opheliapo's reviews
345 reviews

Was this book written by a frog?

Up until about half way through meditation three, everything made logical sense, considering the social development and frame of time. The concepts of nothingness and 'I am; I exist' (p.19) were delineated succinctly, and seemed to be relevant modes of thought even from a modern viewpoint.
However, by page 31 the frog had arisen and was leaping to all sorts of conclusions. It was almost as though NASCARtes was covering his ass from all those nasty Aristotelians calling him an Atheist. Those logical, modern ideas had been replaced by this indefinable concept of 'perfection' and 'imperfection' which hopped their way through the rest of the text, providing a sure answer for any question that might doubt the existence of God.
I have no problem with being proven wrong in my assumptions that a sentient, almighty creator does not exist, but I would at least like that evidence to make logical sense, and to come from a source who doesn't seem to be attempting to convince himself as much as he is trying to convince me.
Nice try, NASCARtes, you blasphemer.

This is really what I needed to get out of my reading slump. I’ve been picking up and putting down books for weeks just trying to get hooked on something. I think settling into a light novel is exactly what I needed after consecutively reading a bunch of long and / or heavy material this year.

Some of these shorts had really weird and fun concepts but it was all kind of ruined by how dense and flat a lot of the art was. A large portion of it was impossible to discern and genuinely offensive to the eyes.

Middle book syndrome.

A CRUMB of world-building Leigh Bardugo I beg you

My 4 stars go almost completely to the beautiful illustrations. The text was pretty generic and didn’t follow a cohesive story.

Yeah, this had all the pitfalls of the young adult genre, but it managed to take a pretty run-of-the-mill first book and improve upon it, which is more than can be said for most trilogy sequels.

I thought, after the second book, that we were finally going to get a few crumbs of character development, but no. Alina stayed boring, Mal just got edgier, The Darkling continued to give me old nonce vibes, and a bunch of new characters were added and then not given even a little bit of attention. Honestly, Genya and Nikolai carried this book, and they weren’t even around for half of it.