bluejayreads's reviews
847 reviews

I don't think Mike Michalowicz realizes how much he's revealing about himself in this book. The general idea behind this system seemed to be, "I am physically incapable of not spending money if I have even a single penny available, so I had to find some sort of way to hide money from myself so I wouldn't run my businesses and my life into the ground with my spending habits." Just because he's in such an unbelievable hurry to get rid of as much money as possible doesn't mean that's every entrepreneur's financial struggle. As someone who often swings too far in the other direction (I have on multiple occasions spent several hours repairing or DIY-ing something because I didn't want to spend $20 to replace it), this has never been my problem, and my business has posted profit every single year of its existence, even if I use his weird profit calculation. And as someone who has read quite a bit about money, both business and personal, the Profit First system is just Dave Ramsey's "Pay Yourself First" maxim but for businesses. Mike just seems to believe that he's invented the concept of "spending less than you earn" and "having a separate savings account" and this makes him some sort of business finance genius. In reality, if you can grasp the idea that you can have money without spending it, you're probably not going to get much of value out of this book.

I don’t actually have a ton to say about this one. As much as the Industrial Revolution sub-series doesn’t tend to be my favorite Discworld sub-series, I do enjoy Moist as a character. He’s entertaining, interest, fun, over-the-top, and pretty much exactly who you’d want to guide you through another zany adventure in the Discworld. 

However, plot-wise, Making Money is remarkably similar to Going Postal. Moist gets himself put in charge of a government institution (although this time it isn’t directly Lord Vetinari’s fault - though you can’t say he didn’t have a hand in it, either). He applies his con man skills towards making the institution more functional. There is a group of wealthy, powerful people who really don’t want him to do this, so he also has to apply his con man skills to keeping himself safe from their schemes. It had unique elements, like Moist not actually being in charge of the mint so much as the caretaker for the dog who technically is in charge. (It’s the Discworld, these kinds of things happen.) And it has elements repeating from Going Postal as well, like the continued presence of Adora Belle Dearheart and her golem obsession. 

The story was still interesting and entertaining, as most of the Discworld books tend to be. But I didn’t like it nearly as much as I enjoyed Going Postal, and I think some of that is because the two books are so similar. But some of it was also that Going Postal was about Moist both figuring out how to be himself in an honest profession and getting himself established in the city, while by the time we get to Making Money, Moist has already established himself as himself. It lacks that “underdog thrust into a new situation” element - while being in charge of the mint was definitely different from being in charge of the post office, the scenarios are similar enough that it didn’t feel all that challenging. I never doubted that Moist would figure it out, and neither did Moist. 

There were some interesting elements to this story. Like most Discworld books, it includes commentary on real-world things - in this case, explicit commentary on how and why money works (not wrong, as entertaining as you would expect a discussion on how monetary value only works because everyone agrees it works would be), some statements on the gold standard, a wild subplot with a guy who wants to be Lord Vetinari and another one with buried golems that didn’t quite feel like they fit.

On the whole, like most Discworld books, this one was good. It had plenty of wittiness and that signature combination of serious-but-in-a-very-silly-way that I love, and it was an enjoyable read. But reading it so close after reading Going Postal meant I couldn’t help but compare the two, and in a direct comparison, this one is unfortunately the lesser of the two. 

The Discworld Series: 

The story is good so far, but I'm not loving the audiobook - will come back to this in a different format.

I’ve really enjoyed most of T. Kingfisher’s works so far, and I’ve been slowly exploring horror as a genre, so I was excited to give this one a try. I actually started reading at one point and then stopped for a while, not because I didn’t want to keep reading, but because I have three jobs and I’m going to grad school and I just haven’t had time for anything lately. I did come back to it, but eventually decided that I really wasn’t that into it. The horror part really fell flat - everything going on was definitely weird and supernatural, but it wasn’t all that scary or horrifying. And, honestly, it wasn’t all that interesting, either. I think it would be scary to actually be in that situation, but to read about it, it’s mostly just a little bit slow. I kept waiting for the actual horror bit to kick in, but though there were moments, it was lacking that sense of all-consuming dread that I was hoping for. It had potential, it just didn’t manage to keep up the atmosphere between the more intense moments. 

 I had strong feelings about A Conspiracy of Truths - it's one of those books that I'm not really sure if I liked it but it stuck in my head. Though this one follows a different character, I expected something similarly remarkable. What I got was what appeared to be a manuscript written by Ylfing with commentary by someone else, which was amusing at first but got old really fast. My biggest problem, though, was that even in his own record, Ylfing was obnoxious. I tend to overall have a low tolerance for characters being stupid, and Ylfing is just so, so stupid. He was entertaining as a side character in the first book, but as the main character I just wanted to wring his neck. The only problems in this book are problems of his own creation, and they wouldn't even be problems if Ylfing could just stop whining and be normal about anything for even a single minute. The commentator on his manuscript was pretty much immediately fed up with him, and so was I. 

The more Brandon Sanderson I read, the more I realize that he is a spectacular worldbuilder and a really strong plotter, but only mediocre in actual writing. This book was instrumental in me realizing that, because The Frugal Wizard’s Guide for Surviving Medieval England is mostly gimmick, and without a powerful plot and world behind it, it feels like a gimmick. The writing isn't bad, but it's not spectacular, and it wasn't doing anything to connect me to the story or the protagonist. And the story kept being interrupted by pages from the in-world guidebook, which seemed to be operating as both a repetitive gimmick and as a substitute for world-building. In plot, concept, and commitment to the gimmick, it really felt like something a high schooler might write. Which is not at all what I expected from Brandon Sanderson. 

