10 Months from Today!!

A couple of days ago I found out some wonderful and exciting news. I went to the blog of one of my favorite authors, Patrick Rothfuss and found that FINALLY there is a release date for the second book in "The Kingkiller Chronicle" trilogy. The Wise Man's Fear will be released on March 1, 2011; exactly 10 months from today. Awesome!

Christmas Books

So, when it comes to reading I have certain traditions. Around Easter each year I read The Chronicles of Narnia. During the summer I read Harry Potter and around Christmas time I read The Lord of The Rings. Last year I also started reading some Christmasy type books during the month of December. During December 2008 I read several such as The Autobiography of Santa Claus by Jeff Guinn and The Lump of Coal by Lemony Snicket. I continued the tradition this year. Of the five I read this year my favorite was the wildly inappropriate yet ferociously funny The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore.

As for the rest of the books I read I have to ask: "What's the deal?" Why is it so many Christmas books have to be about someone (usually a parent) dying of cancer? Hello, can't we come up with something else to get people in the Spirit of Christmas? I gotta tell ya, 'twas a little depressing after a while. I had also checked out the book The Christmas Shoes but having heard the song it's based on I figured it would be in my best interest to skip that one and just go back to my beloved Lord of The Rings.

Defeating Shadows

Usually I don't post book reviews on my blog but since this book was written by one of my wife's co-workers I thought I would include my review here as well as on my goodreads page. I hope that this review will be a help to her in promoting her book. Just to warn you, this does contain some spoilers.First off I want to say that this was a really good book. I thought the story was ingenious. The plot was very creative and I loved the whole concept of the Elemental Beasts and the swords, the Directional Kingdoms, the Void Vulture, etc. One thing that I really enjoyed was the four main characters. I think of the four princes that I like Dominic the best. This is probably because he’s almost as snarky and sarcastic as I am. One of my favorite parts of the book came near the end when Sam was close to death, saw the paths and was given the choice of whether he wanted to come back or not. Though scenes like that are hardly unique in literature for some reason that image just really hit me powerfully. I especially liked when Sam asked the Mortin and Phillip he was talking to in the dream if they were the “real princes.” I’m glad that they’re answer was kind of vague. It makes the scene more interesting to think about and wonder about.

With all that said, there were a few things about this book that made it a bit awkward to read. With most novels the narrative is told in past tense, as though the author is relating a story that happened at an earlier time (“Someone went and woke him up”). However this was told in present tense as though it were happening right there and then (“Someone goes and wakes him up”). I found this very distracting at first since I couldn’t remember having read a book like that before. However, after a short time I got used to it and it stopped bothering me.

There was also a conspicuous lack of punctuation at times. Now, I majored in linguistics so I don’t care much about so-called “proper English” or anything, but sometimes when one chooses to leave out a lot of commas it can be hard to interpret the sentence correctly. Sometimes I actually had to re-read certain parts to figure out how the phrases within a sentence were supposed to be broken up so I could figure out what the author was saying. Another thing was a lack of proofreading. This book had more typos than I have ever seen in a book and I’ve read Chris Heimerdinger’s Tennis Shoes series. Extra words, misspelled words, words written as two words that should have been one word, using the wrong form of a word, etc. Needless to say, it was a little distracting.

Another thing I noticed was there were a lot of repeats of ideas. In most books you get the description or an explanation once, then if a character needs to relate that information to someone else later on in the story the author will simply state that the character related the information. However, in this book many times when these types of situations happened the full explanation would be related again in the text. This was a little unusual but I actually found it a kind of nice. Since I often read this book a bit sporadically sometimes it helped to have the information repeated since I had often forgotten it. This book was a little predictable at times. There were many incidences when I read something that would remind me of scenes or themes from The Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter or other fantasy books. Of course, most fantasy stories remind the reader of other fantasy stories and when you have read as much fantasy as I have you tend to notice those similarities more. So don’t misunderstand; this is in no way a copy or a knock-off of some other story. Defeating Shadows is a unique and creative story that happens to contain many of the themes that are dealt with in other stories in the genre.

So overall, this was a very enjoyable read. I would recommend it to anybody who enjoys reading fantasy as much as I do. Hopefully Kris E. Kay will write more soon.

Rothfuss Interview

So, while Patrick Rothfuss (Author of The Name of the Wind) was in London he gave an interview regarding his new and highly anticipated book The Wise Man's Fear. I found the interview fascinating and so I decided to post it. It is almost an hour long so I totally understand if you choose not to watch it.

Patrick Rothfuss Interview
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The Wise Man’s Fear – Update

There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.So, I got a bit of good news about one of my favorite authors yesterday. Patrick Rothfuss reported on his blog that he has finally sent the first draft of “The Wise Man’s Fear” to his editor. This is the second book in his series The Kingkiller Chronicle. Ever since “The Name of The Wind” came out in 2007 Ruthfuss fans have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this next book in the trilogy. There were a couple of publication dates projected that fell through or turned out to have not been genuine in the first place so this is really exciting.