Abandoned p.94, 2 January

Given to me by my brother-in-law, a kind man with an unshakeable belief that I would like fantasy if I only tried the right one. This is the fourth right one.

The sentence that lost me was a man describing his own eyes in terms of his rank. I put it down, made tea, came back, read it again; still there.

My objection is not the world. The world is clearly enormous and clearly built with care and I have no doubt the payoff arrives somewhere in the last third. My objection is that everybody in it explains things to each other for my benefit. Two soldiers who have both served in this army for years stand in a corridor and remind one another how the army works. Nobody talks like that. Nobody has ever talked like that.

There is a prologue with a genuinely good idea in it, and then the book goes quiet for a very long time indeed.

I'm aware this is the wrong rating for a book I gave less than a tenth of. I rate what I read, and what I read was a man thinking about his boots.

Two.

Read instead: The Blade Itself, which has the same fault for fifty pages and then stops having it.