Crate Digging

Children of Earth and Sky - Guy Gavriel Kay
I didn't know a damn thing about Game of Thrones until the show popped up. I watched the first season and read the first book concurrently, then drank up all the Hennessy that Martin had on his shelf before season 2 came out. So I've read all that meandering shit.
Hear me now, dear reader, when I say that if you're one of those miserable bastards who reads GoT for the court intrigue and adventuring and cultural politic nation building aspects (and not, for example, the rational and proper things like motherfucking dragons and a city definitely destroyed by dark magic, dog, come on) then this book I have here is for you.
Also, good news: if you liked the magic parts, this book also has some of that.
Children of Earth and Sky is vast and complex. The world is rich and dense and realistic, due mostly to it being based off of history. It is essentially traced over 16th century Adriatic Europe, and I almost feel bad telling you that right off the bat because I didn't have it click until the very end of the book.
I brought up Game of Thrones because it has a massive cast of characters and switches between their perspectives, frequently immediately and within the same scene, and has a lot of Rough Realism or Whatever. It is a fantasy book through and through, though. Trough. Tough. God, the English language is a mess.

This book has great depth and will carry you with it. The fantasy equivalents of Prague, of Venice, of Constantinople/Istanbul are real, because they were real, and because the author has great skill and vast knowledge of history and of how to write like a motherfucker.
Turns out this guy is the guy Tolkien's son picked to be his assistant/editor when he compiled a bunch of his dad's unpublished lore. When he was twenty. You might be familiar with the Silmarillion.
This book is devastatingly human. It weaves plots with ruthless shakespearean deftness. It handles women characters in a variety of roles well, which is remarkable.
This is another book I had to eat in parts, over weeks, because of the sheer scope of it. It had the disconcerting tendency to run off with details of the characters lives far into the future, then return to the present for the rest of the characters. It's exhausting to live alongside so many varied and detailed people at once.
It is hard to imagine being able to hold this much in one head at any given time. Both a zoomed in, all-seeing insight into exciting specific lives and an objective, empathetic understanding of the human condition and how short and sweet it can be. And how shitty, and easy to end.



And how SLAVIC everything can be, that side of the Mediterranean.
Do not be like me, dear reader - a poor uneducated fool who confuses the Baltic and Balkan regions. If you hear 'Croatia' and think "haha, potatoes! vodka! latvia!" then you are like me and a big stupid idiot. That's up in the Baltic region, dumbo! Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro? Those are Balkan!
They are firmly in tomato europe territory and their history is fucking fascinating as evidenced by the fact that this book that mines them for fantasy worldbuilding is one of the best damn things I've read in a while.
Hey remember how I'm obsessed with magic systems revolving around the nonconcatenative morphology of the triconsonantal root of semitic languages?
MOVE OVER ITS PROTO BALTO SLAVIC TIME