Part coming of age story and part sword and sorcery adventure story, The Name of the Wind is a masters class in fantasy world building that unfortunately gets bogged down when the action switches to a University setting. Kote spends his days running the inn on the side of a road in a tiny town. Dark days have descended on the land. Black spider like demons terrorize the populace, raiders are common on the roads, and whispers of an ancient evil are becoming louder. One […]
You, too, can speak the name of the wind. JK. Only the specially chosen can do that.
I am in love with The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I cannot be snarky about this one. I have fallen in love completely and it has left me blind to the faults of this novel. I want to speak the name of the wind, I want to find the dragons and I want to go in search of the Chandrian. But I don’t want to do it with Kvothe. Kvothe is the “Hero” of the story. We first meet him, quietly sweeping his inn as […]
Wow. That was long. Really long.
I started listening to this book five years ago. Five. 5. FIVE. YEARS. I took a multi-year break because I could not handle the misery of the chapters about Kvoth’s first year or so in Tarbean. And then I started listening again, because this should be both in my wheel house and up my alley. But the truth is, I just don’t know. I don’t know if I like it. I know I wish it were a lot shorter, which means I didn’t love it. […]
On Fantasy Giants, Magic Systems, and Cool Metatextual Stuff
Fantasy, like few other genres of popular culture, is the land of giants. Metaphorical ones, of course, but I can’t think of many more artistic endeavors where the playing field is dominated by a mere few authors. One only has to pick up any Terry Brooks novel, for instance, to see the long shadows cast by JRR Tolkien (Classic Fantasy Hero’s Journey) and CS Lewis (People Magically Transported to a Strange Place). More recently, JK Rowling (Manichaean Battle with Scholastic Backdrop) and George RR Martin […]