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I'm about 400 pages into "The Name of the Wind" and I'm kind of underwhelmed. A lot of it comes across as amateur and poorly researched. I'm trying to figure out why a quasi-medieval setting has the same distinctions between sciences that we do, with a few fake magic ones thrown in for good measure of course. Those are very, very modern concepts. Medieval universities didn't really divide things up like that. I guess it could be for convenience, but GRRM's maesters seem to do the same thing way better. Also, does Kvothe ever do anything other than be great at everything he does and get sabotaged by the evils of others? I'm trying to figure out why I should care about him as a protagonist. I know he survives up until he buys the inn, so there's no tension at all, but I feel like there's not actually a story here. A bunch of stuff has happened, but there's no plot. Does that pick up or do I have to wait until book 2?
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Oct 26, 2012 05:11
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I'm just trying to figure out why they discuss chemistry and biology but they aren't industrialized and there hasn't been a single mention of a powerful enough microscope to actually look at a cell. How is that they have an understanding of germs and chemical formulas, but all of their medicine is crushed up herbs? They have vast, vast knowledge and understanding of intricate and complicated concepts, but no technology. You can say it's not medieval, but it is. It's rural farmers, knights with swords, kings, dukes, lords, and ladies. People play lutes and harps. No one writes symphonies. Things don't really seem to fit well together. They have a clear distinction of physics as a discipline, but it was only in recent memory that they figured out how to build a lute with metal strings. Literacy is hinted at not being widespread, but we've never met an illiterate character. Everyone travels by horse and buggy, but they have the ability to produce near limitless energy. And this might come across as nitpicky, but how did Kvothe spend three years of his life struggling to survive when he had knowledge of magic and the ability to perform it at will the entire time? The entire middle section of the book never mentions sympathy. It falls out of the story completely until they reach the University and he has near complete knowledge of it again. It's not like he was incapable of getting supplies either. He picked locks, saved up money to set a person on fire, and could get basic stuff from the dude who helped kids. Tell me that at no point he thought about using his amazing abilities to his advantage.
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Oct 26, 2012 06:08
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Above Our Own posted:I'm willing to accept that he didn't practice sympathy for a while due to severe psychological trauma. Kvothe was completely neurotic, although he did snap out of it kind of suddenly. I would be willing to buy it if he ever mentioned that as a reason. He talked about how traumatized he was in relation to not doing other stuff, but sympathy is just completely dropped in that entire section of the book. It's as if it no longer exists in the world at all. And then he is suddenly doing it so well in the University that he's the best duelist and can embarrass a Master. It's just another weird disconnect. For some reason he has to spend months getting back into practice with a lute, but an incredibly taxing mental ability comes back to him without even trying. I think I might enjoy the book more if I read it from the perspective that Chronicler is actually just a psychologist trying to better understand the long term effects of frequent and severe concussions in people and Kvothe is his case study. I mean, Kvothe is regularly getting the tar beat out of him, but he doesn't seem to suffer any long term injuries from it at all.
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Oct 26, 2012 06:36
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Kynetx posted:Fine. Point being that calculus existed in a time before the germ theory of disease, which I use to illustrate the point that technologies don't advance at equal rates. The difference being that since things didn't develop equally, there weren't clear cut distinctions between disciplines. New disciplines emerged as things developed. This world has clean cut distinctions between all major disciplines that align exactly with our own. It's silly.
