My last 5 books: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, BioShock, and Gaiman

In the order I read them - oldest first.

1. BioShock: Rapture, by John Shirley.

The prequel to the game BioShock. While I love the game and always try my best to pick up every single audio log in-game it's hard to get much sense out of the jumbled up audio logs. They aren't found in the right order and the dates keep getting mixed up. So in that sense this book helped a lot to show how things really went down before the game starts up. That said I wasn't extremely fond of this book. It was slow. So slow. And if I hadn't been a fan of the game series and had an intitial interest to find out how things happened, I probably wouldn't have finished it. 

2. Dragon Age: The World of Thedas vol. 1

Game lore galore! Thedas is immensly detailed and I keep finding out things I didn't know before, despite having played Origins 5 times, DA2 3 times and Inquisition another 5 times, there are still things I don't know. This book was amazing!

3. Adventures in the Dream Trade, by Neil Gaiman

I bought Gaiman's Humble Bundle back when. This was the first of the books in the bundle that I decided to read, and for the first time since getting into Gaiman's stuff, I'm not sure if I like it or not. There are some brilliant pieces in there, but they get muddled by all the pieces that aren't. This book is divided into sections. The first sections consist of Introductions, Afterwords and other similar things, and while they are all interesting to read they soon start to flow into each other and create an indecipherable mess. Next section consisted of a few poems. They were cute. They made me smile. I'm not a poetry person so I can't claim to know if they were good or not, but at least they seemed cute to me. The essays that came next were long and for the most part I can't even recall what they were about. The song lyrics section I mostly just skimmed through, because reading lyrics without the music is really weird to me, but I did enjoy the anecdote in the beginning of this section. And then there was the weblog from when American Gods were going to press and it was extremely interesting up until the point where it was mostly a tour journal, and it got repetitive (went there, signed this many, ate this, met people). At the end of this book there were a couple of short stories which were the highlight of the book. I love Gaiman's work, that's usually the rule of thumb. But this book was (hopefully) an odd exception. This book was more a chore than a joy. I'm sorry.

4. Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne, by David Gaider

I read a lot about this book before I read this book. A lot of people claim to understand Loghain better in Origins after having read this book. I don't. I still feel he's a self-satisified idiot who thinks he knows more about the world than he actually does. What bothers me most is that all through this book he talks about the importance of giving someone their word. Eventually he swears an oath to Maric and thereby the Theirin bloodline. So why the hell does he get Cailan, his son, killed, and tries to have Alistair, his bastard, assassinated? The only thing I can think of is lust for power. Loghain has stood in the sidelines watching everyone close to him getting more than he did. Maric got Rowan and the kingdom. Loghain wanted Rowan. Loghain thinks he knows more about being king than Maric. Loghain is an idiot. Mostly this book made me sad. Severan, the bad guy, sends a bard to the rebels to infiltrate and destroy them. In the process this bard falls for Maric who also falls in love with her, which breaks Rowan's heart because she's in love with Maric and they are betrothed. So she goes to Loghain for comfort only to find out that he's in love with her. She dabbles with him once, which breaks Loghain's heart when she breaks it up after the bard dies. Maric's heart is broken by the bard's death and everyone is miserable. Even if they manage to get Ferelden back from the Orlesians by the end, it's a hollow victory because none of them gets to be happy having reached their goal, and it makes me sad.

5. Mass Effect: Revelation, by Drew Karpyshyn

Basically the story of why Anderson and Saren hate each other, why Anderson didn't get to be a Spectre and how Saren came across Sovereign. This book was exciting from page one and it was hard to put down and put out of my mind.