book 2 really stepped up in the character department and I love them all now).

This had a really awesome blend of dark moments, as one would expect from what is essentially a magic drug cartel war, and reverence from its characters. Usually I find my stories leaning more grimdark or high fantasy but this was a great middle ground that bounced back and forth between things like racketeering threats, devout prayer scenes, straight up murders, and then a little sex. This has got it all.

9/10

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Best parts: Sailing & The Lopen

Revisado: 12-29-22

This is the better of the two stormlight novellas but that isnt saying much since I really didnt care for Edgedancer.

This did two things: added a tiny bit to some cool lore, and gave The Lopen a few prominent scenes.

I would recommend this to any big SA fan but these novellas haven't become essential yet to the Cosmere experience

9/10

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Begs for an animated series

Revisado: 12-24-22

This whole series just set a new standard for myth and folklore storytelling, it will be the series I read from when I have children and need to introduce them to Greek mythology. Fry is already a remarkable writer and narrator that to have these two together results in more than the sum of its parts.

Now for this specific entry I would rank it 3rd in terms of enjoyment, but 1st in terms of education. This was the set of stories I was least familar with so I learned the most of the characters, backstories, and overall connections. This really helped keep all those tidbits and minor stories channeled into one cohesive timeline. This begs to be an animated series in the style of Cosmos.

9/10 absolutely loved, but would only recommend to Greek myth buffs or someone who had already read the first 2 books

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Entertaining, but difficult to keep straight

Revisado: 11-03-22

Read this series if you like; Abercrombie's First Law, Netflix's Castlevania, Norse Mythology

I really enjoy the world, tone, and style of this series. As I've said before of Shadow of the Gods this series has a very Joe Abercrombie feel to it, but if we scrapped the Union and Gurkish Empire and just focused on a story in the North and on the Named Men.

Each chapter on their own is really entertaining but trying to keep characters straight was difficult. I'm actually pretty familiar with Nordic names so the more I thought about this (since it was a similar issue I ran into in the previous book) I think it wasn't so much the exotic names (however I do believe many people would have a rough time with all of them) but that the narrator did not have a significant range of voices and it was easy to slip between characters and pov chapters thinking they were one and realizing further on that it was another.

On the whole I really like this world, the twists and inspirations he has drawn from Norse mythology are really fantastic. He's clearly an expert that knows his source material well enough to play around with it in really cool ways just like how a great DM crafts a story for his players using existing material and giving it enough spin to feel wholey its own world and I love when that kind of work is accomplished.

I really hope this series gets popular enough for a quality fan wiki to develop to help keep characters, gods, and locations straight (honestly just a map and fanart sketch of each pov character would do wonders for me). I feel like this series could make it really well as a tv or animated adaptation with very strong Netflix's Castlevania or Vinland Saga vibes

While you might miss out on the pronunciation of the names in a print or ebook I might actually recommend that over audio because without the narrator's limitations I feel like I would give this a higher rating

7/10

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Well I guess I like fairy romance now.

Revisado: 08-13-22

This was a ton of fun to get into, partly because romance in general is a genre I haven't touched. Probably because the majority of romance I was exposed to early on was Jane Austen in high school and that just did not speak to me at all, but fantasy romance may be the direction I need to work in now.

Now the actual book, it was hot. I liked the Beauty and the Beast parallel and the lead characters seem to all have their own little charm that I'm liking. The world seems fun and honestly just the in-world mythos that the world was made by a great cauldron and thus all their swears involve a cauldron is just a super cool little nugget that I'm totally gonna remember forever now even if I forget everything else in the book, much like the god's hall in Abercrombie's Half a King, or the 8 god family structure in Milan's Dinosaur Lords. Unlike those last two though, I really liked this book, the fairy species are cool, the courts are interesting, and the last quarter (trials) was the best part to me.

As I understand the bar for these sorts of stories this is only a very mild level spicy, in which case I'll be reading on because damn, even I, a straight man, want a hunky rich fairy lord like Tam.

9/10

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Wow is Neil a great narrator

Revisado: 07-29-22

So I've listened to this almost immediately after finishing the 1st 2 books of Stephen Fry's Mythos cycle which goes through the Greek myths so the contrast/comparison here is cool! This is not to say that Stephen Fry did it better or anything, simply that I think Fry and Gaiman have two different approaches when when telling their mythologies. HOWEVER, they are so similar in how British their dialogue comes across that it tickles me like an episode of Blackadder or Faulty Towers, just so much fun. While fry was more thorough, he has taken 3 books to tell the stories of the gods, heroes, and Trojan war respectively, while Neil has decided to focus on what are in my opinion some of the more notable/entertainment stories from Norse mythology. Really my only great critique of Gaiman's work is that it isn't nearly long enough. Like Fry he does a great job with witty dialogue, giving casual conversation to gods and frost giants, he has a good sense of pacing, no story felt like it went on too long or off about something that didn't seem relevant (this was actually something I had to curb myself on because I found myself getting upset that some obscurely minute detail of a character or their story wasn't being brought up but then realized that beyond it being a fun tidbit it really wouldn't have moved the current story forward beyond trivia). Only being 6 hours long you could easily sneak this in on a week's commute to work or weekend and your life would be for the better.