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Nov 1, 2012 11:02
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Above Our Own posted:Something that sets apart good authors is the enormous amount of research they put into their settings. "BUT IT'S FANTASY" Just look at The Baroque Cycle. That's how you do a book that tackles academia. I know "The Name of the Wind" isn't earth, but it felt just like earth. It felt like a bitter guy writing fanfiction about the American college experience where this time he was the most popular and everyone thought he was awesome and he really got the best of that jerk who picked on him and was better than him at everything to boot. Also, I don't feel like the DaVinci comparison is fair at all. DaVinci had awesome to crazy ideas but no real way to implement them. A lot of them are analogous to modern day inventions, but it's not like he actually was flying around in a helicopter. The technology just wasn't there for it. The collective "know-how" didn't exist and he wasn't exactly influential in their creation. Kvothe's world doesn't have that problem. The knowledge is all there and readily available to anyone who goes to the University, which is well known and frequented by the nobility and scholars from all over the world. The knowledge is helpfully categorized with masters in every major known field. They have the means to produce reactions and mechanical devices and then they do nothing with that knowledge. It's just that Kvothe is such a super special snow-flake that he does things no one else can do, for some reason. It's like everyone else is just perfectly happy with the status quo, except for that one master who wants a perpetually burning candle even though such a device is completely worthless in their world. But still he's the only one that seems to express creativity. Maybe the story later tries to justify Kvothe by having him be some hero from prophecy, but it seems like he's only special because the author wanted a super awesome kick butt great at everything protagonist.
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Nov 1, 2012 15:34
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Yeah but if you want a believable, cohesive medieval-renaissance-fantasy world you need to stick a little closer to those historical settings before branching off with wizards and poo poo so you don't end up with something that doesn't make sense internally.
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That reminds me of what people were saying about how if guys like Newton could suddenly come up with fantastic ideas, then Kvothe could do the same. This is dumb for two reasons. First, Newton himself admits that he didn't do anything special. He was just building on the work other people had done and it was inevitable that we'd make the discoveries he did. Second, he wasn't even unique because other people were independently making the exact same advances he was at the same time! Is anyone else in the story comparable to Kvothe? Who is his Leibniz? And I don't just mean "rival". Leibniz was actually better than Newton in some ways and his model of the universe seems to be more relevant today than Newton's. Besides, Newton was far from a perfect person. He had truly terrible flaws. While being particularly good at math and optics, he was a superstitious Christian occultist who believed in alchemy. He was also a total dick and was notorious for being jealous of who got credit for what. This makes him way more interesting than Kvothe as well because while he was certainly brilliant, he was also completely wrong about some things and had real weaknesses as a person.
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Nov 1, 2012 16:57
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Kynetx posted:If memory serves, it's mentioned in the first book that sympathetic devices are a luxury item out of the reach of all but the most wealthy companies and individuals. It's pretty apparent that for all the technical ability of the educated classes, they haven't tackled transportation in any meaningful way, which might explain the high cost of technology. To me, there are just so many obvious things that could be done with the abilities they have that people aren't doing and it doesn't make any sense that they're not doing it. Why isn't the University the wealthiest place in the world? Why are they bothering with tuition? What exactly is their motivation? Are they a repository of knowledge? Keepers of secrets? Do they want to better the world? Or are they out to use their knowledge to earn a profit. It seems like it's a pretty open secret that they just suck money from the wealthy in order to better themselves. So why go through the trouble of the tuition system? It seems perfectly designed to keep brilliant but poor people out of the club (which seems to be exactly what Rothfuss wanted since it's a major plot point of book 1, but then it's just a tool of the plot and doesn't actually make any sense). Why aren't all students required to produce basic sympathetic devices that the university sells to the elite at exorbitant prices? It seems like the work is not only voluntary, but they prefer you to spend your time studying than taking up odd tasks if you're not ready for it. This implies that their goal is to spread knowledge, but then why put an artificial barrier on that? The transportation thing boggles my mind too. They have near infinite energy and ways to cause things to rotate indefinitely. You could literally just have some kids cranking a wheel in shifts to power a locomotive type device across huge distances. It only took us a hundred years or so (and certainly less than two hundred) between the first modern steam engines and functional vehicles. It's stated over and over again that it's been a couple of hundred years since the majority of people stopped burning them at the stake. But that doesn't imply that their knowledge only recently grew, just that their numbers did and their practices could be done more openly. They've had centuries to work on incredibly basic ideas to overcome barriers of transportation or produce devastating weapons, but no one has done it. It's not like people with these skills are bound to the University for life. They get expelled. There are even chapters dedicated to the training of students dueling other students. You'd think the world would be ravaged by rogues selling ideas to rich kings and the University sending teams of assassins to hunt them down. But everyone seems to honorably stick to a code where they don't want people to start burning them at the stake again. