We had a good time talking about Steelheart. Three or four of us had already read Firefight, but that wasn’t a big issue, since we were able to focus on the first book and how it was written. Pretty much everyone agreed that the analogies were terrible, the point of view was frustrating, and the character was way too lucky. We are also used to Sanderson world building a bit more at the start instead of keeping large parts of the lore secret. I do appreciate the slow reveals that have been going on over the course of the books, but it does get frustrating. We all talked about what powers we would have and how we would use them. The people who had read Firefight were able to talk about the weaknesses they would have, but nothing too specific or we would have revealed it to the others.
I really liked the story in this book, and really disliked the magic system. The magic system was so core to the concept, and so contrived feeling that I really couldn’t take it seriously. I especially thought the immunity was contrived, and in the end not all that important. Normally when there are powers like this in a book I think about what I’d do with them, but the system was contrived enough that I couldn’t think about it.
This was a great book, and the development of the characters was really nice. I did find the resentment between the two good Drow to be a bit too fabricated. I also thought that they weren’t very careful on their making up, which led to their downfall. The fixation on Drizzt by the faceless master was also odd, since it was more of an issue with the family and not with him in particular. Him stoping with knowing what family it was that did the deed struck me as odd, as I expected him to want the details and throw those in the face of the ones involved. I guess it did take him 15 years to find out which family had taken him out. It might be worth reading further in this series, and I’ll try out the next one.
I like the super human part of this, but I didn’t care for the concept of the one ‘real’ city. It made things really confusing in some ways, as the concept of shadows was confusing. The story was good, and the crazy painter character was fantastic. The ‘trumps’ he made seemed like an odd concept, especially if he is the only one to make them. The descriptions of the battles were dry by being too over the top in many ways, and not descriptive enough of the inglorious parts of the battles.
This was an amazingly well done book. I liked much of the writing in that it shows his understanding and at the same time it shows how much he doesn’t understand. I especially like the parts where he is too smart to understand that everyone else isn’t on that level. The ending has some really sad parts, but I liked that he eventually became a really nice guy again.
I didn’t particularly care for this book, especially the resolution. I think the characters in it were very well developed and had interesting stories, I just didn’t like them. That seemed to be part of the point. I’m liking that I can go through some of these classics and read them, but I’m not always liking what I find in them.
I have really enjoyed this series so far, especially the interesting play of humanity, freedom, and civilization, and how many gradations of those concepts there are in the book. I liked this one in particular because of the later reveal to the others that the captain used to be a ship.
After a few minutes I didn’t notice the she pronoun being always used, and imagined amorphous people until they did some action that I considered particularly masculine or feminine. These actions were typically were they being pursued or pursuing when it came to sex.
We had a bookclub meeting in the week between the Japan trip and the Hawaii trip. This was a discussion of the book Thinking: Fast and Slow, which was a big one that was also very dense. The book was great for me, since it was mainly about biases and heuristics. Not only that but it had a lot about how to deal with them and avoid falling into many of those traps. It also talked about how to drive people towards or away from those biases. We had a smaller group, Tina, Amy, Nina, Stepanie, and Myself. The talk was great, and since the book was so dense we ran out of time long before we ran out of things to talk about. We chose to go for a shorter and lighter book for the next one, Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson.
This book made some really good points about checklists, and it didn’t talk about them directly, but the concept of willpower comes in a lot with them. The checklist is there both to make sure you don’t forget and to allow you to not remember. I builds up the habits, and refines them, while at the same time you don’t have to think about it. Something I also noticed while building my checklists was that I could optimize them for order of operations. I could also add things in that I haven’t normally done and it makes it easier to do them. I think it is going to work out really well.
It's an Exciting World 