I'd like to think of Book 4 as "deleted scenes". It contains some good stories, but the overall plot doesn't advance much. It didn't help that the traditionally more popular characters were relegated to book 5, and the one who is there (Arya) had a really weird plot. And as much as I adore Brienne, I must admit her chapters, which I really enjoyed, felt more like a sidequest than the main story.

What was 1000x better was the Cersei/Margaery/Sparrows showdown. A lot more interesting than the travesty we got in the TV show. *Sigh*

Then Book 5 does advance the story, but not enough because it is too widely spread between dozens of point-of-view characters.

Seeing as books 4 and 5 weren't meant to exist in the original plan, with a 5-year skip between what now are books 3 and 6 bridged by some flashbacks in 6, I'd call that a very appropriate description.

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This book looks interesting. I'm putting it somewhere in my never-ending queue - I hope I'll live long enough ;)

So far this year, I've finished a book called The Priest of Blood by Douglas Clegg, the first in his Vampyricon Trilogy. It was a decent dark fantasy story about how a young man dies and becomes a member of this Vampyre tribe. The book used this odd narrative style, the protagonist is writing the book hundreds of years after the events have taken place, which feels a little strange and detracts from the tension of the story in my opinion. Still an interesting read though and I'd recommend it to anyone on the hunt for some dark fantasy.

That's interesting opinion, thanks. Perhaps I should reconsider my approach.

Journey Into Darkness - John Douglas and Mark Olshaker

Obsession - John Douglas and Mark Olshaker

The guy who invented FBI Profiling.

Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn trilogy. Definitely amongst my most favorite 40K reading to date. Actually, up there as one of my most enjoyable, fun Sci-fi reads period.

★★★ The Secret Network of Nature / Peter Wohlleben
★★☆ The Jungle Book / Rudyard Kipling
★★★ Moc błogosławieństwa ojca / The power of father's blessing / Henryk Wieja
★☆☆ Rowerem po Amazonce / Bicycling on the Amazon / Piotr Chmieliński

List of all books finished in 2018.

Blood's a Rover - James Ellroy

Final entry in the Underworld USA trilogy. Still gripping, but I felt that it was a little bit dragging by the end, when all loose ends are tied together.

So far in 2018: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2018/post9

★☆☆ German Autumn / Stig Dagerman

In late 1946, Stig Dagerman was assigned by the Swedish newspaper Expressen to report on life in Germany immediately after the fall of the Third Reich. First published in Sweden in 1947, German Autumn, a collection of the articles written for that assignment, was unlike any other reporting at the time. While most Allied and foreign journalists spun their writing on the widely held belief that the German people deserved their fate, Dagerman disagreed and reported on the humanness of the men and women ruined by the war—their guilt and suffering.

I believe it would be much better to support the main thesis by just showing the real life, facts, explaining how the society was divided, how they've struggled with going back to normal life. Another words - by making a good reportage. Too much politics or perhaps I have just expected something different. I didn't like it much.

List of all books finished in 2018.

The People's Police - Norman Spinrad

I'm a great fan of Spinrad's work and this is last-to-date novel. Set up in a fictional but realistic New Orleans, with some voodoo and some politics, add some sex and music and you get his favorite ingredients.

But this time, I don't know, it felt too short, like a good idea but rushed and underdeveloped. I still like it a lot, but I was let down.

So far in 2018: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2018/post9

Augustus Richard Norton: Hezbollah. A short history.

Informative, fairly short (200 paperback pages) book about the Lebanese Shia militant group/party. The 2014 edition contains an afterword of about 40 pages that deals with developments since the publication of the first edition, most notably Hezbollah's involvement in the Syrian civil war and the consequences for its image in the Arab world. I found the book quite even-handed and interesting, recommended if you're interested in Mideast politics.

Good Omens

Another book picked up from the Library. Since the edition I got is British, from 1991, and has fewer pages than later British editions, I assume it doesn't include what was added in the US edition, and probably also in later British editions. But I did see a part about Warlock there at the end and a few footnotes meant for a non-British audience, so I'm not entirely sure of that.
Either way, about the book itself, I could describe it as satire, if not quite a lampoon, using humor to tackle serious issues. And while it's quite an achievement to be funny while tackling Armageddon, I'm not even referring to that, which in itself, along with all the Heaven and Hell and angels and demons business, is just another tool used for the same purpose. Or I guess each of these elements, along with others, can be seen as a tool used to enhance and flesh out each of the others.
In spite of all of that, and of the fact that it's written well and I read it quickly and easily and agreed with plenty of the points made, even making a particular note about the alien encounter, and also about Adam's initial reasons and the way things were developing at that moment... It just didn't grab me. Maybe it was too funny to be taken as seriously as it seemed to want to be and too serious to be taken as humorously as it seemed to want to be, with each of these facets seeping too much into the other, or maybe it was that the style of humor didn't work well enough for me to stand on its own, but in the end it'll remain just another book read, unlikely to leave a lasting impression.

Rating: 3/5 (GR | blog)

I finished the Lyonesse trilogy by Jack Vance. Vance is a wordsmith. His use of vocabulary, etc. is masterful. Much better writing than in the Wheel of Time or a Song of Ice and Fire and puts them to shame.

If manga counts, I am almost finished, 10 pages left on Voices of a distant star. Amazing story and great read that is short and sweet, I recommend this to anyone who is into sci-fi and romance mixed in one.

It follows the lives of two close childhood friends, a boy and a girl, who get separated once the girl is sent in space to fight in a war against aliens. As the 15-years old girl goes deeper and deeper into space, the texts she sends take more and more years to reach the earth. That's the story in a nutshell.