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LionArcher posted:I just started reading the first book for the first time. I have friends that are very excited about reading it. I'm twenty pages in and so far, this is not as good as wheel of time. The first book is fine. Nothing amazing, but serviceable genre fantasy that is kept buoyant by the promise of more. It and Lost share a lot in that regard actually.
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Nov 10, 2021 03:41
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PJOmega posted:The first book is fine. Nothing amazing, but serviceable genre fantasy that is kept buoyant by the promise of more. I think the initial season of Lost was better than NotW but you're 100% correct in your description of the 1st book. The second book makes it abundantly clear that any good writing in the first was a fluke while Slow Regard screams it in your face. 
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Nov 10, 2021 04:05
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I thought the first book was ponderous and terrible from the start and was baffled that it received the praise it did. If you don't like it, there's no reason to force yourself to finish it. It goes nowhere and there's nothing worth reading that follows.
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Nov 10, 2021 09:24
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I checked out when after nothing happening for the whole book he had a literal random encounter with a dragon to inject some drama into the ending, if that's the high point of the series I really don't want to see how book 2 went
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Nov 10, 2021 09:32
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Evil Fluffy posted:I think the initial season of Lost was better than NotW but you're 100% correct in your description of the 1st book. Yeah, the lost comparison is simply the analogy I reached for off the cuff. It's the mystery box style of writing. Scandal is another good example, where the show presents it as a intricate mystery that is being revealed to the viewer, where in reality the writers also have no clue what the mystery truly is. It breaks the covenant between reader/watcher and writer. A mystery novel has to be written to fairly treat the reader as capable, and a good construction is to start with what really happened so the journey to that information feels solid and fair. WMF is benign, with prose that feels good if you're treating it like a summer beach book and don't think about what any of it means. It falls apart on even mild musing, but a lot of genre fans don't do that, because doing that would risk a huge house of cards given the garbage we've all read. It plods, it meanders, but with the promise of revealing what's behind the curtain that obscures the connection between the Harry Potter fanfic and the framing narrative. A well written book is a well written book, but the mystery box could be anything. It could even be a well written book! Hell, the person who gushed about WMF to me for 6 hours from the passenger seat was someone who, at 24 years old, was a staunch advocate for how "wonderful and deep" Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series was. That's the sort of person who heaps praise endlessly on Rothfuss' work.
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Nov 10, 2021 13:38
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multijoe posted:I checked out when after nothing happening for the whole book he had a literal random encounter with a dragon to inject some drama into the ending, if that's the high point of the series I really don't want to see how book 2 went I enjoyed both books but I totally checked out for the faerie sex goddess chapter. It was so awkward and immersion breaking I had to skip it.
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Nov 10, 2021 13:47
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If you want to read a book that actually delves into how deeply weird and disturbing fairy sex goddess sex would be, go read one of my favorite book series: The Wizard Knight. It does literally every single thing Name of the Wind does but taken to their logical conclusion. The main character is the best sex haver, the best warrior, the best wizard, the best knight, the bravest Chad, and heck even his parents are the most dead. He's also the best liar, so the book even handles the unreliable narrator in a way that Rothfuss fans are pretending he's going to pull off. There's a mysterious cosmology and sky angels who can gently caress things up, plus dragons that aren't really dragons as a bonus. It's great. And like the King Killer saga, it's only two books. Except these include a coherent beginning and a conclusive end. Plus the parts in the middle connect those two things and are fun to read. Go read it. Edit: I forgot to mention that The Wizard Knight is also a chronicle of the titular character's adventures seen in retrospect. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Nov 10, 2021 |
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Nov 10, 2021 15:33
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Yeah, Kingkiller seems to come off as someone trying to ape Wolfe... Except I'm not sure Rothfuss has ever heard of Wolfe.
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Nov 10, 2021 17:03
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Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner is basically the fairy sex chapter stretched out into a full novel with better prose and, somehow, more plot than both of Rothfuss' books.
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Nov 10, 2021 17:42
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Hexel posted:I enjoyed both books but I totally checked out for the faerie sex goddess chapter. Did you skip the barmaid with her sexdar or his trip to the land of sex ninjas who somehow don't know very basic things about biology that humanity has known for literally thousands of years and Kvothe tries his best to educate the ignorant (matriarchal) society about it and fails? WMF is just such a poo poo-tier book that I honestly can't understands how people like it even if they liked NotW. Or especially if they like NotW because the stuff NotW does to disprove the legends about Kvothe is completely tossed out the window repeatedly in WMF which goes full blown "nope all those things are true and EVEN MORE AWESOME RAD.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:05
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starting to think rothfuss found the manuscript of NOTW in the trash and stuck his name on it.
