25 Series I Want To Read in 2014

Last year, I blogged over at The Founding Fields about 25 book series from various genres, science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, space opera, etc that I wanted to read in 2013. The intention behind that particular reading challenge was to read a broad variety of some of the most popular names in those genres as well as to try out several new authors and revisit some favourite classics. While I wasn’t as successful in the challenge as I might like, I’ve made it a new year resolution to make sure that I do indeed repeat the challenge in 2014 with new books, new authors, and finish it this time.

To that effect, here are the 25 book series I’ve picked for this reading challenge for this year. You can see the previous list for 2013 here.

Warcraft: Tides of Darkness (Review)

“A statue?”  Turalyon laughed. “What could either of us possibly do to earn statues?”

– Tides of Darkness, a Warcraft novel by Aaron Rosenberg

Warning: some spoilers below.

Given my immense backlog of books and e-books, I thought I’d finally start clearing it up one by one. Choosing which novel to read was not a particularly difficult decision though. As a long time player of Blizzard games, ever since the days of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, Diablo and StarCraft, I have been enamoured of the worlds the company has created. And having read some previous novels such as The Last Guardian and Rise of The Horde, I was rather keen to delve into this novel, which is their chronological sequel.

I played Warcraft: Tides of Darkness ages ago and going through the novel, I realized that this is very much a rough novelization of the events there-in. Video game novelizations generally tend not to be as good as the original material. Some aspect of the writer’s approach usually brings these novels down, which is a real shame. Character development, mission flows, dialogue, something always takes a hit when a video game is transformed into a novel.

Unfortunately, that trend has continued in Tides of Darkness. Yes, I last played the game more than a decade ago and the novel is not an exact novelization but there are clearly strong links between the two.

So where does the novel go wrong?