A review by tortue_abroad
Nirvana in Fire 琅琊榜 by 海宴

That's gotta be the longest book I've ever read, and it felt even longer doing it in a book club. Overall, I appreciated that the book version got rid of a lot of the scenes that I thought were a bit silly in the show and felt like they were just added for the drama (turns out they were!). On the other hand, this is way more closely focused on Mei Changsu himself and so that means you have to sign up to 1000 pages of men doing politics and very little time with women doing things. That's a hard sell for me, and I got through it by skimming through the sections that were exactly the same as the show. Overall, the show and book are very similar, with the book being a more reasonable story in terms of character choices. However, I don't know that I would care as much about the character choices without the acting from the show, so I would still prefer the show over the book. Finally, having said all that about the book being more reasonable, I thought it was very funny that the super abrupt shift in the ending of the show is beat for beat the same as the last chapter of the book. Seems like somone was just fucking done writing and was going to end it ASAP.