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Nov 10, 2021 23:12
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multijoe posted:I checked out when after nothing happening for the whole book he had a literal random encounter with a dragon to inject some drama into the ending, if that's the high point of the series I really don't want to see how book 2 went You're really underselling the encounter with the dragon. It absolutely is the pinnacle of Rothfuss' writing. First off, the setup for that encounter features the two worst scenes from the book: - bartering for a horse, which is supposed to be an expensive black horse, but actually just had its hair died black and then it washes away in the first stream they cross. this has no impact on anything. - a high-stakes conversation with a hillbilly farmer where Kvothe has to lay on a fake hick accent or else ??? also no impact on anything. Then, it turns out the dragon got high on shrooms or whatever. But wait! There's more! The reason Kvothe went to see the dragon was because he heard a rumour about blue fire in the area, which had something to do with the Chandrian (these are the villains who killed his parents, remember?). But it turns out to just be the dragon, so it was a false lead. But somewhere in there, Rothfuss drops a note that actually yes there were Chandrian(s) in the nearby village just earlier, and they had uhh I dunno stolen something from a house but for whatever reason Kvothe missed this clue and ended up learning nothing about the Chandrian, again making the whole trip pointless. Oh, except he could have taken advantage of Denna but didn't.
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Nov 10, 2021 23:35
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It's not a dragon; it's a draccus, which is a gigantic fire-breathing lizard that inspired the legends told about dragons, which are not real, unlike the draccus.
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Nov 11, 2021 |
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Nov 10, 2021 23:56
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I feel like I forgot that part of the book
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Nov 11, 2021 00:04
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Sham bam bamina! posted:It's not a dragon; it's a draccus, which is a gigantic fire-breathing lizard that inspired the legends told about dragons, which are not real, unlike the draccus. That whole section really rubbed me the wrong way. Just pointless pedantry.
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Nov 11, 2021 00:07
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It mirrors the song and dance about breaking down the sensationalized legend of Kvothe to reveal the real Kvothe who is also an epic badass.
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Nov 11, 2021 00:16
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TV Zombie posted:I feel like I forgot that part of the book Same. Just about all of my memories of the books are just of his time at the Hogwarts knockoff. And when he got tuned up by a couple of redshirts in his own place of business. Fraud.
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Nov 11, 2021 00:19
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Hughmoris posted:And when he got tuned up by a couple of redshirts in his own place of business. Fraud. See, this part could be cool if it was being written by a better author. The legends make Kvothe out to be a consummate badass, the story he's telling make him out to be a badass, but he gets his rear end whooped. What changed? There's an interesting story there! Rothfuss will, of course, handwave it away and tell us we wouldn't find it entertaining, much like the pirate adventure.
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Nov 11, 2021 01:47
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Ornamented Death posted:could be cool if it was being written by a better author rothfuss.txt
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Nov 11, 2021 01:57
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I will take the threads advice and not return until I've finished the two books. I'm behind in epic fantasy of the last ten years, and need to read it all before I start really working on my epic fantasy series I've finally committed to start working on in 2022. (I already have the first main 7 book series mapped out, but I need to read the major players to make sure I'm keeping it fresh).
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Nov 11, 2021 02:11
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Godspeed on your endeavor.
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Nov 11, 2021 03:57
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TV Zombie posted:I feel like I forgot that part of the book I wish I forgot all parts of all his books. Though I guess that means I'd run the risk of reading NotW again because I wouldn't know how bad of a shitshow awaits. Ornamented Death posted:See, this part could be cool if it was being written by a better author. The legends make Kvothe out to be a consummate badass, the story he's telling make him out to be a badass, but he gets his rear end whooped. What changed? There's an interesting story there! Rothfuss doesn't even stay consistent on what he claims the series is about. Stuff like the "bloodless" legend just being the result of him taking some herb/drug/whatever before being punished and it affected his circulatory system or "learned an entire language in a day" when he just learned a single sentence at least played to the whole "no my legend is bullshit and here's the normal poo poo people turned into legend" has promise in the hands of a good author (IE, not Rothfuss). But then you get the "well it's a draccus which is literally a dragon in all ways except exact spelling" stuff which is stupid pedantry and then the Felurian poo poo followed by his being trained by the sex ninjas in their fighting style (something they were going to execute his friend for doing since it's a severe taboo?) which is a complete 180 and effectively "yes those over the top awesome legends are real and I just rule that much" back-patting instead of his original claim that the legends were bullshit. The "and there was a pirate adventure but you know about that so who cares" thing was a special kind of fart huffing that I don't think Rothfuss matched until his "well if you think Slow Regard is bad it's clearly just not for you  " commentary later for that book.