Even if you just have a slight interest in mythology I would recommend this book. Plus, its Neil-fucking-Gaiman, can't go wrong there.

10/10

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For the Ages

Revisado: 07-25-22

So what I really like about this is how he blends together all these stories into what feels like the same world, like all of these characters actually were within just a few years of each other and not that far away from each other geographically speaking. As if this was a large interconnected universe just as today's MCU or Sanderson's Cosmere. Obviously they are all Greek and did take place in the same period but pervious tellings I've encountered haven't woven them together as tight as this. I'm a huge fan of interconnected worlds because it just feels much more real.

He does an excellent job of giving the proper back story at the proper time for the proper character or event. I'll also add that I really liked how I learned so many new things about the myths that I thought I knew so well since childhood and perhaps this is simply because myth has a way of finding variance of itself over time and space and culture. The cultural values of the time or place have a major factor on what elements of the stories are highlighted.

Another thing I really enjoyed brilliantly from this collection was how he highlighted the merits and positive traits of each of the heroes. When I was a child and I read these stories I thought of the heroes as these cool figures and then as I got older I was presented with more and more information about how terrible these people were; Hercules has anger management problems, Theseus never kept any of his promises, Odepius was a freak, Perseus was the only one who got a happy end even though he murdered an innocent woman. But Stephen Fry goes out and explains how Hercules wasn't just a big brute and that he had one of the most overlooked traits of modern heroes: fortitude, the willingness to simply endure what needs to be endured and the willingness to make amends for your sins even when they aren't really yours. Jason and Theseus were both characters that as a teenager I was also taught how they simply abandoned their women on random islands never to be seen again. However this collection of stories talks about how Medea was a crazy ass bitch and a family murderer, and Theseus didn't seem to want to cause all of the pain that he did to his father and other loved ones but rather it was put in an extremely unfortunate position and the gods just decided to mess with them. I really liked how so many of these characters were written to be actually human so that they weren't just bastards to the core but we're legitimate heroes trying to do good works in the world. Perhaps they had their flaws but all humans do and these ones at least tried to do a little good.

One last point I'd like to make is how I love Stephen Fry's use of conversational dialog between characters. It makes the heroes and figures sound so much more grounded, especially when there's dialog between gods that sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch.

I think I'm safe in assuming that Stephen Fry's Mythos cycle will probably be what I read to my children one day when I want to introduce them to the Greek myths. He's set a new standard in my mind of how to tell great myths.

10/10

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Roger Clark is the best part

Revisado: 07-25-22

OK so have you ever seen the trailer for a film and you saw your favorite actor and you want to watch this movie because your actor is in it, and then you see the movie...and it just falls flat. Unfortunately that is the case here.

It really felt like someone trying to imitate Dresden Files, but now with actual cowboys (great concept!) but just didn't execute it as well. I had listened to Dead Acre, the prequel or prelude short story that was available last year, and I thought it could be it could have potential, especially with Roger Clark narrating. He voices the protagonist Arthur Morgan in Read Dead Redemption 2 (2018), and quite frankly he sells that character and that game, which is already a fantastic in so many other respects, but Clark's performance delivers such an emotional journey that by the end of playing the game you feel as though you really care about this character...I did not care about James Crowley. This series has a lot of potential, supernatural cowboy hunting demons has awesome written all over it, but something about Crowley's personality needs to change to make him more captivating.

5/10

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Not a normal guy

Revisado: 07-24-22

There's some great stories in here, some to inspire, some to entertain, and some to just add a dose of perspective. My biggest takeaways were these:

1) Repetition is the key. There's just no going around it, you're not going to be good or even simply competent if you don't do the thing, and then do it again, and just keep doing it regardless of how cold, wet, or dark it is. Even if you wake up feeling like a pile of shit, the thing doesn't care and in fact often times your opponents (human or otherwise) want it to be unbearable so you dont even start. He didn't do those 4000+ pull ups just thinking about it, he had to just do it everyday, even on the days it sucked. ESPECIALLY on the days it sucked. And I have to do the same, if you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to get what you've always got.

2) You are not alone in failure. Not just because everyone fails, but rather you are not alone because after you've failed you now have tools to fix it. When you fail at a task you now know how this task will go, where you need to improve, how to better prepare and tactically plan your next strike.

3) 40% rule. When you think you are done, and totally spent, out of gas, drained of all color and will, you're really just about 40% of the way there. Just eat it a little longer, go from mostly sweaty to entirely drenched and slick, and you will go farther than your stupid limbic system is telling you to.

4) Eliminate the stupid decisions. Making habits, cutting out the bullshit, all of it. You only have so much willpower in a day, how dare you give up that precious resource, that liquid gold, over to some bullshit that will never stop being hungry and doesn't really care if you give it what it wants.

9/10

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