 Hello there! So this is going to be another compilation of book reviews. However, I don't really have enough books together right now to really do a compilation video. So what I'm going to do is, every time I run across a book that I have only brief thoughts on, that I just don't have that much to say, then I will just add it on here. So as of the time of this recording, I only have one. It's Angel Fall. We'll get to it in a sec. But after this, I'm just going to keep adding more on until I get something that is of a reasonable length, I think, and we'll just see how that works out. Hopefully I'll have less stupid hair that day. But first up is going to be Angel Fall by Susan E, I think. It might be like Susan A or something. I'm sorry, I have no clue how to say that. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Also right now, this book is actually really great. I actually really like this. I heard about it and it sounded kind of neat, but I was not expecting it to be this good. Basically what it is, is there's this teenage girl named Penrin, who is with her younger sister Paige and their mother, who is a paranoid schizophrenic, and suddenly one day, angels come down from heaven and they start attacking the earth. And the story starts a couple of weeks after that, when most of the world's already destroyed and most people are already dead. They're just trying to make their way in the apocalypse. And then Paige, or not Paige, Penrin comes across an angel who is being attacked by other angels and they actually cut his wings off. And while this is going on, Paige gets kidnapped by angels and carried off somewhere else and she has no idea where. So Penrin teams up with the angel whose wings got cut off. His name is Rafai. And they just agree to work together so that they can reach the area where her sister is being held and hopefully try to rescue her. So this book has a really solid opening. It opens up and we get to the part where Paige is taken in less than 20 pages. But while all that's going on, we still manage to get a really good view of what this world is like, what the characters are like, what kind of shit they've been going through lately, which is pretty great. And then in the middle, I will admit it dips a bit. It's not bad at any point or super boring, I don't think, but it does dip in quality. And then by the time you get to the climax, it is one of the most insane things I've read in a long time. It is a phenomenal climax. I don't want to hype you up too much, but it is really good. There's some crazy twists that happen in there. The action that goes down is really good. It's nuts, man. And I really liked it and so for that reason, on Goodreads, I was like, you know what, fuck it, five stars. That seems fair. You can see here that the book isn't that long. It's like less than 300 pages and it does have a really quick pace. So even those parts in the middle where it does dip a little, they never last that long. You know, if there's a part that bores you, it probably won't go on for more than another 10, 15 pages maybe. Like, sometimes the quick pace is a little detrimental, but honestly, for the most part it works really well. Like, this was a very easy thing to get through and I was happy about that. But if you were ever reading this and you get to a point and you're like, yeah, this isn't very good, like, just power through it. It won't last that long. I really like the fight scenes and the action scenes in this too because they're not 100% realistic, but they're a lot more realistic than some other stuff that I read because one, Penrin has reasons for being so well trained in martial arts. It's mentioned, I'm not going to go too deep into it, but it is actually a really neat reason why her mom wanted her to be so good at self-defense. It's a very interesting, something I haven't really seen before, but Penrin has spent years and years training very hard in a variety of martial arts. So it makes sense that she would know what she's doing, but at the same time, she's not like a perfect fighter. She's very good, but she can still make mistakes and she's also still a small teenage girl. She's only like 16 or 17 and they actually don't give a whole lot of description about a lot of things in this book, which is part of why it's so short and so quick-paced, but like, I don't know much about what Penrin looks like even after reading this. But anyways, she's very small and so if she runs into someone who also is a very good fighter, but happens to be 6'5 and weighs over 200 pounds, then she's in trouble unless she can come up with some other type of advantage. And I really like reading about that type of stuff. You know, it's basically a weak but skilled person versus a big, hulking enemy. It's fun and I like that sort of thing. I do wish that she was a bit better when fighting angels, but that's not a huge part of this book and maybe in the other ones, it'll get better. And the only real thing that I have to complain about here other than, you know, some of the descriptions just not being very good, some of the lines are pretty stupid. Like this one, where they're just finding the bodies of two dead girls and it says, one girl looks to be about pages age and the other a couple of years older, that would make them 7 and 9. Like that genuinely feels like something I would read on Wattpad. Like, you know, we had all the information already. You don't need to throw more in there. And there's a couple of lines like that spread throughout or a couple of lines where it kind of does the opposite where it doesn't give us enough or a couple of lines where it goes, I saw something crazy and then describes what the crazy thing was, which wouldn't bother me if it was once or twice, but it happens a lot and it just gets kind of repetitive. So I think this is the author's first book, which for a first novel this is really great. Don't get me wrong, but it needed one more pass through where editors catch stuff like that. But overall, Angel Fall really, really