Yendi/Dragon
Well, I read more books out of order. I forgot that Dragon takes place literally days after Taltos, right up until they started talking about Baritt. Oh well!
Spoilers under the cut, Yendi first, then Dragon.
I really like Yendi, but I didn't have a lot of thoughts about it. It's a fun read!
I didn't mention it in Taltos, but the book really hits on how young Vlad is during these early stages. He's 13 when his father dies and he starts living on his own, 17 when he "works" for the first time, and he becomes a boss of his own area shortly after. By the time we get to Yendi, Vlad is still only in his early 20s at best. This didn't seem like anything when I was reading this in my early 20s but now to me, he's an absolute baby and I am so stressed for this boyyyy.
Picture an old man - an Easterner, almost seventy years old, which is a very impressive age for our race. But he's in good condition for his age. He is poor, but not destitute. He has raised a family in the midst of the Dragaeran Empire, and done it well. He has buried (an Eastern term for "outlived"; I'm not sure why) a wife, a sister, a daughter, and two sons. The only surviving descendant is one grandson who nearly gets himself killed every few weeks or so.
Ahhhh this bit got me. Not only do we know nothing about Vlad's mother, we also don't know anything about his uncles (EDIT: for some reason, I thought Noish-pa was Vlad's maternal grandmother - so he had an unknown aunt and uncle, not two uncles), or grandmother. :(
I have a few more thoughts about Dragon.
Dragon starts right off talking about memory. "... I know my memory sometimes plays tricks on me." There are a few points where Vlad mentions remembering some additional things from his time in the Paths of the Dead, but never exactly what. I can't remember if/when we find out what those extra things are.
Vlad's meeting with the Serioli has a lot of good stuff packed in there. It's mostly Spellbreaker-based, but all the stuff about the Great Weapons there is good.
I like all the battle tactic stuff, it's all explained in a way that makes sense as much as it needs to, for a dummy like me. It's the right amount of both context and flavor. I believe Brust has been a long-time Civil War buff, so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the troop movements and battle stuff was informed by that.
And then, of course, once the battle stuff really gets going, Vlad's memory gets another hole punched into it by whatever happened during his dreamwalk while recovering from the spell that hit him so bad.
Memory holes really do seem to be a decent way to account for plot holes and other contradictions in a 40-year series, though.
