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Becky Chambers' Monk & Robot two-novella series wasn't just good enough to overcome my visceral disgust of Machines Being Treated Like Living Things, it was good enough that I did That Thing where you notice you're getting towards the end of a book but it's Too Good and you gotta go read another different worse book, you read three or four other books while savouring tiny nibbles of the Good Book so it lasts longer. It's very good. The ebook of the first book (called "A psalm for the wild-built" is TWELVE HECKIN' DOLLARS which is a piss-take for a 160-page novella, so the library's the way to go on this one - but if you've got money, you can actually buy the epub (ebooks.com has it, and it claims DRM-free so you should be able to just read it without having to piss around with different software) and honestly, if I were ever gonna pay twelve dollars for an ebook, this'd be the one.

Patrick Rothfuss' Name Of The Wind is juvenile Gary-Stu power fantasy but competently and compellingly written, what reviewers would call "A real page turner," it's pulp dreck by the numbers but it does it well. Until about a third of the way through the sequel, where Rothruss loses the will to continue the story he's writing, pulls two other half-finished unrelated novels out of his desk drawer, files off the serial numbers and welds them all together into more or less enough pages to pass as a fantasy doorstop. He doesn't even Bondo over the joints, barely even grinds down the mess he's done of the welding, then sprays a beautiful coat of paint over the misshapen lumpy clag lines. I haven't finished this yet, I'm still 100 pages from the end, but I'm half expecting he's gonna try and weld another unrelated novella in to fill the hole between here and an abrupt ending that'll leave the reader gagging for book 3, which will never come out because Rothfuss is out of drawer stories to find-and-replace names on. It's very bad but also good readable fun. First book's a tenner, which is still a piss-take for a smegging ebook but there's a lot of it so I guess there's value for money - unfortunately no matter where you buy it from, it's encrypted even after they've got your cash, so you'll have to piss around with removing copy protection or install special software to read the encrypted file (or just get an unencrypted copy from a pirate site).

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