Just got Wise Man's Fear in the mail after pounding out the first doorstopper in the trilogy over the course of a couple hours on a lazy afternoon. Rothfuss's writing is refreshing, the genre's filling up with too many hacks and incompetent these days. His characters are fun, he persistently breaks expectations and ducks clichés, and the framing device he used is inspired both in terms of being relatively unique (seriously, when was the last time you read a genre novel written as a story-within-a-story?) and because of how he uses it to worldbuild -- the story being told is the past from the perspective of one of the characters and the present that it's being told in is consistently less mysterious and more concrete; it's a rather subtle way to demonstrate how the character has grown up, by contrasting the looseness and relative ignorance of both he and the reader's knowledge of the world in the two times.
Also finished Naomi Novik's Uprooted on that same Saturday. I enjoy her writing, but good god am I glad to see something from her pen that's not more Temeraire -- I like it, but I'm sick of it. It's fun, cute, and captures very well the feeling of faerie tales: the plot is driven almost wholly by character flaws both long-past and present, the whole truth of the matter doesn't come clear until the very end, and concludes with a very strong sense of cyclical continuation intermingled with irreversible change. Also features the 17 year old protagonist and the multi-century-old wizard mentor figure falling in love, if that puts you off too much.
Picked up a bunch of Heinlein's shorter novels, novellas and short stories that have been impossible to find--apparently Baen's been doing a mass reprinting of them--and I'm working my way through those as well.
Author
Topic: What are you reading? (Read 89045 times)