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
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Nov 2, 2012 03:17
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It's more than just the hard magic system not making sense with the level of technology they have. The entire University system is like a bizarre parody of the real world. That would be fine if this were a satire or a social commentary, but it's written completely straight. The knowledge they work with is known to cause students to break under pressure and minds to completely snap resulting in madmen with magical powers, and yet they still use public whippings as punishment even though psychology was a defined field that Kvothe mentioned and they seem to have decent mental health facilities. I'm expected to believe that no one has suggested that they stop causing extreme physical and mental trauma to students? One of the Masters is a complete shithead infamous for actively working against the progression of students who aren't complete sycophants and holds a lifelong grudge against someone who had the gall to be as smart as he was at a young age. This is known to all of the other masters and yet nothing is done to try and reign in his abuse of power. He also came across as incredibly stupid (and petty) for thinking he could trick a council of the most educated men in the world into believing his story when there was an entire lecture hall full of people who could attest to the contrary. It's every bad cliche of the world's worst professors rolled into one. Let's also not forget that he's completely loving bloodthirsty. Try to imagine what Kvothe must have looked like after his first week of classes. He spent the majority of his adolescence being regularly beaten and surviving on rotten scraps. It's even mentioned in the scene where he gets stitched up how incredibly skinny he is. If Master Dickhead had gotten his way, Kvothe would have died, but until Kvothe mentioned the room full of witnesses that could back him up, none of the other masters batted an eye at a dozen lashes. Why is the food so awful? This seems nitpicky, but it really underscores why this comes across as a satire of American college life. These guys are paying exorbitant fees in tuition on a bimonthly basis. Surely some of that could be spared for decent food. Someone must have figured out that good nutrition leads to healthy people, which in turn means better students. Again, they're constantly worried about mental breakdowns, but they feed the students poo poo! They go through the entire examination and tuition interview process every two months. All research and work is being done manually, right? When the hell do they have time to get anything else done? So as a parody of the American college experience, it works perfectly. You have the crusty old dean, unnecessarily cruel punishments, terrible food, cramped living conditions, arbitrary barriers to advancement, and tuition rates that only the super elite can easily afford. And we're expected to believe that this system has not only existed, but flourished for centuries!
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Nov 2, 2012 06:22
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Well, at least with the American military there are a ton of fingers in the pot pulling things in different directions so much so that one area may not actually have any idea what another is doing to explain it. It's also not like the budget is unaccounted for. Exactly where is the money in the University going? How much do these masters earn? What's the upkeep like there? They're not producing fighter jets. They're not maintaining aircraft carriers. The quantity of money being discussed in a single student's tuition is enough to feed a family for a year or more in some circumstances. How is the world able to sustain that much money being funneled into one place? Part of the US military's problem is that the soldiers are also seen as disposable. Are we also supposed to think that students at the University are disposable? How many wealthy families exist in this world to supply a constant supply of new applicants to replace the ones being washed out every term? Edit: We're also aware of the problems in the US military and at least pay lip service to trying and improving the conditions. The way things are the University are just accepted at face value, which is exactly why it seems like satire of real world institutions. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Nov 2, 2012 |
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Nov 2, 2012 06:42
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TychoCelchuuu posted:Yeah I guess it sort of doesn't make much sense. Oh well. Honestly, it wouldn't bother me nearly as much as it does if there was a story to go along with the world building. The focal point becomes this world and how it works because there's not a plot running along with Kvothe's narrative.
