The Name of the Wind

[Chaos]

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss.

Anyone read it yet? I just finished it a couple of weeks ago, then re-"read" it afterwards in audio book format. A very interesting first endeavor, and I really hope the next book in the series gets finished soon.

I thought it was extremely interesting to see into the early life of an "epic hero," from that person's point of view. And, rather unusually, the religious undertones were actually very thoughtful and well-structured.

I'd love to hear some other opinions on it, if anyone's read it. If you haven't, and you like fantasy... check it out!

[Kzinistzerg]

Yes, read it! Thought it was well-thought out... Few points:

1) A friend pointed out to me that the situation Kvothe is in is unrealistic; Kvothe doesn't seem to have many enemies. Someone as awesome/arrogant as him would have people doing things out of envy/hate left and right if they didn't love him.

2) TVTropes pointed out that the magic, for all its jargon, is basically voodoo. Yeah.

3) It's wobbling between "Kvothe is awesome" and "Kvothe is a Mary Sue" for me; I find the writing much more humble and more realistic, than, say Heinlein's works, but on the other hand... few people are just awesome at everything. Kvothe has that whole arrogance flaw thing which keeps him from being totally Mary Sue, but it's near that border for me.

4) I can see that the archives would be unorganized. However, I think that at some point, there would have been a fairly comprehensive organizational system-- someone had to be zealous enough to do it.

Overall, I think it was a pretty good book and definitely a new use of some of the standard fantasy fare.

[Chaos]

They specifically deal with the whole organization thing... nobody lives long enough to see their vision come to fruition, then the next guy comes along with his brilliant idea and fucks it all up... plus the whole thing with warring factions hiding tomes and stuff. That part in particular sounded very authentically academic to me.

[Kzinistzerg]

Yeah, that's true. Libraries are probably the best example of entropy known to mankind. I still think that at some point, someone would have gotten obsessive enough to make a dent in it, giant piles of mismatched paper or no.

To be fair, though, it's a perfectly decent depiction. It's a minor quibble. That's one of the reasons I do like Name of the Wind quite a lot: most of my "problems" with it are minor.