TBR Jar Review: The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Edison

This book was my TBR Jar pick a while ago. I succeeded in ordering it at the library and it arrived pretty quickly. Then it lay around for a while. And then I finally pulled myself together and started reading it. 

And then I stopped! I just couldn’t get it to it. All I could figure out from the synopsis was that it was epic fantasy and that it inspired Tolkien to write “TheLord of the Rings”. So far so good. I figured it must be good with all  the blurbs featured from writers such as C.S. Lewis and Ursula K. LeGuin. But I barely made it past the first 100 pages. 

The language was just really intricate and flowery and that made for very slow reading. Of course this was first published in 1922 so the language was bound to be a little old-fashioned, but I feel like the author tried to imitate the prose of medieval literature. And I did not see the call for that! 

As for the characters I never really connected with them. Partly because I didn’t really understand exactly what they were saying half the time, because they spoke in such long, hard-to-follow sentences, and partly because the characterization was quite superficial. It almost felt like a fairy tale style of writing, where because the tales are quite short, there is no time to develop your characters, but this was a whole book. There was plenty of time to dig deeper, but it just never happened. To be fair, I only read the first 100 pages, so it might happen later on, but I feel like at least a few of the many characters introduced could have been developed a bit within that span of pages. 

As for the story line itself it was okay. But because I never really cared about the characters, I didn’t really care what happened to them. So the battles and duels were a bit meh, because honestly I didn’t care who won. Also, the language made every bit of dialogue really long-winded, so the plot moved along very slowly. I feel like those first 100 pages were just the initial manouvering and not even all the main characters had been presented. In my view a book should be well underway in a 100 pages with you too involved to quit. But sadly this book just didn’t do it for me! 

Hopefully I will have better luck with my next TBR jar pick, which is: 

“Since You’ve Been Gone” by Morgan Matson. This one I actually have on my shelf, so no waiting to get it from the library and I am really excited to read it!