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Nov 2, 2012 07:29
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I suspend disbelief so long as what I get out of the story is thematically consistent. I'm not too worried if all of the parts don't line up just right so long as it's clear that the holes are allowing the author to write a better story. However, holes bother me when they're unnecessary or are there for convenience. The problem with the holes in The Name of the Wind is that they come across as artificial just to work against Kvothe rather than seeming like organic parts of the world. On top of that, there's no plot. Kvothe just does stuff or stuff happens to him, but nothing feels narratively related. So far, it's just a sequence of events. This is why I'm giving up on the series after the first book. There's an entire novel full of weird inconsistencies in the world that the author is building but accepting them and moving on doesn't leave me with a fulfilling story. Those plot holes aren't serving an overall theme. I don't feel like Rothfuss has something important to tell me that those plot holes are assisting.
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Nov 2, 2012 08:11
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Fallorn posted:I think a whole lot of the money goes toward But they don't actually need the rich people to attend. They need smart people to attend. Most wealthy folk only go for a few terms before washing out. Things would be far less precarious if they just sold highly convenient devices to the wealthy at super high prices while letting the intelligent people continue to make advances. Kynetx posted:Hah... funny you should mention that, but I'm paying 10-grand a year for my son's boarding ALONE, at a state college in which he's a resident. I KNOW my wife and I don't spend more than 75% of that on groceries, and we don't try to be thrifty. $10,000 for boarding, I'm assuming that includes a room, right? I guess I'm curious what kind of setup he's got. When I was in college, it was actually far more affordable to rent an apartment and buy groceries than to live in the dorms and use a meal plan. The situation in the book is the opposite of that. The dorms and lousy food the school provide are actually the affordable ones. Either way, the way college education is set up in America right now is leading to a lot of social strain and bad financing. Their world doesn't seem to have all of the same institutions as ours, but the loans have been used to utterly ruin people. It's exactly why I said it comes across as satire. The problem is that reading it as satire doesn't do anything for the story. And I don't inherently dislike the mechanics of the magic system. I just think if you're going to have hard and fast rules for magic, you have to take them to their logical extremes and if you don't, there need to be good explanations as to why things stopped where they did. What exactly is holding these people back? This is why Brandon Sanderson is such a great writer. He answers those questions, often times by leaving holes out in the open, and then revealing that that's the major plot of the book. Maybe Rothfuss is playing a really slow burn and he's going to totally pull the rug out from under us. That would actually be interesting.
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Nov 2, 2012 16:42
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and sending people out into the world to find books/other strange things and bringing them back. Think of it as the funding for a secret adventure club. That and the transport cost of some of the supplies has out be outrageous with crappy roads and no trains.
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Prop Wash posted:I agree with you that there's a lot of stupid nitpicking in this thread and it's hurt the overall debate, like the dude up there who pointed out that the university charges more than an average person's income per year. Way to be dumb, dude. Likewise it's not a requirement to have a small treatise at the back of each book on the magic system. We're reading a novel, not a I think you missed my point on the cost of the University completely. Obviously, that's exactly how it is in America. It becomes an on the nose parody. Reading the book as parody doesn't improve the story, so what benefit is there in the book to making it that way other than to act as an artificial barrier on Kvothe personally. No one else seems to have any trouble with it. It's a Kvothe problem even though it should have far reaching implications. Yes, we hear about loan sharks and the like, but we don't see the consequences of these things. They're brought in exclusively to be problems for Kvothe to deal with. It makes the story come across like a console RPG. Kvothe has to deal with these little sidequests that should be causing problems for everyone, but really are just waiting for him to activate the quest. As for the magic system, the author doesn't have to explain all the ins and outs of it, but every time they go to the trouble of making the rules clear, it's begging the reader to ask why things aren't done differently. I totally agree with GRRM on this aspect. Magic should be used in small amounts to spice up a story. Unless you happen to be Brandon Sanderson, it's best to just leave it alone. Had he left it at the vague powers of Naming, it wouldn't be begging for people to ask, "Well, why the gently caress don't they do X, Y, and Z?" Edit: And all of my responses lately have been aimed specifically at the idea that The Name of the Wind has interesting world building. It's a weird hodgepodge of things Rothfuss thought would be interesting in a fantasy setting that are more or less lifted wholesale from our world with a twist (Alchemy and Chemistry only share a building) with plot convenient devices stapled on and a variety of magic systems that he didn't really think through. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Nov 3, 2012 |
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Nov 3, 2012 02:35
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Above Our Own posted:I'm not sure if you're aware that he literally wrote this story while he was a penniless college student and published it with minimal structural changes. I'm aware. Do the conditions under which he wrote the story make it more interesting?The story has to stand on its own merits. I can't even tell you how many creative writing teachers told me, "Don't write something just because it really happened or it's based in fact. Write something that's actually interesting."