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Nov 11, 2021 06:21
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LionArcher posted:I will take the threads advice and not return until I've finished the two books. I'm behind in epic fantasy of the last ten years, and need to read it all before I start really working on my epic fantasy series I've finally committed to start working on in 2022. (I already have the first main 7 book series mapped out, but I need to read the major players to make sure I'm keeping it fresh). My advice would be to read actual good authors of classic literature and to learn what makes them effective and try to do that instead of reading Harry Potter fanfic in an attempt to "stay fresh".
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Nov 11, 2021 06:57
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PJOmega posted:Hell, the person who gushed about WMF to me for 6 hours from the passenger seat was someone who, at 24 years old, was a staunch advocate for how "wonderful and deep" Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series was. That's the sort of person who heaps praise endlessly on Rothfuss' work. Was he wearing a tooth?
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Nov 11, 2021 14:38
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My favorite part is the clearly another-short-story-Rothfuss-wrote-that-he-patched-in time Kvothe spent in Tarbean as a penniless orphan that he spent being beaten up, robbed, frozen, filthy and malnourished but when it's time for him to go to Hogwarts he takes one bath and suddenly he could be mistaken for a nobleman because the entire Tarbean plot was just spinning wheels until Kvothe was old enough to go to Hogwarts without it being completely baffling why anyone at Wizard College gives a 15-16 year old the time of day.
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Nov 11, 2021 16:48
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Atlas Hugged posted:My advice would be to read actual good authors of classic literature and to learn what makes them effective and try to do that instead of reading Harry Potter fanfic in an attempt to "stay fresh". Yeah, good fantasy/adventure/sci fi authors are inspired by good literature while bad ones only consumed genre so they produce photocopies of photocopies, each degrading in quality. A couple of years ago I read The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco and through that book you can see how his youthful interests in comics and aventure serials were later tempered by classical literature and academia and that's how we got some great mistery (Name of the Rose) and fantasy adventure (Baudolino) books. The best advice I can give if you want to write is always read more and varied literature. Sure, toss an Abercrombie there once in a while so you can understand the prose and what works and doesn't work for you, but don't limit yourself to only fantasy books
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Nov 11, 2021 17:53
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Yes, do you want to write The DaVinci Code or Foucault's Pendulum?
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Nov 11, 2021 21:21
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Right, I've been reading Rose Tremain lately and her understanding of character, motivation, plot structure, and, frankly, magic is head and shoulders above most fantasy I've ever read, and this includes novels that I really, really like. If you want prose that begs to be read, check out "Sacred Country" and "Music and Silence". Having read the latter, if she wanted to write "Game of Thrones", she loving could have, and it would have been a far more tightly crafted novel.
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Nov 12, 2021 00:44
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PeterWeller posted:Yes, do you want to write The DaVinci Code or Foucault's Pendulum? The Davinci Pendumlum. No I'm thinking.. the Focault Code. To be fair, the Davinci code sold a lot of copies.
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Nov 12, 2021 01:12
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pseudanonymous posted:The Davinci Pendumlum. No I'm thinking.. the Focault Code. To be fair, the Davinci code sold a lot of copies. Every era of literature has writers that sold tons of copies in their lifetime and then vanished entirely from the popular consciousness in a generation. 50 years from now he'll be little more than a stack of books in used bookstores. 100, a footnote in histories of 21st century pop culture. 200? Forgotten entirely.