solid book. I want to read the second one as soon as I can. And if the idea of angels coming down and destroying the earth appeals to you at all, you'll probably like this book. If you're thinking, I don't know, that sounds maybe kind of neat. You'll probably like this. You may not. I don't know. If the idea doesn't appeal to you, you're not going to enjoy this. But honestly, I really like this concept because we don't know exactly why the angels are coming down at first. I don't know, maybe God's just pissed because we let gay people kiss or something. I don't know, but the point is, really great book. If it appeals to you at all, check it out. You'll probably like it. On to the next one, which will probably be filmed, I don't know when, but not right now. Okay, so now it's time for part two. And for this one, I have two quick reviews that I want to go over. So the first one is actually not even for a book. It's for a manga series called Gameron. Now, I haven't talked about manga all that much on this channel or about comic books for that matter, even though I am a fan of both of those. Not quite as much nowadays as when I was younger, but there's still lots of series out there that I've read and loved and that are completed that I think more people should know about, and Gameron is definitely one of those. So the plot to this one is like really, really simple, like almost stupidly simple. Basically, it takes place during the Edo period in Japan, and there is a Daimyo, which is a feudal lord who rules over, you know, this area, and he wants to know who the best martial arts school is in that area. And by martial arts, I mean like weapons, bare hands, all that sort of stuff. And so he gets his 31 sons together and he tells them, okay, each of you needs to go out, pick one of those schools, and then they're all going to enter a tournament and fight each other and whoever the victor is, that guy gets to become the Daimyo after me. And so then we go to the main character, or actually not even the main character, but one of his sons named Naoyoshi who goes to find this legendary swordsman. And so he goes to the sword school and there's no one there except for this one kid who turns out is the guy he was looking for son, and his name is Gamma, who is the real main character. And they talk a little bit, he sees that Gamma is also a phenomenal swordsman in his own right, and so they agree to help each other out. And from there, the whole series is basically just a bunch of action scenes one right after the other. That's not a criticism, mind you. I think that's actually a very good thing because the action is really the draw for this series. You know, we're here to watch Gamma and other people. It's not too big of a spoiler to say that other members of his sword school do show up later, it just takes some time. But we're here to watch them fight other dudes, and the series knows how to pace things. Like whenever there's a fight, there's also a little bit of downtime afterwards. Then there's a big long fight and there's some downtime afterwards. And they also know how to mix them up so that they're not all the same. Because a problem that a lot of people have with Shonen Battle Manga is that a lot of the fights just boil down to I can make bigger energy beams than you can, and then the bad guy's like, No, and then he disintegrates or whatever. This is not like that because, one, it's mostly pretty realistic. Like you don't have people using magical powers or anything. It's mostly just like bare hands and real life weaponry. That's not to say it's 100% realistic because it isn't like it's still a bit over the top and more than humans could do. But I think it keeps itself grounded enough that you could almost believe that most of this is possible, which is great. But even beyond that, most of the fights are not solved through brute force. Like some of the smaller ones are, yes, but the bigger ones, like the ones that are more important to the storyline and everything, those are extremely tactical, extremely strategic. It revolves around both the heroes and the villains utilizing their own unique strengths and trying to analyze their opponents and find out their weaknesses, and then eventually they come together and they manage to win like that. And it's fascinating to watch because, like I said, every fight is a little bit different, you know? Watching Gamma who fights with a sword try and fight somebody who has just a giant-ass spear. He's thinking, okay, that guy has a lot more reach than I do. But at the same time, if I can get past him, then he isn't able to switch and attack me at close range very easily. So how can I utilize that to my advantage? And that's different than somebody who has like a bigger sword than Gamma trying to fight some guy who is fighting with his bare hands, but he's really agile and can avoid most of his swings, and if he gets in close, then you're just dead. So, you know, there's a lot of strategy, a lot of tactics to it, and it makes it way more fun to read than just, I'm the good guy and I win through the power of friendship. Now, the story does have one or two twists in there. Like, it's not just, here's round one of the tournament, here's round two of the tournament, here's round three until you get to the end. Like, there are some changes to the status quo partway through the series, which I won't get too into. And, yeah, again, the story still isn't super complicated, but we do at least get a proper villain, and the characters are working towards a bit more of a complicated goal than just winning this tournament. So, it's a good decision. And overall, the series, it knows exactly what it wants to be. You know, it's not trying to be complicated. It's not trying to be a super deep character study or anything like that. It's just about all these cool action scenes, and it does those extremely well. The only problems I have with this are pretty minor, honestly, but Gama and Naoyoshi develop a really deep friendship through the