The Sleeping Dragon (Guardians of the Flame #1) – Abandoned

The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenberg
Published: 1983

This is the first book I’ve abandoned midway through in as long as I can remember. It’s something I have an incredibly hard time doing, but I should do it more. If I’m not enjoying a book, I’ll usually just let it ruin reading for me completely for a month while I struggle through it. There’s really no point in that. Nick Hornby abandons books he’s not enjoying, so I’m using that to justify this.

This is the story of a group of university students who find themselves transported into a fantasy world while playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons. They awake in this world with the bodies of the their characters, and they must travel as adventurers to try and find a way out. How could this novel not be amazing, you ask? Now, I know it’s a bit of a hacky premise, but this was published 30 years ago. And I like Dungeons & Dragons, and fantasy, and fish out of water stories.

What really bothered me were the characters. One idea I did like was that once transported to these new bodies, their old personalities were at ends with their characters’ personalities, but instead of that being handled in any interesting way, it just turned everyone into raging adolescent assholes.

I only read about 150 pages of this, so it’s possible it becomes great in the last third of the book.

As an aside, I found out that you can add an abandoned shelf in Goodreads to your three main shelves. You just edit your bookshelves, create a new shelf called ‘abandoned’, and mark it as ‘exclusive’. This way books like this don’t have to be marked improperly as to-read or read. It’s important, okay?