I started reading John C. Wright’s “Last Guardian of Everness” but got stuck in the middle because of the cursed conventions of the degenerate genre that Wright chose to try his hand out in, and “MTV style” narration that jumps from a character to character (there must be an official name for that, but I don’t know it).
The degenerate genre is Fantasy, of course, and the conventions are: magic, characters that are “chosen” (and “last guardians” in general), unicorns and other mythological critters, cities with names that sound like allergy medicine names (Celebradon? give me a break). Passing by much abused elves and gnomes in favor of lesser know dudes like selkie and Koschey The Deathless is ok, but still short of coming up with original types.
Wright is much better than an average Fantasy writer, but his storytelling is somewhat sloppier than necessary for me to swallow Fantasy. Unfortunately, it looks like he is becoming much more boring, sloppy and he is yet to produce something better than “Guest Law” and other of his short stories. The Phoenix Trilogy was good (even if too long and not polished enough to be a true masterpiece). He has a beautiful world created in “Guest Law”, and the best part of the Phoenix Trilogy for me was that it was kind of related to that world. But he squanders all of that to write slightly above mediocre Fantasy.