series, which is great, but it comes across as homoerotic at times. Like, I don't think that was the intention. If it was the intention, then sure, that's fine. It's just trying to imply that they have romantic feelings towards each other, but it feels more like Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings movies, where they were clearly just trying to show that they're the best of friends, but it just comes across as them being kind of gay together sometimes, and so that was a little weird. Sam, I'm glad you're with me. Another problem is that the villain is pretty weak. Once we get to the main villain, they do show off how powerful he is as a fighter, and that's pretty cool because it builds up towards the last confrontation, and you're thinking, oh, how are the good guys ever going to defeat this guy? And even though it's a series filled with super badass martial artists, and the heroes constantly have to, okay, let's get past this guy, it still manages to make him seem like a threat, but he's just a very weak character. There's very little to him other than I want power. Why do you want power? Because I want power, so he's pretty weak. Now, this one is not a problem for me, but I've heard people complain about it some places, which is weird to me because to me this makes it an even better series, but some people have complained that Gamma is not really the most powerful person in the story. And what I mean by that is that in most of these Shonen Battle Manga type stories, the main character, even if he's not the most powerful godliest person in the series at the beginning, he will be by the end, whereas in this, Gamma at the beginning is a phenomenal swordsman, but the most powerful people in the series are way beyond him, and he does training and stuff and gets a lot better, and by the end, Gamma is an even more phenomenal swordsman, but the people at the top are still way beyond him. He still has many years of training left to go. And honestly, I don't know, that was better to me because it made it seem like it was a bigger story than just about this one guy. It was about a group of people, but I don't know, that bothered some people, so I figured I should mention it. And then this one might just be a translation error, but there's someone who Gamma wants to kill because he killed a bunch of his friends in the past before the story begins, and so part of the reason that Gamma is going out there with Naoyoshi is to try and find this guy, and throughout the whole series, he repeatedly says that he wants to kill him, but he never uses the words, I'm going to kill him. He always says, I'm going to cut him down, which may have just been the translation I read, but that feels like a very deliberate choice, and maybe it was like that in Japanese too, so I'm just not sure why. It was very odd, and it comes up a lot throughout the series, so it just bothered me. And the one last thing that I have to complain about is that the ending to the series is a bit rushed. Now, basically what happened is that the series was already close to wrapping up, like it was in the midst of the climax, and we were about to start the confrontation with the big bad guy, and there were still a bunch of fights that had to happen before we wrapped things up, but then the author heard, okay, hey, you gotta end it now, you're being cancelled early, and so basically he had to condense about maybe 20 chapters worth of stuff into around 5 or 6 chapters, which is not ideal, but we did get an ending. You know, it's not like it just ends and we never find out what happens, it's not like he was only halfway through where he wanted to be, and he had to try and wrap things up like that. We were already pretty close to the end. It's kind of like if you ever read Bleach, it was kind of like that, they were about to confront the big bad guy for the final fight, and then the author was told, okay, you gotta end now, wrap it up, and so things were super rushed at the end, but we did get an ending, and it could have been a lot worse. And overall, Dameron, it knows exactly what it wants to be, it's a very fun series. So if you are someone who is into Shonen Battle Manga, check it out. If you're someone who used to be into it, but now you think it's a little too juvenile or something, maybe check this one out because it's a little bit smarter, knows what it's trying to be. If you're someone who is into martial arts stuff and kung fu movies and that sort of thing, and you don't mind if it's a little bit over the top, but still somewhat realistic, then you'd probably really like this one if for no other reason than the tactical action stuff is a lot of fun. People keep asking me to talk about The Sword of Truth, so I'm gonna do that real quick. Now, I read this book about 10 years ago, I was around 13 or 14 years old, and I didn't like it very much then. It's a very bad book, I hate it as a very strong word, but it's terrible. Like it is horribly put together. It's basically just an epic fantasy, and that's it. Like if you, whatever comes to your mind when you think epic fantasy is what comes up here. You know, there's a farm boy who is kind of sort of the chosen one who goes off on a quest with the help of a wizard and a really pretty girl who's into him for no reason to defeat some sort of dark lord, and then it's also filled with Randy and Objectivist philosophy. Now, the thing about this is there's basically no originality in this entire series, like none at all, and the story is just, well, I mean, it does exist. I'll give it that much. Like the story, sometimes epic fantasy will fall into this trap of just it'll start off and here's the inciting incident and the bad guy has his plan, the heroes have to go stop him, and then they walk through the woods for the majority of the book. They're just kind of going through the woods doing stuff, nothing interesting happens, and then you reach the climax and they fight the bad guy, and that's terrible. At least in sort of truth, there is other stuff