Sunday, February 03, 2008

What I'm Reading, Part I: Fiction

This will be my third attempt to get this blog going. For my 0.2 fans, I apologize.

First, I'll start with some brief snippets on what I'm currently reading.

The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss

It seems that a few times a year a new author is especially highly touted in speculative fiction; the rhetoric is usually the same: "The best new author to come along in years, decades even"..."An instant classic"..."I can truthfully say this is the best book I've read in a long time." Et cetera. Last year it was Patrick Rothfuss and The Name of the Wind, which was released in March.

Does it live up to the hype? At only about 70 pages in, and on my second try, it is too soon to say for me. A few months ago I read the first fifty pages, but then once the protagonist, Kvothe, starts narrating his biography, I was turned off. Why? Two reasons. First, I usually dislike (longer) stories within (shorter) stories because I want to find out What Happens Next, not What Happened Before. Sure, some of What Happened Before is good--but in The Name of the Wind, like Stephen King's Wizard and Glass, 90% of the next is a story-within-a-story. The second turn-off was Kvothe's tone, at least initially. He starts off by telling (not showing) us just how infamous and nefarious he is, which irritated me. I think it is a good rule of thumb that if someone tells you that he or she is a character, chances are he or she is not, but just trying to be a character.

All of that said, about a week ago I picked it up again and read a couple chapters and enjoyed it and (actually) plan on finishing it. I'll get back to you in a few weeks...

Acacia by David Anthony Durham

I'm not sure exactly what it was, but something inspired me to pick up a copy of Acacia. Like The Name of the Wind, I am only about 70 pages in. So far there is nothing extraordinary about Acacia, it is just generally a good book. If I had to compare it, I'd say it is somewhat similar to Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, which I also felt was very good but nothing special (except, perhaps, in being consistently very good in just about every facet of a novel). Again, as with The Rothfuss, I'll get back to you.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino is new to me, and boy am I glad I picked this book up. I've seen the name around for years, and have grouped him in my mind with authors such as Umberto Eco and the South American Magical Realists (Borges, Marquez, etc.). I don't know quite how to describe this book as it isn't really a novel, but a series of vignettes, that are descriptions of fictional cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. The language is lush and richly imaginative, with little philosophical hooks that tantalize and twist the mind. Here is Polo's first description:

Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theater, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they are happy, that time.
I love how Calvino weds the sacred and the profane, the mundane and magical.