I’m a big fan of Jim Butcher’s Dresden series. Read them all, pouted about for a while when he moved on to other projects, and did a little happy dance when a new one came out after a long drought.
My question - and yes, there is one - is about his other material. I’ve accumulated some of the other stuff, and wanted some input from my fellow Butcher/Dresden fans about their take on his other series. I have books 1-6 of the Codex Alera books, but only book 1 of the Cinder Spires.
To establish a background, I read a lot of crime fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, spy novels as well as non fiction in areas of history, music, theology and the like. Some of my favorite authors include John Sanford, Douglas Adams, Steven King, Neil Gaiman, Tolkien…
I greatly appreciate the time taken by anyone who has input, small or large. Thank you!
Codex Alera is great, but you need to go in with the expectation is that Jim wanted to do a traditional fantasy, but with his usual character building and fast paced plots. So, many readers my not like the familiarity. Particularly, I loved the characters a lot and the series go into weird directions later on. Also the fantasy races in that book are really great, much more fun than the humans.
The Aeronaut’s Windlass is Jim Butcher as its peak, while Codex and Dresden took a while to find their groove, this book hits the ground running, it’s pretty good. There’s also fully fledged talking cats with their own culture and society.