Part I: war unfolding: 6.75/10

Lot's of one-off encounters, people sustaining injuries to near-ex-machina lack of narrative impact, and slow plot development in favor of character development. I don't hate it, but I think I prefer grand story development. To come in Part II methinks. for now, 6.75/10

Okay, 2/3s of the way through and I've sifted down my thoughts on this book/series so far – it's cynical and dark, dark humor intermixed. Depicts some really brutal scenes (past medieval of violence, with prose that make me wanna give the author a hug bc it's too authentic to be creative in a vacuum).

Books where the author doesn't give the characters (especially the protags) agency annoy me – see my review of Warbreaker. The narrative POVs in this book are an exception though since the characters we experience the story through have little to no control over what they're doing, only how they're doing it. All of them are being used, sometimes by more than one layer of parties and this is revealed in satisfying ways rather than heavy handed plot devices/cop outs. This doesn't change when characters gain more power, authority, and status, if anything, it gets worse. Which is perhaps what makes this series so enjoyable as "dark" fantasy: the cynical message underlying all characters.

I also like the moral ambiguity of all the POV characters. No one is good, most of them are downright evil with maybe one exception (titular character).

I'm going to finish the series before doing any reading of its reception since there's like 6+ characters who have 1:1 analogs of GoT characters – but again the timeline of the release of this book doesn't align with even the possibility plagiarism.

The warfare scenes are all told from the limited viewpoint of like 1 or 2 characters at a time, so they all feel like Battle of the Bastards, for better or worse. It's an interesting balance between grand schemes/puppeteering and then muddy gore

"Still alive," "Bodies found down by the docks," and "you have to be realistic about these things" are v enjoyable refrains

Finished this book. And it ends high. There's 3 simultaneous plots going on, the journey to mt. Sauron stand-in which is the least enjoyable I think just because not much happens other than walking and walking and walking, but it's also the most promising because it's obviously going to be the most important one.

Glokta's arc is the most enjoyable since he seems to be in the thick of it the most (conspiracy arc).

And West's arc on the northern front is just military siege warfare throughout, so there's a nice balance throughout.

Steven Pacey's narration is the best of any (fiction) audiobook I've read on this list.

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