Taltos

[sholio]

Reread Taltos today because I was in the mood for it, after talking to sovay about characters being rescued from the afterlife made me remember that's the plot of this book. I have a lot of Vlad feels now. Vlad, you are the worst at hating Dragaerans, you just are.

I feel like this book is the platonic ideal of what I want from a book of this type.

- Ancestral enemies forced to work together, reluctantly becoming friends.
- Banter and snark.
- Self-sacrifice as a core element of the plot.
- Awesome female characters (not so central in this one as in some other books in the series, but still excellent and very much not treated differently from the male characters)
- Weird, cool worldbuilding.
- Moral dilemmas.
- Three interwoven timelines that are all interesting, engaging, and related to the current plot in ways that only gradually become apparent in an "oh, THAT'S what that was all about" kind of way. (Seriously, I don't know how the structure of this book works so well. I never found myself skipping any of the sections or getting lost even with the frequent scene and time jumps.)

There are other books in the series I love - most of them, actually, except for a few in the middle - but this one is probably my enduring favorite. I mean, "enduring" given that I only read the whole series for the first time a couple of years ago.

Comments

[sovay]

Reread Taltos today because I was in the mood for it, after talking to sovay about characters being rescued from the afterlife made me remember that's the plot of this book.

Nobody told me that about this book!

(I have read and enjoyed Brust's Dragon, gift of rushthatspeaks, but never followed it into the rest of the series.)

[yhlee]

I remember enjoying the early books in this series a lot! I drifted away after the falling-out stuff happened with Vlad and Cawti in the later books, alas - it felt too much like watching a divorce train-wreck and that stopped being fun. But I still have nostalgia.

[rachelmanija]

Taltos is fantastic. The structure is so good, and the central plot is so weird and interesting.

[hamsterwoman]

That bulleted list is a lot of the reasons why it's my favorite, too. Especially those first 3 :D

I also find the three timelines really deftly done! (although I also know people who found them disorienting the first time around, and having reread it with an eye to that, I can definitely see how that can be).

I've been thinking it's time for a reread for me, too... :)

[sheron]

If I remember correctly, I bounced off the series upon first starting because it was 2020 and I wasn't feeling like reading about assassins (which I gather was the main character's job) but I feel like this is a book I need to go back to this year or at the very least Soon-ish because it seems really fun.

[silverflight8]

Well this sounds relevant to my interests!!