1-4 are all great. This one I’m reading now was a slow starter for me, probably because of the character changes, but I’m starting to enjoy it more as I go.

Okay, I’ll check out some of his books after Restaurant. Thanks for the suggestion!

Spells, Swords, & Stealth is a LitRPG where the main characters are actually NPCs who randomly pick up some adventurer gear. Their adventure is actually pretty entertaining, and (spoilers):

hidden stuff

at the very end of the first book it reaches out and touches the “real world”, kind of like an in-universe fourth wall break.

The B plot is a group of people in the “real world” who are actually playing the TTRPG (as their own characters, not as the NPCs mentioned above). This, to me, is far less interesting, in the same way that the Abaddon stuff was way less interesting than Lindon’s story in Cradle. But whereas Suriel, Makiel, et al were still somewhat compelling, especially now that the series has concluded and its possible to see the full arc of their story, I found the “real world” in Spells, Swords, & Stealth to be kind of cringy to read because a lot of the human characters are overly-stereotyped “nerds”. It doesn’t help that the series doesn’t have the best writing to begin with.

Unfortunately as the series has gone on the “real world” stuff has begun to take up a larger share of the page count. Also, the plot has stopped basically dead in its tracks where I’m at in the fourth book to explain some of the mechanics of the fictional TTRPG, which is probably the worst thing an author can do in a LitRPG.

Okay, cool! I hadn’t heard of Secret History but I’m going to check it out.

I read it after all tree books of the first Mistborn Trilogy, I think I preferred it that way, kept more of the mystery around the events of Well of Ascension and Hero of Ages.

I’m halfway through the second book. There is a lot that’s very culturally specific and while Ken Liu provides notes for a lot of it, there’s some stuff that he doesn’t really explain, which may be part of it. Some of it is just the way things are written or described, it’s a different style.

Nice, thanks for the recommendation! I will check out the podcast.

Its also a disappointment that we will never get the Seanchan sequel trilogy that only had one line of notes. It really is such a shame how much story telling potential is left for this world. Like we know in general of how the first four Ages go? Granted I’m not done with the series yet, but already I can tell how much will probably go unsaid.

Well, I hate to phone it in, but I have tried and failed to write one a few times now. So I’ve let someone else write one for me. Take as much or as little of this as you think is worthy of “elevator pitch”; any one paragraph will do but the most condensed for your intentions would probably be the third.

The Broken Earth is set on an Earth-like planet that is constantly subjected to large-scale seismic and volcanic events. The people of this land, which is called the Stillness, live in constant fear that an Angry Father Earth will unleash an environmental disaster strong enough to trigger a Fifth Season, a prolonged winter of hardship that can last anywhere from a decade to thousands of years. The Broken Earth is a resonant and cautionary work of climate fiction at a time when hurricanes, floods, and wildfires are pummeling the globe. Disaster preparedness is the organizing principle for people of the Stillness; they build for survival among the technological remains (the “deadciv”) of a long-dead civilization, which includes large mysterious obelisks that hover above them in the sky.

Among the people of the Stillness are orogenes, people born with the ability to harness and control kinetic, thermal, and other forms of energy. They alone can quell the seismic and volcanic events that threaten the Stillness. But orogeny is illegal, and orogenes (referred to as the derogatory term “roggas” by most people in the Stillness) are regarded as less than human. Orogenes are hunted down throughout the Stillness; those that aren’t killed are enslaved by the secret order of Guardians. Even more powerful than orogenes or Guardians are stone-eaters, a humanoid species that resembles stone statues and that rarely interacts with other beings in the Stillness.

Jemisin’s series centers on the story of Essun, a 42-year-old village schoolteacher who has been hiding her identity as an orogene. The Fifth Season begins with the shattering of two worlds: Essun’s husband discovers that their children are orogenes, kills the youngest, and kidnaps their daughter Nassun; the Stillness experiences an earthquake so powerful that it triggers the worst Fifth Season the planet has ever experienced. Jemisin immerses readers in the world of the Stillness: the journey that Essun sets off on to find her daughter propels the narrative, but Jemisin tells the story through multiple points of view and from multiple points in time. It’s an ambitious task to balance complicated world-building, a well-paced plot, and a range of fully distinctive characters, let alone to do so over the course of three novels. Jemisin deftly keeps all the plates spinning.

Sure. Let me reiterate that you’re thrown right in and there’s no exposition dump, no explanation of terms or of the world or that kind of thing, to guide you into the opening beats.

I didn’t appreciate this at first, but in hindsight it’s a clever way of making the reader think like one of the world’s denizens. But it’s a hard hurdle to cross. Good luck.

Oh, to possibly save you a click or two, first book is called The 5th Season.

The premise is interesting and the characters’ reactions to the situation are interesting, but I don’t find any of the characters all that likable or easy to identify with. I also don’t really like the writing style.