Books 2022 Reading Challenge

I started this book last year, but I had to put it aside because of reasons I described above/in the previous thread. What a behometh of a book. And one of the best King novel I've read so far. I love how eerie the beginning is. How the superflu slowly built up in the shadows. And then it hit and civilization collapsed. The second part of the book, in which everyone slowly got to Boulder was the weakest part in the book in my opinion. It had one excellent chapter full of classic King. It introduced several new characters and brutally murdered them by the end. I get that this part was mostly about developing the main cast and worldbuilding, but it felt like a chore to read after a while. But it was worth it, because the rest of the book was brilliant. The politics of Boulder Zone, the meetings and Harold's betrayal were all written so well. The climax was a little bit weaker, but I kinda expect that with King. I don't like the whole "hand of God" thing at the end, but I quite liked the rest of supernatural occurrences.

The characters were astounding and really one of King's biggest strength. My personal favourites are Tom Cullen, Stu and Glen. I'm especially glad Tom got so much attention in the last 100 pages. On the other hand, I didn't really like Randall Flagg or Mother Abagail. Randall was a weak villain. He was scary, but his plans went south before the main characters even got a chance to meddle with them. I completely agree with Glen's reaction, when he first met him face to face. Mother Abagail was selfish for most of the book and hid her decisions behind the "God". I'm not saying they weren't well written, I just didn't like what they were doing.

Pretty standard dark fantasy book. All short stories, except for the titular The Last Wish, were enjoyable and great way to kill a time on train. I can see why The Witcher series never exploded in the west until the games came around. Sapkowski doesn't care about deep character/places descriptions or great/meaningful dialogue and sometimes fails to put some of his ideas into words, resulting in inconsistent story and characters. Some characters just turned their behavior by 180° between 2 paragraphs without any explanation. There was also this weird feeling in the back on my mind that this could be easily written by someone from Writer's Lounge. On the other hand, Sapkowski write excellent action. I enjoyed every single fight in the book. I also love how clever he was with references to Slavic folklore. Plus the character of Geralt is fine main character.

There are 7 more books in the series, so there is a hope that the quality will go up.

Just like the previous collection, this was pretty fine way to kill a time on a train. But I feel like the first few short stories were generic and predictable. The book goes back to rough and dark atmosphere of the first collection only after Ciri is introduced. I think ending the book with Something More would be perfect. But Sapkowski had to put a story about Geralt and Yennefer's wedding at the end. I get that this story was suppose to be non-canon comedy, but it is a bad one. It embodies everything bad about Sapkowski's writting. Boring dialogues, almost non-existent descriptions and random shifts in story and character's motivations. And while these are present in the whole book, they are not as prominent. Or as prominent as in the previous book. I like that there is more philosophizing and that it isn't limited to Geralt's point of view. I also enjoyed several newly introduced characters like Essi or Dudu.

Hopefully, the writting will get better, because I'm quite enjoying the world of The Witcher.