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Nov 3, 2012 04:55
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Ornamented Death posted:Someone finds all of this interesting, otherwise Rothfuss's books wouldn't have shown up on the NYT bestsellers list. I'd say Rothfuss took similar advice to heart and made a boatload of money off of it. Honestly, it comes across as the male version of Twilight to me. Wouldn't it be awesome to be Kvothe. He's smarter than everyone. He's great at everything he does. Women swoon for him. And he can play Selling well isn't really any kind of indication of quality. Compare The Name of the Wind to Elantris, Sanderson's first published book. Even if the story is a little slow to get started and the language isn't great, everything is internally consistent and there aren't glaring holes in how his societies would actually function. Aside from that, the characters are actually interesting, especially the villain. Though it would later turn out that Sanderson can only write one woman, it was fun the first time. Above Our Own posted:Uh you misunderstand me completely. I am not justifying any of the authorial problems in the book. You seem to think I'm implying that the book should be given some kind of leniency for some reason. I've said repeatedly in this thread that I think one of Rothfuss' major mistakes as a writer was choosing to hold on to his angst-ridden college fantasy escapism story instead of creating something new with more technical maturity. My mistake! I wasn't sure if you were implying he should be given leniency, the books really are a parody of American college life, or if you were agreeing with me.
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Nov 3, 2012 07:56
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Fallorn posted:Then again that was like the 12th novel sanderson wrote. First one to get published. Every time he poops he comes out of the bathroom with a chapter finished. Every long plane ride he has most of a novel. Hence the italics. Sanderson certainly loves the first book he wrote, but he knew better than to try and get it published right away. He's been sitting on it for years and still intends to go back to it someday, but it will be nearly unrecognizable from the draft he wrote the first time around.
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Nov 4, 2012 06:20
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Sophia posted:So when someone says "but why is it like this" everyone can say "magic and history to be further revealed later" and it's like okay, I guess that's possible. The story isn't over yet after all. As someone already said, this would be fine if the narrative being told was actually one worth reading. Kvothe's life story is incredibly dull. For all the adversity, for all the triumphs and failures, there's not really much to it. There's no glue linking the little anecdotes of how awesome, and tough, and brave, and smart he is. Stuff happens, but there's no plot. There are characters, but there's no depth. A twist without the rest is just a twist, and why should we care?
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Nov 7, 2012 15:44
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Kynetx posted:Why... Why are you reading this thread/these books/staying current with the new book's progress if you feel this way? I'm not actually. I just recently read book one and have been discussing it since. I'm not motivated at all to read book two. That doesn't mean I can't discuss ideas with other people about it. Frankly, I'm curious what other people see in it and that's basically what the discussion has been about. Hence why we've been discussing Rothfuss's ability as a world builder and the merits of the narrative. When the discussion moves to plot speculation for the next book, I'll have nothing to add and will probably stop folowing the thread all together.
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Nov 8, 2012 03:18
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MoreLikeTen posted:Holy poo poo, some people hated these books. Is it because Kvothe is too It has less to do with Kvothe being super special because there's a greater than zero chance he's an unreliable narrator. The problem is that the story Kvothe is relating, true or not, is completely uninteresting. Things happen, but there's not a plot. Other than through the title of the series, there's nothing in the first 400 pages that motivates the story forward. At least, that's how I feel.
