(no subject)

[wolffyluna]

I’ve just finished Heaven Official’s Blessing: a blog post in three parts.

Part 1: Didn’t You Only Start This In Late October, Wolffy?

It turns out. there are two secrets to getting me to read a book fast.

1. Give me a deadline.

I gave myself the deadline of trying to finish before December 28th, because that would probably be the last day of Chocolate Box Exchange nominations, so I’d want to know if/what I wanted to request before then.

I worked out how much I needed to read each day to reach that goal. …and then I consistently read a bit more than that. Sometimes because I got sucked in and just had to know what was next. Sometimes it was because I was An Overachiever™ who worked out if she just read a few more pages each day she could finish a week ahead of her arbitrary deadline.

1. Comptetitiveness?

The reasons I am posting this today instead of December 21st is because of the other speed reading secret sauce.

I have a friend who was also reading TGCF. And was getting mildly annoyed that they had to resist clicking on spoiler-boxed liveblogs. The obvious solution to this being to catch up with me. And this somehow turned into a friendly competition to see who could finish first?

We are both fast readers.

A lot to text was read very quickly.

I came second, but only by 15 minutes. Which means I am lightly charred from friction with the air as I raced to finish but have finished the book.

Part 2: In Which I Talk About the Book

• It took me a little while to be sold on HuaLian. Hua Cheng came across as a bit… Idealised Love Interest Guy? The charming bad boy magical billionaire who solves all your problems and doesn’t even murder you a little bit. So ideal he was a bit more of a plot device than an actual character. I wasn’t that interested in that dynamic. …but then I found out how much Hua Cheng was deliberately shaping himself into Idealised Love Interest Guy, and the devotion– and goddamn do I love devotion so much. I was sold. (It also helped that over time you got to see more of Hua Cheng not managing to be perfectly suave and charming, and generally not completely succeeding in his goals.)
• I knew from the beginning that I was going to like Xie Lian? But by the end! He is so good! Such a good character! He’s noble and heroic but not perfect and such a good whump vehicle and and and! I love him.
• I’m love Ling Wen!!! She is my favourite! I’m a little annoyed we didn’t get that much detail on what was going on with her and Bai Jing, but eh, there is only so much book, not everything can fit into it.
• Yushi Huang! I am also a Yushi Huang partisan. I love how practical she is? And also the fact that she is not one of the flashy or dramatic gods and she usually doesn’t exercise her power, but boy is she powerful. I like characters like that.

Comments

[zdenka]

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Yes! Xie Lian is so good. "Noble and heroic but not perfect" is a very good description.

I love Ling Wen and Yushi Huang too! It's hard to pick one favorite but I think Yushi Huang might be my favorite. Or at least I have a bit of a crush on her. She's just so calm and serene and competent. And the way Pei Ming just kind of mentally bluescreens around her will never not be hilarious to me.

[wolffyluna]

Xie Lian is great! It's so easy for characters of his archetype to end up being flat goody-two-shoes, and it's nice to see someone of that archetype who has some rough edges while still totally being that archetype. (And there's things like-- his righteous pride is what causes him to make some bad decisions. It's also one of the things that stopped him from making bad decisions!)

I think Ling Wen just edges out Yushi Huang as my favourite, but it's very close. Yushi Huang is still very very good though, and I love how she's relatively unassuming, but everyone is low key scared of her, because she's the god of agriculture, and you do not piss off the god of agriculture.