complete with TL;DRs (too long don't read)
TL;DR: This is a book about boring/pompous/uninteresting people doing mostly uninteresting things. Any interesting bits the book does have are dwarfed by pages of vague, shallow philosophizing. The book also seems to have launched the "dark academia" aesthetic, another point off for it.
2026-02-25
TL;DR: It is bewildering to me that a book this poorly-written on the sentence level has a 4.49 out of 5 on Goodreads. The story is quite YA and quite predictable (it doesn't really fit into adult fantasy, imo) but the prose and dialogue are unreadable if you care about that stuff. Read his newer work!
2026-02-25
TL;DR: Some idiot loser describes how good he is at sex for half the book. The other half is tepid world building from someone's improvised D&D campaign. It killed a trilogy that was already lame to begin with
2026-03-16
TL;DR: The main character is being bullied (because she's Asian) and she's a bully too. There, you've read Yellowface.
2026-03-02
TL;DR: some classics are great. with others you have to wonder: maybe they just didn't have much good stuff to read? this is a book with a rather boring love triangle; it ends with the couple in love trying to kill themselves by sledding into a tree. we have invented better love stories and better tragedies since Ethan Frome, i promise.
2026-02-19
TL;DR: Clumsy sentences, hackneyed plot, self-important prose, and ultimately soporific. This is one of those books which evades criticism simply because of the author's DEI credentials which is ultimately damaging to authors of color. Ocean Vuong isn't the worst thing Oprah has given us--after all, she did start Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil's careers--but it's up there.
2026-02-24
TL;DR: "dark academia" fantasy diasporoid slop. stinky lunchbox transformed into a mediocre fantasy novel that somehow manages to dodge the one interesting point about translation the novel could have conceivably brought up
2026-03-16
TL;DR: Jack Black and Jason Segel made this seem like a fun story with peeing giants, but you need a PhD in 1700's English pop-culture for any of the jokes to make any sense.
2026-03-22
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