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Nov 19, 2012 01:44
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? This is a serious question because I love them and so do 100% of the people who I have recommended these to, so I was unprepared to find a different opinion.
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Flatscan posted:Didn't GRRM creep out Emilia Clarke so much that she had her contract renegotiated to add a no-nudity clause? It must have been at this point that GRRM decided to write a scene where she poo poo out a river of blood while vomiting and decided never to conclude her plotline.
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Nov 25, 2012 14:37
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I think GRRM has even gone on record saying he wishes that most of the child characters were started a bit older. I can't confirm that though. Also, GRRM can always try and get a pass for the ages of the characters because of the setting. Young girls really were married off at stupidly young ages. It certainly doesn't make it right. And it's not something that necessarily needs to be included in a book because it's true, but there is historic precedent.
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Nov 26, 2012 08:43
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It's OK to like a thing, but this remains one of the few books that I have given away before I finished it because I just couldn't bring myself to read any more of it. It's awful. If you want to read a book that is an account of events where you don't know if the "author" is presenting things as they "really" happened, where you can sympathize with the main character despite his perhaps being too good at what he does based on his own version of events, then go read "The Shadow of the Torturer". As was said above, for someone who claims to "love words", Rothfuss isn't particularly good at putting them together, and the story isn't compelling enough in its own right to ignore that. If you compare basically any passage written by Gene Wolfe to something by Rothfuss, this becomes immediately apparent. And given how long-winded Rothfuss is, I just don't have time for it. So, thank you Lamps for putting yourself through this and writing up your thoughts as you continuously subject yourself to some kind of post-modern torture.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:39
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Except we already have the first chunk of the book with him as a street urchin and it's super loving boring. Maybe if you dropped that altogether or significantly reduced it or better yet, made it all happen in the same city and it progresses directly from him being a poor street urchin just trying to survive to him applying the tricks of his trade to sneak into the academy. Basically it would have to be an entirely different book.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:56
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Solice Kirsk posted:"I moved from Like Pad On Still Water to Whispered Grass Through Wind." Robert Jordan did this to describe his sword fighting forms and it was pretty effective.
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Apr 20, 2016 08:02
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3DHouseofBeef posted:Yeah, that's pretty much the issue. The word I've had bouncing around my mind while reading this thread is 'hollow'. Just so many things in the book seem to be hollow. I have to imagine that there is, even at the smallest level, some redeeming value to the work. Not to argue that popularity equals artistic value, but there is something that people are enjoying from the book. As I have some issues with the text and obviously would struggle with seeing a counter-argument, I would love to see the other side argued well. The impression I always had was that it was little more than Twilight for boys. In fact, I may have argued that very thing some hundred pages or so ago in this thread when I first tried to read it. It's a masturbatory power fantasy where the reader gets to imprint themselves on the special snowflake narrator. Kvothe is basically the mental image every bullied nerd has in their head growing up. He knows he's better, smarter, and more talented than everyone else and if it weren't for the system favoring those bullies, he'd be on top every time. A few good teachers just get how amazing he is, but everyone else is plain stupid or a jealous jerk and given the opportunity, Kvothe demonstrates time and time again that he really is the best, just like the reader would if magic were real (because naturally the reader would be great at it just like Kvothe) or he had a chance to play his lute in an inn. To me, that's all there is to it. That's why the story resonates with the particular audience it does. And that's why people who aren't trapped in that frame of mind are immediately disgusted by it. It's just like Twilight. Either you moon over Edward or you say, "Christ this is disturbing." Thoren posted:So did William Goldman in The Princess Bride and it was awesome. I haven't read the book, but in the movie version at least they're all references to historic fencers and their particular approaches to sword fighting. It's not just sharp dialog, it's actually grounded in something, which is why it feels so drat authentic.
