Batched Book Reviews #11

Black Fortunes, What if? 2, Hero of Two Worlds, The Mayor of Noobtown, Hounded

Published in

VP of Books

3 min readAug 28, 2023

Black Fortunes (2+/4) — A few stories of going from slavery to wealth. A lot of historical context. Not overly long. Good read and worth reading if this sounds interesting, but I expected a bit more.
What if? 2 (4-/4) — A mix of totally absurd humor and popular science of the highest quality. I haven’t laughed so hard since… I finished “How To” by the same author. While entertaining it also leaves a good feeling of reading actually a valuable book — you can take quite a lot away from it in terms of popular science and intuition about it. Example questions answered in this masterpiece: What if we fill the solar system with soup? How much Earth mass do I need to remove to lose 20 pounds of weight? What would it take to build Rome in one day?
Hero of Two Worlds (2/4) — An interesting story about an interesting person served in a very uninteresting way. It took me five months to finish this book, and after all that time, I know very little about Marquis de La Fayette or his times, but I did learn a few important life lessons. Lesson 1: Don’t read a 17-hour-long history book if you’re not a history fan. Lesson 2: Don’t read a history book about a single individual unless you’re interested in completely unimportant facts about that person. Lesson 3: Reading a book in chunks of 20 minutes over five months is not a good idea.

The Mayor of Noobtown (2/4) — Too much RPG, too little literature. After reading so many good LitRPG books, I started to believe that it’s hard to write a bad one. However, it turns out that not only is it possible, but you can also achieve a 4.6 rating on Audible while doing so. The world-building is full of completely redundant numbers. There is no story. The events and mechanisms are completely unrealistic, with no logic or coherent system behind them. The main character is boring. On top of that, the author tries to be funny and fails miserably. The book is not terrible and was relatively pleasant to listen to, but it’s also a complete waste of time.
Hounded (3-/4) — Pleasant and entertaining but not especially deep. The character of an ancient druid living in contemporary Arizona is quite interesting in itself and the book is decently written. However, there is little more to it — no great plot, no extremely interesting characters, no world-building twists. I was lured into it by the promise of an overpowered character (which I like), but I feel that promise was only partially fulfilled. It’s good lightweight entertainment, but don’t expect more.