The Sword and Laser discussion

Anyone else diving into this?

I've been at it for a few days and while I like the over all story, I find it very hard to follow all the world building. There is SO MUCH to absorb, I feel like she's throwing too much at the reader too quickly, and a lot of it is not explained until later.

As I said, the story is pretty good but I feel lost sometimes with all the terminology I don't understand.

I read it with another group (here). I didn't like it. The characters were forgettable and inconsistent. Not much depth. Just wasn't for me.

I really want to give it a try however I don't think I'll be able to fit it in before the end of the year. :(

I'm about half way through but I stopped - not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because another book that I wanted to read became available at the library and I'm under some time pressure to read and return that one.

I'm really not sure what to think so far. The characters aren't particularly drawing me in and it is such unorthodox world building that it's hard to absorb. A lot was made about how she doesn't spoon feed you with info dumps, but I don't know... I hate to say it, but maybe I could use just a little spoon feeding here and there.

I'm not giving up on it yet, I will start back up again when I finish my other book. Hurley earned my faith with the Bel Dame Apocrypha series, so I'm gonna go ahead and see where she's going with this.

I've seen some comparisons with Steven Erikson's Malazan series because he frequently throws the reader into the deep end and doesn't spoon feed anything. But at least with Erikson, he creates great characters that you can connect with. I don't get any of that with The Mirror Empire. But that's just my opinion - a lot of people seem to dig the book, which is great.

So far I find it easy to get lost. I don't like my books to be a challenge, I just like good stories. There is a good story in there, it's just got so much information overload that I can't enjoy it.

I picked up on a chapter last night, reading through it I thought it was a new character and was confused till the end when I realized it was a character I read about 2 nights ago. That's frustrating.

I found it challenging, but I still enjoyed it.

I think that if you're going to have a multi-POV story a little bit of exposition goes a long way, in both working out how the culture of the POV character works as well as how the POV character's culture/country sits in a wider context. The author is unrelenting in not providing any of this information in any explicit fashion. So it's easy to get lost, and it's also hard to get into the characters when you're sifting through everything they say or do to get a clue as to what's actually happening.

It's a rewarding struggle, because the world-building here is so rich, but I can get why people aren't gelling with the characters. You're spending your reading attention on other things.

I had sort of mixed feelings on the book. (My Review)