 This book is a really strange reading experience. It's heavy and intense and dark and emotional and violent and full of death and gore and body horror, all wrapped around an ex-lovers-that-hate-each-other-but-maybe-still-love-each-other romance that very often takes a back seat to the violence and gore and etc. But it also managed to be very weird in a way that didn't exactly work. The first part of the plot is based around trying to figure out exactly what's going on - although it turns out that most of that aspect is based on one character already knowing the answer and just not sharing it with our protagonist. (I don't like intentional-non-communication-as-a-conflict-driver as a trope in general, but the fact that there's no established reason for this character to not say anything - and in fact the protagonist is involved in this whole thing because they need her to do something specific relevant to this information - is irritating and feels contrived.) Once this character finally tells the protagonist what's going on, the plot quickly becomes more about surviving to the end of the book. And I really struggled to suspend my disbelief with it. Characters acted in ways that were close to but not quite ways I'd expect real people to act. Events were just a notch or two beyond what felt reasonable. Nothing was ridiculous or excessive, and I can't even put my finger on why, but most of the last half of the book felt just slightly over-the-top. All things considered, it's not a bad book - I enjoyed the protagonist as a character, it had a lot of interesting moments and some unexpected twists, and was engaging enough to keep my attention through the end. However, I'm probably not going to read the rest of the series. From the way this one ended, I imagine book two is going to be more of the same. And even though I liked it, I didn't love it enough to continue. 

The only way I can really describe this is "internet philosophy." It's a weird kind of philosophical thought that seems profound on the surface, but once you dig a little deeper are profoundly pointless. The "ideas" here either don't really say anything or say things that are pretty obvious to anyone who's done more than thirty seconds of introspection. If you took a bunch of inspirational quotes from a middle-aged white woman's Pinterest board and wrote essays about them, you might end up with something like this. (Also, calling some of these entries "essays" is a bit of a stretch in some cases. Many of them are just lists.) They're repetitive but overall well-written, and some of the questions they pose might be interesting reflection questions, but on the whole this book gives a sense of superficial wisdom - it *feels* profound without actually *being* profound.

I really loved Godkiller, the first book in this series. I've made no secret that I'm a sucker for unique and interesting takes on deities. But though that's what got me to actually pick up Godkiller, I ended up loving it for the characters and their dynamics with each other and with the world. When my library got a copy of Sunbringer, I checked it out immediately. 

Unfortuntely, like most sequels and middle-books-in-a-trilogy, Sunbringer definitely had some flaws, especially when compared to Godkiller. But before I get into those, I want to start with what the book did really well. First and biggest of which was move the story forward. What started in the first book as a deceptively simple "go to this place and do this thing" plot ballooned at the end into something much bigger with implications for at least one country and possibly the world. This book not only carries on that plot (including repeatedly raising the stakes and giving several chapters from the antagonist's point of view), it advances everything that was brought up in the last book. I was perfectly prepared to accept Inara and Skedi's connection as a suspension of disbelief issue, but not only does it have an explanation, it's much more dramatic and far-reaching (and just plain cool) than I expected. Plus it's incredibly plot-relevant. 

I also still enjoyed the characters quite a bit. One of my favorite things about the characters in Godkiller was their dynamics with each other, but since Kissen is massively separated from the others, Elo and Inara are generally in the same area but largely doing different things with different people, and Inara and Skedi's relationship is going through some weird stuff throughout the book, there's not as much of that. I still like the characters individually (Kissen especially is fantastic), but the dynamics range from definitely different to pretty much nonexistent. This isn't necessarily a change for the worse, but it's definitely a change to a big thing I loved about book one. 

The main thing that I really struggled with in this book was keeping track of what was actually supposed to be happening in this plot. Some of that probably has something to do with the fact that for the most part, the characters don't even know what the plot is here right now. I as the reader get more of the big picture because I get to read perspectives from Skedi, Elo, and Anara, as well as Kissen and Arren. (Arren doesn't get a ton of page time, but he still gets some. And yes, five perspectives is a lot for one book, but since I was already familiar with these characters, it wasn't nearly as annoying and confusing as it was in the first book.) But even I the reader don't get the whole picture, and any given character only has a tiny piece. Kissen herself crosses entire continents trying to stop one thing from happening, even though she doesn't even know why it would be a bad thing, just that she has it on really good authority that it would be. By the time I got to the end of the book, so many things had happened and so few of them seemed particularly related to character goals that I was about as surprised as the other characters when Kissen announced that thing was bad, actually. This is definitely an action-packed book, and it definitely manages to move the overarching plot forward. But it felt like a lot of the details got lost along the way. 

On the whole, this book is about what I expected from the sequel to a book I really loved - solidly good, readable, enjoyable, but not nearly as great as the first book. I picked this up having it in my head for some reason that the Fallen Gods series was a duology, so I was a bit surprised to get to the end and find out there's more. But I will be reading Faithbreaker. The story is still good, the characters are still stellar, and I'm still engaged and intrigued by this world's weird and unique take on gods. Even though I can't say I'm enthralled with the overall direction the plot has taken, I'm still enjoying it and will happily finish out the series.