It is fun, but buggy + doesn't have great performance in some areas. I've recently played it for a bit on 1.1 patch drop, and lasted for about 6 hours until I hit a brick wall of a progression blocking bug. There was a decently large thread about it on the forum, no dev response, no fix in the next 3 hotfixes, so I stopped playing. Might come back for 1.3 or something.

The real juice of modded minecraft is in the modpacks - curated sets of mods that were configured to work well with each other, frequently with some custom recipes added by the pack developer, and sometimes some kind of a quest line to guide you through the pack and provide a more structured experience. There are many different types of modpacks - kitchen sinks (large collections of mods, frequently without a lot of balance tweaks or changes, for a more sandbox experience), questing packs (with the aforementioned quest books to guide you through the mods), vanilla+ packs that intend to expand on the vanilla minecraft experience and not change the gameplay loop significantly, packs focused exclusively on magic or technology mods (or both), expert packs (questing packs with heavily reworked recipes, where you need to build elaborate machines and automate stuff Factorio-style)...

I'm not up to date with the modpack scene, so can't really make you a definitive list - back on reddit (sigh) there is a r/feedthebeast community that specializes in modded play.

That said:

• FTB Academy seems to be a pack specifically meant to teach the basics of modded play.
• Project Ozone 3 comes up quite often as a pack with a good quest book that guides you through everything.
• Cottage Witch is what I'm currently starting, it's (so far) a chill magic vanilla+ pack. New creatures, new plants, some new mechanics, tons of new decorations for building.
• Peace of Mind is an older pack made specifically for playing on Peaceful, if mobs are stressing you out. It's got a good questbook too.
• and if you want to jump straight into the deep end... Enigmatica 2 (or 6) Expert, Gregtech New Horizons. Expert packs in which you need to automate everything to progress. Gregtech in particular is infamous for its complexity, difficulty, and length, but if you enjoy solving hard problems it might be for you.

You'll also need a launcher to install these packs - FTB have their own if you want FTB Academy, otherwise there are some options such as Curseforge (do not recommend, eats resources just by existing), Prism (seems to come up a lot as a recommendation), or GDLauncher (what I'm using).

Something kind of adjacent to this happens in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series. Aliens come over to fix the Earth and humanity, but decide that human nature is part of the problem, and set out to modify it. It's a really interesting read.

I was in the mood for a) something that won't require a lot of thinking and b) something high fantasy. So... I started The Way of Kings. I'm not Sanderson's biggest fan, but I can't deny that it's a very quick and fun read (despite its monstrous size). No thoughts, just get swept up in the world and enjoy.

The storm-based worldbuilding is very cool. Coincidentally, I've been playing Against the Storm a lot. Very interesting how a similar base idea (what if we had a world ruled by a cycle of storms?) can go in such different directions.

Spoilery thoughts:

I'm trying to get out of a reading slump I've been in for the last... 3 months? Picked Orconomics to get back into things and just finished it today. Honestly, the first 50% was like pulling teeth. But I got pretty hooked after that, once it really got going and subverting the usual fantasy tropes, and enjoyed it enough that I'll probably read the sequel at some point.

There was just one bit of weirdness that kinda bothered me - in the main cast there were two decently important female characters and they were both absolutely fine, I liked them a lot! But there were just... no other women in this world? No female city guards, innkeepers (there was the innkeeper's wife, I guess, but she was there for a joke), no clerks or managers or shopkeepers. Idk.

...title? Asking for a friend, of course.

Light-ish romances I've read semi-recently: Strange Love by Ann Anguire (fun and surprisingly engaging sci fi alien romance), The Elf Tangent (fantasy adventure).

Not a romance but low brain power required: Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson (young adult fantasy adventure, power of friendship).

Lightning fast read, frequently gets emotional + medium brain power required: Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.

And I personally tend to go for either fanfiction or progression fantasy/litrpg when I want something easy to read. The Wandering Inn was my gateway drug to the former.

Fingers crossed for the surgery! That's very sad that you'll have to miss out :/ Well, at least you didn't get hit with this bs during the trip?

Life has been busy, which means that I've mostly switched into maintenance mode and just read a lot of fanfiction (easily digestable, right there on my phone, familiar characters and tropes - perfect for turning my brain off for a bit). I can't quite decide what "real" book to start next - considering When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain.

Finished The Fifth Season, enjoyed it so much that I have jumped straight into book 2 - The Obelisk Gate. So far I like it slightly less, but it's still very good. It's interesting to see an actual book written at least partially in 2nd person - I'm an avid fanfiction reader and the application of 2nd person in fanfics is... usually really clumsy, so it's refreshing to see that it can be used to great effect.

Currently on a bit of a reading binge (check out my comment from last week for short reviews of new-to-me stuff) but I'm mostly just doing re-reads. The theme seems to be "good people reluctantly do good things and are unhappy about it". First I went through the first 2 Murderbot Diaries novellas, now I'm doing a full re-read of Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy (I maintain that the first book is the best one but they are all quite good). Planning to start The Fifth Season when I'm done, haven't read this one before.

My favourite tactic is based around Hunger of Hadar, a Warlock spell that creates a zone that a) deals damage to everything in it at the start and end of its turn; b) is difficult terrain (aka slows everything down); c) blinds everything in it; d) best of all, has no save. Plonk it down in the middle of the enemy team, use another control spell to slow everyone inside even more, use shove/repelling blast/whatever to push anything that's made its way to the edge back to the middle. Wait for everything to die, rinse & repeat.

But the greatest cheese in the game must be casting darkness (or shooting arrow of darkness) on your own party. As long as you're inside the cloud you are basically untargettable by spells and ranged attacks - and the enemies don't seem to be smart ebough to be throwing Fireballs on just any weird clouds they see. On your turn you just need to step out, cast/shoot, step back in. The only way they can get you is if they come inside the cloud with you (aka in range of whoever is on blender duty, Lae'zel or Karlach like this posting a lot), and the AI gets a bit confused when it can't see you so it's not a sure bet that they'll even try. It's a thing of beauty.