Books

10 September 2025

In and out of the reading slump

I’ve been having a terrible book hangover ever since I finished reading the Realm of the Elderlings series, about which I extensively blogged. It was such a great series and a deeply emotional reading experience, that I struggled really hard with most books I’ve tried to read ever since. I’ve probably had the worst reading slump I ever had in my time of actively reading books. My first attempt was The Immortal Investigation by Michael Cronk – a very lighthearted, humorous book, and debut novel of an indie author. I realized pretty fast that this is neither my style nor […]

15 July 2025

Death of the Author: Life after Gaiman

I’ve been a fan of the works of Neil Gaiman since roughly 2003, when I read American Gods. During the 00s, I read most of his published works, including Neverwhere, Anansi Boys, The Sandman, and various short story collections. I even went to book readings by him, first in 2007 in Cologne (weirdly, it took place inside a car dealership), and then again in 2014, also in Cologne (but in some more author-appropriate location). I always loved how dreamy and philosophical Gaiman’s works were, and how they weave something magical into something utterly ordinary. Especially their concepts of religion and […]

22 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: The Data Science Edition

I previously wrote a spoiler-free overview, a series by series reading experience report, and a deep dive into the book series Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb. This post here will conclude my blog posts about Realm of the Elderlings with some data, both about the books themselves, as well as my personal reading statistics and ratings. First, let’s look at the books and the series as a whole. I have read the physical paperback books published by Harper Voyager UK, so all my stats are based on those editions. There are 16 books in this series, which can […]

19 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: A deep dive

After I gave a a spoiler free overview of the Realm of the Elderlings, as well as a very long series by series review and reading experience report, I want to analyze some aspects of this series as a whole (but mostly regarding the books with Fitz as the main character). In this post, I’ll dive deep into the characters and themes of the series. SPOILER WARNING: This entire post contains heavy spoilers for the Realm of the Elderlings book series! Proceed to read at your own peril! Born a conflict FitzChivalry Farseer is the protagonist of 9 of the […]

15 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: Series by series reviews and reading experience

How was it to read The Realm of the Elderlings? After my spoiler-free overview in the previous post, this post will contain more in-depth reviews which were largely written as StoryGraph reviews as I was reading each book, and then later assembled here into a coherent post. Some books or sub-series were definitely a lot easier to read than others. Each was a somewhat different experience, but to summarize it: once I really got started with this series, I was hooked and it was easy to go through these tomes that average roughly 683 pages. The Farseer Trilogy I picked […]

12 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: A spoiler free overview

Never in my life before have I undergone such a monumental task as reading a 16 book series. I’ve read a book series here and there, mostly though with only 3 books or in rare cases, up to 7 or 9. This achievement is a first for me, but hopefully not the last. The series I’m writing about is The Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb. Her novels were recommended to me by friends and BookTubers alike, so after having had them on my to-read list for a year, and the first three books waiting on my actual to-read-bookshelf […]

17 February 2025

Romantasy is not for me

I jumped on the Fourth Wing and Romantasy bandwagon in 2023, when I was researching cool books to read. Back then bookstores were plastered with these novels, so I honestly wanted to find out what the hype was about?! Fantasy is one of my most favorite genres and I always enjoy a good fantasy book. Romance? Well, I can’t say I’ve ever read any proper romance novels, aside maybe from some fanfiction 🤔 But why not? Well, my first Romantasy novel was the ubiquitous Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. I jumped on the hype train with this book, mainly because […]

12 September 2024

Unwind

The Unwind Dystology was by far one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read. It’s a captivating, easy to read series aimed at young adults, but despite that, it’s nowhere near light reading. In this world, abortion is outlawed, but instead parents can ‘unwind’ their children between the ages of 13-18. This means that they ‘continue living’ in a ‘divided state’, as the euphemisms in this book say, but in reality they become glorified organ donors. It sounds horrible and you wonder how a society could ever have sanctioned this way of life. But the books expertly convince you that […]

30 June 2024

Mistborn

Everybody loves Brandon Sanderson, don’t they? Well, as my enthusiasm for reading had been rejuvenated in the past year, I have been spending a lot of time on literature websites and other channels to find the right books for me to read. After some letdowns of overhyped books, I established a firm list of “must reads” and / or “classics” that I felt would be my thing. Reading what you want is so important, and probably why jumping on the hype train is always a disappointment. Anyway, everybody seems to love Brandon Sanderson, and while Stormlight Archive is praised to […]