Welcome to my first “proper” Reading Roundup” post for 2025! I have set my target for the year on Goodreads and have finished one, rather long, book. To make things attainable and not any kind of pressure, I set the target as 50 books. Before I had the stroke in 2019, I usually read more than 100 books every year. Probably because I read a lot of children’s books and Young Adult for my work as a school librarian. These days I usually manage to go beyond the 50 target, but I don’t want to have any kind of negative thoughts. After all, reading should be enjoyable and fun at any age!

So, what have I been reading?

I decided to continue to read Tad William’s trilogy, “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn”, so purchased the ebook of the second book The Stone of Farewell. This is the blurb…

“Following a brutal civil war, Osten Ard has been crushed under the rule of the two villainous High Kings. A single hope if the rebels can find the three swords of legend – Memory, Sorrow and Thorn – they might be able to bring the Storm King and evil King Elias down. Once but a humble kitchen-boy, Simon is now Simon Snowlock, dragonslayer and bearer of the mythical sword Thorn. But Simon is more alone than ever his friends have been imprisoned and his liege lord, Prince Josua, has been exiled. And the Storm King may also be in possession of one of the swords… A single chance if Simon can deliver Thorn to Josua and lead his followers to the Stone of Farewell, the rebels may be able to muster the forces necessary to rise up against Elias and the Storm King. But no one knows where the Stone of Farewell is. Or, indeed, what it is… In STONE OF FAREWELL, Tad Williams sets his characters against impossible odds – and proves that the beloved, internationally-bestselling DRAGONBONE CHAIR was no fluke, but one of the greatest fantasy novels of all time.”

The was a huge book and it took me ages to read, however, it was worth the effort! Here is my response on the Goodreads website…

Stone of Farewell by Tad Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, this was a really enjoyable book. When I was reading the first book in the trilogy, I struggled with the opening chapters and nearly put it aside. After reading some of the comments on here, I decided to persevere and ended up loving the book so much that I took the risk of purchasing the other two. And what an excellent decision that was!

The Stone of Farewell follows the adventures of several main characters, and also a few of the lesser ones, including a couple of young women. To be honest, while I was pleased that a male author, writing this series in the 1990s, included female characters, these two really irritated me! They were both becoming very odd and whinging. It would have been more interesting to “promote” some older women to the main story arc, for me at least. Perhaps the third book will put that right.

Anyway, the world building was excellent, the plot exciting and most of the character development terrific (I was trying to think of a suitable word beginning with “e”, but failed dismally). I did struggle a little with the switching around from each point of view, but that is my own issue.

I have already bought the ebook of “To Green Angel Tower”, the final volume and am looking forward to immersing myself in this fantastic (in many senses) world again.

View all my reviews

I will try to finish the huge final book, To Green Angel Tower, in time to write about it in next week’s post, but it is even longer than the above book and I would prefer to savour it rather than rush to the last chapter. Anyway, you all know how I will be occupying myself every afternoon if I can just hide away from Lovely Husband and Elder Son and get some peace and quiet!

Happy Reading!

Love and best wishes,

Snne

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P.S. I had a play around with the WordPress AI image generator and these are the two that it came up with for this post. But some of those book titles look a bit strange 😆😅😆. I may become addicted to this…