Top 10 Reads of 2021 (4-1)

And A Little Hatred, it was kind of disembarking from the central characters that we'd spent so much time with in the first three books. And it was like, oh, it's good, you know, writing's great, cuz it's Joe Abercrombie, but they're not Logan, they're not Glokta, are they?

Before They Hang is my favorite. It is that kind of group dynamic that you get in here.

Now, this I just absolutely loved, because it was set in a Mesoamerican fantasy setting, which is really refreshing, and it was just really invigorating to read a fantasy that just felt so unique, so fresh, so different to what had come before it.

And it's really a true overview of the Vikings as we know them, the people from Scandinavia in the Dark Ages. And this it's just brilliant.

It's brutal, it's breathtaking, it's heartbreaking as well, if you know the story of Thermopylae, but it's a riveting read.

Basically, it is traditional fantasy. It takes a lot of those tropes, but it reinvents it to bring something completely fresh to the fantasy genre.

And it is a story of love, it is a story of friendship, it is a story of being alone in the world and what it does to you. And it is a story that will stick with you for a very long time.

This was amazing. It's a book two of the Rigante series and it oh, it was so close to Sword in the Storm actually beating this, but this is just amazing. This made me cry.

this is a book that caught my attention in the first few words and held onto it into the very last page. I mean, it's so hard to describe what happens.

What Sword in the Storm did in book one set up Midnight Falcon so nicely, that's why this is in my top reads of 2021.

The Blade itself I think sets up the trilogy incredibly well.

so, this is Machiavellian fantasy that explores political intrigue like nothing I've ever experienced before, especially in the fantasy genre. and thrust into that, there's some incredibly nuanced characters with really lyrical prose that really brings out their characteristics.

This tells the tale of a truly remarkable segment of history, a really remarkable sequence of events of the Greco-Persian Wars. we see Marathon and Thermopylae both in this book, and it is told so, so well by one of the what I would say one of the greatest writers of historical fiction, Conn Iggulden himself.

And in The Trouble with Peace, these characters really take hold of the reader. And there are some epic moments, really hilarious moments, fantastic character delivery moments, as well as probably the biggest battle actually in all of Eider, in all of the Circle, I would reckon, probably.

The Silence of the Girls is a brilliant reimagining of the Trojan story that we I imagine all of us know. And it can get a bit old, can't it?

But We Are the Dead is an exceptionally well-crafted page-turner of a read, which just adds something fresh to the fantasy genre.

But no, it's awesome. Matthew Harffey is a great writer. I mean, really I was getting a bit burned out with Viking Age tales that were set in Britain. And then I thought I'd read this as a palate cleanser as a standalone. And boy, oh, I needed this.