Ok, so I’ve decided to go back to my original rating of 2 stars even though I had given it 4 stars as it got a bit better later on. I have had the next books in the series for a few years and they just have to go. I’m not interested in continuing the series so in the trade box they go. Thank you and goodnight 😉. Ok, good day since it’s morning, but I digress! ********4 Stars ⭐️ Okay, so I almost dnf’d this book BUT, I read a friends review that said the same thing but they pushed on and loved it...

“The Dragonbone Chair stood like a strange alter-untenanted, surrounded by bright, dancing motes of dust, flanked by statues of the Hayholt’s six High Kings..”Last fall, my good friend and fellow A Song of Ice and Fire enthusiast, Cheryl Hall, invited me to join her in the reading of The Dragonbone Chair. I immediately said yes, for four reasons: Tad Williams was a new author for me, one I’d been curious about every since the 1998 publication of City of Golden Shadow, Book I in his Otherland ser...

“Books are a form of magic because they span time and distance more surely than any spell and charm.” The Dragonbone Chair is the first book in Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series and an amazing coming of age story, which probably had big enough impact to shape and influence many of today’s popular writers of this genre. For that alone, it is my opinion, that it should be visited at least once in a lifetime, no matter of someone’s preference in their genres.A truly magnifice

O what a ponderous tome! I've been wanting to read this book for a long time and was sorely disappointed. Tropes aside this book is so long winded and dull I could barely get through it! I almost gave up on it a few times. The only thing that saved me is that every hundred pages or so something truly interesting would happen and then right back to boring ol' Simon and his boring bullshit!One of the biggest problems with this book was it's scope. The cast of characters was too long and Mr. Willia...

A bit disappointing. The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie (ps. a follow-up trilogy in that series is dropping in 2019!) sets a pretty high bar for modern epic fantasy. And this is an example of another that fell short. To cut to the chase, it simply had too many elements that felt derivative from other fantasies and too many secondary characters that I couldn’t invest in. I found everything done tolerably well enough, but it just didn’t add up to a great book.The story is centered around a y...

“He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.” - Qanuc ProverbThe Dragonbone Chair is chock and block full of wonder. If you have the patience to master this piece of work (it is incredibly dense and filled with first class world building and heaps of lore) you'll find it an extremely rewarding experience. It is a...

The opening to what is easily the best fantasy series I've ever read. Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn remains, IMHO, one of the most underread and underappreciated series out there. I suspect that the length of the novels scares some people off; Dragonbone Chair is the shortest, and it's still around 700 pages. The series as a whole incorporates most classical fantasy elements: an epic quest, dark sorcery, an unlikely hero, etc., but what makes it unforgettable for me is one main thing. Will...

I now have a Booktube channel! Find me at: The Obsessive BooksellerThis review is going to be more of a non-spoiler reading log. I hope you enjoy this journey a “tad” more than I did the one in the book.Merely mentioning Dragonbone Chair in a recent video about all the unread books on my shelves, I was bombarded with a slew of comments saying I needed to read it ASAP. So I bumped it up a few years in the priority list and gave it a go.Of all the popular classic fantasy, I think Williams is the o...

2.5*The writing style is very good. However the pacing is super slow. If you're going to have a slow pace, for me, you have to balance it with some sort of engaging psychological gauging of the characters usually with a high dose of empathy or some type of theoretical discussion which is thought provoking or some witty character banter. I think if you like old school fantasy and it's pacing you'll love this. If you don't then not so much.

A classic in the fantasy field, this is best suited for readers looking for the traditional orphan-identity quest. While I enjoyed it overall, I was able to set the book down and walk away, coming and going from the story until Simon reached the woods. I consider it a bad sign when I'm able to set a book down--my favorites have me locked into reading position until I reach the end page. Eventually it picked up and reeled me in, but there was skimming involved. A combination coming-of-age and cas...

