Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw.I want to play it--
a good faith experiment.
but tl;dr.
My Eleven-Books Club pick, & I don't expect it will be very popular. I don't think it will be hated, either, though there are things that I could understand folks hating. My first pick for club was Kraken, which was pretty well received but I was rather tepid on as sort of belonging to the "dark-lite" urban fantasy genre that Gaiman dominates, with a weak Gaiman ending; The Invisibles #1 was next, & while no one liked it, that was because the first volume is just not quite "there,"& over-all I liked the whole series, finding it easy to forget its flaws & remember the good bits; then at last The Hum & the Shiver was both enjoyed by the group & by me, which isn't surprising to anyone, since it is just a plain old fashioned "good book." This book is I think going to be remembered like The Invisibles, but without the actual subversive backbone that Morrison's writing has. I (jokingly) blamed Luke&Nicole; they had recommended the book to me in the first place, though they point out that they specifically recommended the audiobook. I told the book club that, but maybe
carmyarmyofme&littlewashu should specifically take note of that.This never really gets subversive. I'm all about subverting fantasy tropes; orc player characters, the cowardly protagonist, the meta-fictional users. This just manages to go through the rote of that, somehow. Not quite self-aware enough to be pretentious, not quite funny enough to be Douglas Adams-y, it parrots the tropes of things like gender representation without really having anything to say about it besides "well, that's pretty much how it is, actually." I don't know, what can I tell you; stories from the male perspective that presume a male audience just are...gross. This in theory eschews & condemns that, but in practice just sort of...takes it as a given. All that said, I didn't hate reading this. It was easy enough, & maybe if I hadn't selected it as my book club pick I would judge it more easily, but if wishes were horses, beggers might ride. Still, there is no protagonist to like, there is no side-character to displace your affection to...the whole world is so cynical that I can't be bothered to care. I probably should have read the audio book; listening to that guy read it may be the missing ingredient.