It’s been a very long time since I read novels out of my own free will. Having been forced to read some pretty annoying stuff during my time studying literature made me lose interest in this medium. Even though some of the books I read for uni were undoubtedly good, I can’t say that they were really my style or my type of book. Margaret Atwood comes to mind. The Handmaid’s Tale is a brilliant dystopian novel, just my kind of stuff, but some of the other things I read from her – nice, but not really my thing.

So yeah, while studying English literature at uni made me read a lot of books, I guess it didn’t really make me read the types of books that were really my thing, and I just wasn’t interested in this medium for many years. Another factor was also time – there are only so much hours in a day, and I tended to prefer spending my free time watching TV shows or playing video games lately.

However, after I watched the TV show Silo, I was very intrigued by this world. It’s a post-apocalyptic society that lives sealed within an underground silo, to protect it from the toxic wasteland outside. But what adds to the mystery is that not much is know about the history about why people are in this silo. Just a lot of dogmatic beliefs. This setting inspired me to look for the novels, and I made a really good catch on booklooker.de, where I got all three of them in almost new condition for 15 EUR (and the seller added some chocolates, super nice).

While the first novel “Wool” was a really good reentry to reading, as I was already familiar with the characters and the setting, IMHO the books are mediocre at best. The TV show improved this book in every possible way. Literally all the characters have much more depth in the TV show, and they even added a lot of plot points that just make this world way more intriguing. What I also found particularly vexing in the book is that one of the things they used as a huge plot twist in the TV show is just given away in the first chapter of the book.

Then the second book “Shift” came along… The tagline on the cover of this book says “Some secrets should remain buried”, and I have to totally agree with that. This book was 99% a prequel to Wool, and IMHO completely unnecessary. It explains how the world came to be what it is, how the silos were created, and why things happened the way they happened. But why would I want to know this? Not knowing every detail of these things is what made this world so interesting for me in the first place.

Finally in book three “Dust”, the plot returns to where book one started, but the conclusion was okayish. Altogether a lot of great worldbuilding with great potential, somewhat wasted on mediocre character development and underwhelming plots.

Regardless, I’m glad that this series got me interested in books again. I’m all the more keen to start reading the next book series that I’ve picked, and I already have about 4 series of books that are on my to-read list now. Starting with the Red Rising series, I will continue with Brandon Sanderson’s and Rebecca Yarros stuff, and eventually take a look at Robin Hobb’s series. I hope I won’t lose my reading mojo again, as all of these look like great fantasy, just like I would enjoy.

That’s another thing that kept me from reading in the past – people recommending me things or a sense of ‘having to read’ certain things. Isaac Asimov is a must read for any sci-fi fan? Maybe someday, maybe never. Sure I can add stuff to my list, but I’d rather read what sounds most appealing to me. So here’s my resolution: I’ll just read what I want to from now on, and so what if it’s low brow young adult sci-fi or spicy medieval fantasy?