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Apr 21, 2016 05:22
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jivjov posted:"well it doesn't follow my preferred conventions of writing therefore it is objectively bad" This is more or less the foundation of all criticism. We have metrics and conventions that we can use to compare and contrast and evaluate distinct things. It's not like he's picking and choosing which conventions to apply and he's even supplied examples of how things should be done from outside of Rothfuss's writing as supporting evidence. It's OK to like a thing jivjov. But that doesn't make the thing you like good. I like plenty of things that are bad and dumb, but I like them anyway. As an adult, I have the ability to objectively analyze the faults in something. However, it's my choice to continue to like something even knowing that it is stupid or poorly made. I also let things go as I realize how terrible they are. That embarrassed feeling you get when you listen to an album you liked in high school for the first time in years and you hope no one finds out you're listening to it on the bus? That probably means you don't like it anymore. You don't have to keep forcing yourself to do something just because you liked it the first time. People change. Things stay bad.
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Apr 22, 2016 03:41
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My Creative Writing TA was forced to share an office with a guy who put up a Led Zeppelin "Stairway to Heaven" poster and he made sure to point out that it was not poetry when I met him during office hours.
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May 2, 2016 03:04
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Talking about structure, William Gibson's "The Peripheral" has over 100 chapters and it rules.
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May 6, 2016 04:26
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I believe this is where I metaphorically threw the book in the trash.
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May 8, 2016 16:16
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You know how a Guns'n'Roses reunion tour was long only thought possible if Slash and Axl happened to both be broke at the same time? Well, here we are and there's a Guns'n'Roses reunion. So, it was possible after all. It just took decades and certainly wasn't something people seriously expected. That's the situation with Doors of Stone. It will never officially be cancelled, but no announcements on it will be made until all of his other revenue sources dry up and he's spent his last dime on an anime girl pillow.
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May 11, 2016 01:46
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While that's interesting and all, in order to get to the twist you have to read thousands of pages of poo poo.
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May 11, 2016 04:01
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Trammel posted:Well it depends. Imagine Rothfuss simply up & died, leaving no notes or materials behind for Doors of Stone. The executors of his estate nominate you to decide what to do with his next proposed novel. I, as the reader, got halfway through Name of the Wind. Then I never bothered with the second book. If I heard Rothfuss had choked to death on a token for his new board game and an up and coming author had been tapped to finish the series, I wouldn't touch the first book again or the second book and the third book could be simply amazing and I'd still never read it because I have too many things to do and not enough hours in the day to go back and read a bunch of poo poo.
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May 11, 2016 07:52
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He just really loves words guys.
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May 13, 2016 17:42
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It's also possible for him to be a good guest on a program and a lovely writer.
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May 17, 2016 12:42
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I'll take a thousand pages of sniffs and braid tugging if it means I never have to hear about Denna again.
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May 21, 2016 17:41
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That's not even the good UW campus.
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May 23, 2016 02:55
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And in common usage it means to bone, so it's especially weird how it's used in the books.
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May 25, 2016 00:41
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At least with those you can either say it's because Jordan was on his death bed or because Sanderson is really clunky with his prose.
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May 28, 2016 17:53
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Blastedhellscape posted:That first quote reads like something from a first draft that was just never, ever proofread. That's how I read it. The last three books are riddled with passages like that because technically Jordan wrote them and Sanderson wanted to leave as much unaltered as possible. But Jordan himself would have gone back and cleaned something like that up. His problem was in bloat, not in prose (at least in comparison to his contemporaries). Sanderson, on the other hand, is a work horse who lacks even that degree of finesse. Which is fine because he actually finishes his drat books.
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May 29, 2016 05:36
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 00:47 |
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Probably the most redeeming sequence of Neal Stephenson's "Reamde" is the exchange between the linguist-slash-fantasy author and the guy in charge of the company making the video game the author is world building for. The conversation centers around a previous, less talented author trying to make everything fantasy sounding by sticking apostrophes everywhere and the linguist explaining that apostrophes actually have to mean something and if the goal is for the world to actually be authentic, then the apostrophes must be dropped. Looking at the above passages and seeing all those apostrophes stuck into names just to make them sound fantastical might be the thing that annoys me the most about them.
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Jun 1, 2016 07:37
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