Wizard’s Tower

A crochety burned out half-elf master wizard, after hundreds of years in service to the same human kingdom, sets out to a distant, almost hinterland, location where he was raised in his families Tower. As this is told from an ancient Elven Mages point of view, he of course views humans as impetus and short lived. It has been excellent thus far and the voices are outstanding.

The story of a wizard building a tower sounded like it would be a mix of magical worldbuilding and mundane tasks relevant to building a magical home. That combination sounded interesting to me, and this book delivers on that premise. Unfortunately, the protagonist, the wizard Nemon Fargus, is so deeply unlikeable that I just could not enjoy the story. I have a feeling that the author was trying to portray how a brilliant, nearly immortal being of immense power would act in a world of short-lived people who aren't nearly as smart. Instead, what we get is... a sociopath. Perhaps some of this is an attempt to introduce believable character flaws, but they're not so much flaws as barely contained megalomania and narcissism. There's a difference between having no patience for fools wasting a wizard's time by trying to draw him into petty politics that he has no interest in, and threatening to murder merchants if they don't give him a good price. At first, I was hoping that the main character's cartoonish tendencies towards murder were introduced to show character growth. When no signs of that happened, I was hoping that maybe it was setting up some sort of political commentary. In the end, though, it seems like maybe this is just how the author thinks someone really smart and powerful would naturally act, which is... disappointingly shallow. Storywise, there's not a lot going on here. It's pretty much what it says on the tin. Wizard decides to build tower. Wizard finds a location and builds tower, while facing mostly unwelcome intrusions from the world around him. The magic system is interesting and very LitRPG. The worldbuilding is sufficiently deep to maintain interest. The narration is mostly good, although I found the voices for the nobelwomen consistently had accents that were cartoonishly "posh" to the point of being distracting. I'm going to take a pass on books 2 and 3.