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Nov 12, 2021 01:22
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Atlas Hugged posted:Every era of literature has writers that sold tons of copies in their lifetime and then vanished entirely from the popular consciousness in a generation. 50 years from now he'll be little more than a stack of books in used bookstores. 100, a footnote in histories of 21st century pop culture. 200? Forgotten entirely. My point was more like, a lot of revered and known artists are poor and Dan Brown gets to do whatever the gently caress he wants. People might want to write marketable fiction rather than "good" fiction.
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Nov 12, 2021 02:26
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pseudanonymous posted:My point was more like, a lot of revered and known artists are poor and Dan Brown gets to do whatever the gently caress he wants. I realized that after I made my post. It's the fundamental choice of the creative: sell out and make bank or go for legacy and risk dying impoverished and unknown.
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Nov 12, 2021 03:07
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Atlas Hugged posted:I realized that after I made my post. It's the fundamental choice of the creative: sell out and make bank or go for legacy and risk dying impoverished and unknown. Well hopefully there's either a middle-ground or else producing some things for money or to establish a name and then doing some better or more artistic things.
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Nov 12, 2021 04:11
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Atlas Hugged posted:If you want to read a book that actually delves into how deeply weird and disturbing fairy sex goddess sex would be, go read one of my favorite book series: The Wizard Knight. The first time I read it I dug book 1 but couldn't figure out why nothing happened in book 2. Then I read it again after some time had passed and holy yowza was book 2 chock full o' stuff. Looking forward to reading it book form again. Or listening to one of the other audio narrations of it. For whatever reason Wizard Knight has like 4 different audiobook versions while Return to the Whorl, the last book in a 12-book series, has 0 audiobook recordings. Gonna have to do one myself just so my roommate will finish the series. And for those who're wondering (originally typoed without that apostrophe which was strangely prescient), I have it on good authority that WMF is pretty jarring in audiobook form as well.
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Nov 12, 2021 06:15
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It's a shame that Book of the Short Sun seems to be so less well-known than Book of the New Sun because it had a way bigger impact on me than New Sun did. Silk and Horn are such fascinating protagonists. I only read Wizard Knight for the first time over the summer and it was loving fantastic from beginning to end. My personal interpretation of the book was it's the story of a DnD campaign where they really needed one more player but he's a giant rear end in a top hat who abuses the system and makes everything about him, so they kill him off but then don't have enough players to continue the campaign, so they bring him back and again he just ruins the experience for everyone before they're forced to retire his character once again. The ending of the story is that once again they're thinking about inviting him back, but he's finally discovered girls and he's pretty happy just chilling with his girlfriend and driving his Camaro around. I know that this is almost certainly not what the book is about, but that's how I saw it.
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Nov 12, 2021 08:21
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pseudanonymous posted:The Davinci Pendumlum. No I'm thinking.. the Focault Code. To be fair, the Davinci code sold a lot of copies. And got made into a Tom Hanks movie! Atlas Hugged posted:I realized that after I made my post. It's the fundamental choice of the creative: sell out and make bank or go for legacy and risk dying impoverished and unknown. It's the choice Achilles had to make: die comfortably and be forgotten or die on some foreign shore and hope to be immortalized.
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Nov 12, 2021 22:29
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Kchama posted:My favorite part is the clearly another-short-story-Rothfuss-wrote-that-he-patched-in time Kvothe spent in Tarbean as a penniless orphan that he spent being beaten up, robbed, frozen, filthy and malnourished but when it's time for him to go to Hogwarts he takes one bath and suddenly he could be mistaken for a nobleman because the entire Tarbean plot was just spinning wheels until Kvothe was old enough to go to Hogwarts without it being completely baffling why anyone at Wizard College gives a 15-16 year old the time of day. And that's after effortlessly living on his own in the forest for months (years?). If life in Tarbean was that bad, he could have just...left again?
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Nov 12, 2021 22:50
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Tarbean almost made me stop reading NotW and I think I kept going just to see what the payoff was to this bizarre period of Kvothe suffering on the streets when he'd already shown he could survive in the woods on his own (which also made no sense because his entertainer family weren't woodsmen).
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Nov 13, 2021 03:55
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It rules that he goes through that and later shames the reader for not having been truly poor if you're not ashamed of your shabby clothes in front of your rich friends Smashing skulls to survive the roving rape gangs as a child is nothing compared to awkward social expectations
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Nov 13, 2021 05:31
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Rothfuss only went through one of these, and he really wants you to understand just how terrible it was.
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Nov 13, 2021 08:32
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