One of the seminal works of epic fantasy which, along with the works of Robert Jordan and David Eddings, made the genre what it is today. Williams makes a virtue of starting small as we follow orphaned kitchen boy Simeon through his childhood in the castle of King Prester John. However, the king's death heralds an age of discord and Simeon finds himself drawn into valiant Prince Josua's rebellion against his increasingly despotic and magically deranged brother. The scope of the story expands wit...

Dear Tad Williams,I cannot thank you enough for writing a book...well, set of books...that I can read as a full-on grown-up and still enjoy as much as I did when I was an angsty teenager.It has been hurtful to find so many of my favorite when-I-was-young reads (looking at you, Shannara and DragonLance) aren't actually good at all and that I must adore them from afar with only sentimentality stoking the fires of young love.Thank you for not adding to that hurt. I appreciate the effort you put int...

I was 14 years old when I first read this book. I remember feeling like a boss when I turned that last page. I had done it. I had finished this monster of a book all on my own and all without anyone telling me I had to. Not only that but I really, really loved doing it too. I wasn't a complete newb to SF/F - I had the Narnia books read to me, as well as The Hobbit, Lord Of The Rings, and A Wrinkle in Time. And while I loved those books - I had to share them with my family. I had to discover thos...

Don't read this if you're planning to read with SFFBC and want no outside influence!(view spoiler)[This book started with 2 strikes for me: one, the Tad Williams author page on GR is...atrocious. I'm sure some overhyped agent's assistant wrote it or something but it's very offputting. I know, I know, it's not nice of me, but I'm trying to explain I was personally biased so I'd say you should take this with a grain of salt, but I'm planning to be plenty salty so just collect whatever amount you t...

I came into this book a little forewarned by the good readers here at Goodreads: "that this book is a SLOW buildup". 0-20%, slow. 20-30%, something could happen, are we leaving yet? 30-35%, is this it? No, false start. 35-45% OK, we left the castle, something has to happen right? 45%-end: Bam! Fires, dragons, magic swords, trolls, elves, demons, mountains, crossing the map, wolves (good and bad), bad dreams/good dreams, death, sieges, magical storms, ships.......The slow build-up eventually drop...

4.5 dragon starsI must confess that this series has been sitting on my bookshelf for a very long time now and I have somehow always skipped over it, partly due to its bulkiness and also partly because of so many discouraging reviews. Curiosity won over eventually and I gave it a try.From the beginning itself I didn’t really love it. The pace was extremely slow and practically nothing significant happened in the first half of the book. At times it felt like dragging. And the main hero Simon – a l...

Truly a masterpiece and probably my favorite Fantasy book of all time. The rest of the series is pretty awesome as well. Also, the most evil villain bar none of any Fantasy series I've ever read in Pryrates the evil priest. If you haven't read Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn in its entirety, you really must. This is what made me a Tad Williams fan for life.

“Never make your home in a place,” the old man had said, too lazy in the spring warmth to do more than wag a finger. “Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it – memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things.” Morgenes had grinned. “That way it will go with you wherever you journey. You’ll never lack for a home – unless you lose your head, of course…” The Dragonbone Chair, packed with adventure and life-like characters, wraps

The Dragonbone Chair is some 80s fantasy coming highly recommended to me by some people, and I have also been told it is watching paint dry.This is a book that could probably have the most clishe cover quote of all time, but unlike with most books it would actually be somewhat true. The two series it reminds me most of are A Song of Ice and Fire, which it inspired, and The Lord of the Rings, which inspired it.We follow your good old fantasy orphan of unknown parentage, we got a wise wizard, cast...

Even though I thought I might DNF it at few points I finished this book in large part because I was in a bit of reading slump and had trouble reading anything more complex.To sum up first half, "This could have been an email". First 200 pages could be trimmed to 50 without any loss and next 100 to same amount. Second half is better but I'm not sure I would have given it more than 2 starsStory is pretty much as standard heroic fantasy as it gets. It's easy to read but bland and slow. Like eating