An overdue book review
Long overdue for a book review.
As most of you know, I usually read and review books on business, personal development, biographies of CEO’s, etc., but as per my email last week about my impromptu vacation, my most recent read was a fantasy novel.
Like I said, I usually read non-fiction related to business, but usually a few times per year I dip back into my first love of fantasy novels. This usually coincides with a vacation because I like to unplug and take my mind away from business for a bit.
Side note: I have still gotten new ideas or business “advice” from non-business books. Even something as random as fantasy can still give you interesting ideas or perspectives that could potentially be applied to your biz.
Anyway, I keep a running list of books I’d like to read - both business and fantasy - and one author I’ve seen recommended a lot and been meaning to read was Joe Abercrombie. Maybe you’ve heard of him, maybe you haven’t but he came highly recommended.
So I decided to pick up the first book of his First Law series called The Blade Itself.
Fantasy books, especially these days, aren’t too short and this one clocked in at over 500 pages, but I was able to read a good 300+ pages on my week off which was great, and finished the book 2 days ago.
I also always like to wait at least 1 day before writing a book review, to get the chance to sleep on it and compile my final thoughts.
Anyway, if you’re a fantasy novel fan or just curious to learn more about it, here’s my overview and review of the book without any spoilers:
it was a really good “grimdark” sort of fantasy novel. Gave me some Game of Thrones vibes because it had an interesting range of characters, different perspectives, political stuff, and also a fair amount of suffering, pain and death;
in my humble opinion, which a lot of Redditors seem to agree with (I love reading book reviews on Reddit after finishing to see how my reviews compare), the best part of this book is the characters. Especially in fantasy, different books tend to be stronger or weaker in certain elements - some have a great storyline, or imaginary world, or extremely compelling characters. Some have all three. I thought the storyline was decent, the worldbuilding was average at best, but the characters were amazing. They were interesting, introspective and felt “real”. In the same way that I fell in love with the world that Tolkien created, I’ve loved getting to know the characters of the first book;
I thought the ending was kind of “meh”. Again, I don’t want to spoil anything for those intending on reading it, but I didn’t find the ending to be that special or surprising. That being said, it did set an interesting enough stage for me to want to see what happens to the characters next;
overall I really enjoyed the book and would recommend it. There are 2 more books to this initial series, and apparently they’re better than the first, so I’m going to try reading them before recommending the entire series, but I definitely enjoyed it enough to continue the series - stay tuned as I continue!
If you’re into fantasy novels then it has my thumbs up. If you’re not, I’ll be back to talking about business and tech in my next email!
Have a great day,
- Josh Schachnow
Canadian family lawyer, CEO at Visto.ai