that happens along the journey, so that's great. And I will say that the characters do have, they are characters. You know, they have personalities and goals and motivations and flaws, and I don't know, I think more books should try doing stuff like that. You know, I at least remember what these people are like, but still, there's not a whole lot to them. Part of the reason I've never talked about sort of truth all that much is that there's just not that much to say. It's terrible, but it's terrible in a boring way. You know, something like The Fifth Sorceress, which is way worse, is at least entertaining in how awful it is and kind of interesting to look at how awful it is and how it completely falls apart. This is just kind of dull. Like, the only parts that stand out are the parts where the main character is getting tortured by a dominatrix and it's very clear the author is just putting his fetishes out there, which like, I'm not saying you can't do that, I'm just saying you have to be at least a little subtle about it and you can't spend a huge chunk of the book on it, you just, you can't. The Fifth Sorceress kind of did the same thing there, but like, that's just oof. And as I said, it's filled with Randian Objectivist philosophy, which again, you can put your own beliefs in there if you're gonna try and convince other people of it, but you gotta be smarter about it than this. This is just, well, I mean, it's like Ayn Rand, you know? She thinks, or she thought, she's dead now thankfully, but she just thought that her ideas were so self-evidently correct that she never really bothered to argue for them and instead she just put the story in a world where her ideas were correct and got everyone else to look at it and say, oh wow, how awesome this world is. I wish our world was more like this fake world and it got everyone to think that they were the main character, or not everyone, but it got all the wrong people to think that they were the main character, they are all geniuses being held back by society. And sort of truth is just filled with that kind of stuff. Or I should say Wizards First Rule actually, because sort of truth is the series and Wizards First Rule is the book. Whatever, I only read the first book. Even when I was 14, it just felt like a crappy derivative knockoff of Lord of the Rings, which it is. And well, there's not that much else to say about it. It's just a really crappy book and maybe if I re-read it today, I'd remember some other issues and stuff that I could talk about in more detail, but I really don't want to. Like if you were to hold a gun to my head and ask me to either re-read the fifth sorceress or re-read Wizards First Rule, I would re-read the fifth sorceress because that's at least funny. Alright, and this one is going to have to be the last one in this compilation, but I'm gonna talk about Wanderers by Chuck Wendig. Now, this book, I remember hearing about it when it first came out and I thought, wow, that actually sounds really interesting. That looks really neat, but I never got around to actually buying it or reading it because it's a really long book and all the hard covers that I found were super expensive. So I just left it and put it on my to-read list and left alone for a long time until at some point last summer I got the audiobook and I started listening through it. Now, it's a very long audiobook. It's over 30 hours long. I made it around two-thirds of the way through before I finally just threw up my hands and said, fuck this, I'm not doing this anymore. This is awful and I have to stop. Alright, this whole review is gonna be full of spoilers up until the point I read because, again, it has been a while since I gave up on it so I haven't... I don't really remember the character names and I have forgotten a lot of some of the smaller plot bits. I remember a lot of the major ones because they were really stupid and I remember a lot of the major problems I had with it. So if for whatever reason this appeals to you, I just don't watch past this point because it's full of spoilers. Now, I know Chuck Wendig, I haven't read any of his other stuff, but I know he was one of the people that was writing Star Wars books for Disney and they weren't paying him properly and so there was an outcry about it. I did not pay a whole lot of attention to that, unfortunately, so I can't speak on it. Maybe Chuck Wendig's other stuff is great. This book is terrible. So basically, the premise for this is that people one day just start randomly losing their minds, I suppose, is one way of putting it. They become completely unresponsive, they stop talking, eating, whatever, and then they all just leave their house and start walking in one direction and people from all over the United States eventually converge and create this big caravan and are just walking west towards something. They don't know exactly what it is and obviously this is all over the news, people are freaking out about it, wondering what is this, what the hell is happening, and most of the main characters in this book because it's one of those ensembles that has a large cast of a bunch of people from disparate walks of life who all converge on this caravan and most of them are people that are like escorting it going with it to wherever it's going. And this is also whatever disease or whatever is causing this is also extremely odd because the people's skin becomes hardened so like they can't take any blood samples or anything, they don't seem to get hurt by the weather or anything that comes near them. They just, whatever it is, it's very odd and so we follow people escorting them, wondering what's going on, we follow a doctor or an epidemiologist I should say who is trying to get to the bottom of it and figure out like, okay if this thing is contagious then like how do we deal with that? And there's also a preacher who becomes almost like an Alex Jones type guy partway through the story and is spouting off conspiracies about like what's really going on which is not