I finished Stavely's The Emperor's Blades. While I get why people like it, and there were plenty of parts I liked, there was a lot I didn't like. It takes forever to get going. Maybe I've read too much Appendix N, but anytime a book goes over 400 pages, I feel like it has to work that much harder to justify its length. The other thing is that there's a bunch of baked-in sexism - the way women are described, the fact that of the three POV characters, it's the woman that gets maybe a third the number of chapters of the other two, if that.
Now I'm re-reading The Silmarillion. It's been seven years since my last read-through of it, and after watching Rings of Power, I feel like I need to revisit it.