I’m still reading these and feeling vaguely guilty that so many writers are creating great content for basically free. There have been many, many times that I’ve been more impressed by these online stories than proper books and novels that were published through the traditional route.

Beware of Chicken

I hesitate to include this both because it’s already so well known and because it’s not quite totally free to read now. But the author surely deserves the success and Kindle Unlimited is cheap. This one of what I like to call One-Punch Man style stories in which the protagonist is hilariously overpowered. It’s also unfortunately one of those isekai stories of which there are way too many right now.

But the premise is a really good one: a modern day Canadian is reincarnated into a typical xianxia world and promptly nopes out by moving to the most isolated province he can find to become a farmer. It turns out of course that working the land is a path to power, so not only does he become strong, his farm animals do too. It’s funny, wholesome and doesn’t shy away from being a little sexy too. I think the quality has fallen off a little as the joke has played itself out and it is turning into regular xianxia but it’s fun reading for a very long while.

New Life as a Max Level Archmage

This is another One-Punch Man style story except that the protagonist is a magic-user who has reached the maximum level in an MMORPG only to be seemingly transported into a real version of that fantasy world. This is still a relatively new fic with not that many chapters out yet but I already like it a lot. The main character Vivisari fully knows that she is extremely powerful but is still unsure of how her knowledge of the game translates to the fantasy world. So she needs a guide and that’s where her kindly but clueless apprentice comes into play.

As usual, part of the fun is that every time the protagonist performs some new, impossible feat, her apprentice’s mind totally blanks. Reading about villains slowly realizing how horribly outmatched they are never gets old. That said, Vivisari isn’t quite omnipotent and so this may yet turn into a more conventional fantasy story. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen so far and I think the writer has good judgment so I’m in for the long run.

Super Supportive

The opening scene featuring a fight with superpowered characters and perhaps the introductory blurb make it sound that this is a superhero story. It’s nothing of the sort as more than two hundred chapters later, there still hasn’t been another serious fight. Instead this is best characterized as a very wholesome, slow-paced slice-of-life story about a very nice, thoughtful and supportive young man. He has lots of friends, wants to do right by them and is always helping others.

The world is fascinating as well. From the humans’ perspective, what they are capable of looks like magic. But it’s actually the result of a pact that Earth made with an alien civilization and so from their perspective, it’s a very specific and controlled application of magic. So this is more fantasy/science-fiction than superheroes. Best of all, the author is very serious about building details of the alien Artonan culture, down to a level of detail that I find very impressive and convincing.

The Years of Apocalypse

I was dubious about this just based on its premise and my doubts only grew once I started reading it. A time loop story in which the protagonist starts out as a student in a magic school? How is this not just a redo of the very successful and popular Mother of Learning? It doesn’t help either that the protagonist Mirian is a bit boring at the beginning, studious to a fault, conscientious and has modest ambitions.

Then the scale of the story grows and grows. It’s not just about winning a single battle. Mirian has to figure out how to save the entire world. This is progression fantasy so she gets crazily powerful rather quickly but it never seems enough. Not only does she have to contend with other loopers who are possibly hostile, she has to learn how to move the trajectories of entire nations, find a solution to ecological problems that have been building up for decades and perhaps figure out the truth of the Gods. It’s a rollicking fun read with plenty of action and is at least rationalism-adjacent given how Mirian does her best to optimize the use of her time and the resources at her disposal.

Here’s another fiction book that is closer to mainstream literature than genre and I expect I’ll be doing this more often. I first heard of this as a a recommendation from Broken Forum and liked the premise of an older childless couple in Alaska making a child out of snow that comes alive. It’s a familiar story as it was adapted from a Russian folk tale and feels like it might be the stuff of a Disney animated film. The challenge here is that as it needs to be true to fairy tale logic, we can already guess how it will end, so how could this be an interesting, engrossing read? Yet it truly is a wonderful book as it is the path to get to that ending that matters.

Continue reading The Snow Child →

This book seems to be something of a sleeper hit that I’d only learned about from a forum. It’s the first novel by Scott Hawkins whose day job is a technical writer of computer-related books. His success feels like it came out of nowhere but of course it’s really the result of decades of hard work and innumerable failures. Many others have described this book to the work of Neil Gaiman but I also detect some similarities with Susanna Clarke. The genre is ostensibly horror or fantasy, yet this is such a strange book that it eventually morphs to something like science-fiction.

Continue reading The Library at Mount Char →

I added this to my list of books to read a while back, believing that it was a decent read about the modern economy. Kyla Scanlon made a name for herself by making financial education content on social media. She coined the term vibecession to capture the state of the economy that looks good in terms of conventional economic statistics but feels bad to ordinary people. I’d expected to know a lot about the basics of economics but this book still surprised me by how basic and watered-down it is. Worse, Scanlan places herself firmly as part of the Gen Z and so writes primarily for them. As such it espouses Gen Z values and ideals that I feel aren’t necessarily a part of economics proper.

Continue reading In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work →