as funny as you might think. Like whatever your thoughts on Alex Jones the dude is pretty funny and they don't really take advantage of that because this is pretty clearly aping on him and there's no humor there. Now I'll give this book credit, that's an amazing start and that's part of what kept me going with this story far longer than I normally would have is that that's a fantastic idea. And even when there's parts of the plot where there's not a whole lot happening I was still really into it because it's building suspense and it's building mystery and I'm theorizing in my own head about oh okay I wonder what caused it, could it be that? I don't think so, could it be that? And then we're also watching the characters investigate and try and gather up clues and stuff and it's just really really neat and I loved it. Around 40% of the way through the book it did start to grade on me though and then around halfway through the book we find out the real reason why all this is happening and one last warning, if you want to read this, leave now but the reason this is happening is that there is a fungal disease that got out which is briefly mentioned at one point in the book and then just never touched on again until this point and it's gonna infect a bunch of people and kill pretty much the whole human population and there is a super computer that could somehow see into the future that predicted this before it happened and so it created a bunch of nanomachines and then those nanomachines went out and basically hijacked the people who are the wanderers and was telling them to go to some safe place out somewhere and the cloud of nanites was also protecting them from the elements and everything and this was its plan to make sure that humanity survived. Okay that may have worked if it had been built up to even sort of a little bit maybe it did not. It hit me like a truck when it happened and I mean in one sense having a twist which you don't see coming is good but the twist also has to be properly built up to and it has to make logical sense like this just comes completely out of nowhere and so I was thinking that it was kind of stupid and it didn't fit with this world because the world that has been created is basically just our world with this one crazy sci-fi event going on and I stuck with the book for a little while after that and the main plot was still not really happening and around two thirds of the way through I was just like you know life is too short and I stopped so maybe the last third of the book is amazing but I kind of doubt it so part of the issue with a lot of ensemble cast books is that none of the characters are all that good because well one none of them really get all that much time to stand out and two the authors often times only do that because they want to look cool and look unique and look like look I'm like Game of Thrones we have a bunch of characters from a bunch of different perspectives and they're all contributing to the plot but the characters are either pointless or they're more defined by what they do in the story than who they are as people so most of them just aren't that interesting or that good in any way the only one I remember that I kind of liked was this old aging rock star who had hit kind of a rut in his life and decided you know what I'm gonna go out and do this I think that I could be helping some people put some good back into the world which I thought was kind of neat but really nothing that special and all of the political stuff in here is really not that good now the thing is science fiction has been used to put forth a lot of like social commentary and political ideas for decades which I'm totally fine with and even if I don't necessarily agree with it I think it's always neat to consider some of these ideas but this is not done well at all like not even kind of sort of a little bit so basically there's two ways that I think you can do this you can either have it be really subtle or not too subtle but have it be subtle to the point where okay yeah people who agree or disagree will be a little bit more affected by it or you can just be totally metaphorical with it which is what sci-fi excels at you know you may not be able to talk about modern-day racism without people getting butthurt about it but if you put it in space and talk about like aliens or something then suddenly you can bring up some of these same ideas and put it forth and people will pay a little more attention to you so that works and this book does neither of those things it's like very in your face it feels like I was being hit over the head with some of these ideas and I don't even disagree with most of them like I don't like a big theme in here is how misinformation is fueling a rise in fascism which is very true 100% true but like okay your analysis of it is so surface level and you're so unsubtle with it you're basically just saying fascism is bad I'm like yes I agree but like someone who thinks fascism is good isn't going to have their mind changed by this so that's wonders didn't like it very much it was stupid and terrible and I could probably sit here for another 15 minutes and talk about like smaller moments that I thought were dumb but honestly like I said life is too short this review compilation has already gone on for a while and I don't feel like talking anymore goodbye thanks to all the names on here these are my patrons and thanks to 10 dollar and up Appo Savilane and Olivia Ray and brother Santotis Christopher Quinten, Mbis Joel, Carcat Kitsune, Liza Rudikova, Madison Lewis Bennett microphone, Paul Williams, Sad Mardigan, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, and Vaivictis you're all really cool all the names on here they gave me money and they get stuff like early access to videos and voting on future video topics if you want to be one then do that if you don't want to do that then join join my channel become a channel member that's great or just you know subscribe like video comment spread this around I need help