So, I THINK I finished this book. I tried really hard to read every possible ending, which did make it a bit difficult to get into the stories (as such), but the entire thing is an absurdly brilliant mad-cap adventure that refuses to take things too seriously, so rather than falling under the spell of the story, you fall under the spell of the book.

And it's genius.

As a work of epic fantasy in the traditional style (the hero is young, ridiculously powerful and more trouble than a barrelful of shoggoths), Rothfuss stands out as particularly good. His world is fun, his pacing is excellent (and I was listening to this rather than reading it, so pacing matters when you're devoting 30 hours of your life to something) and his world is intricately detailed.
This book is exactly what it claims to be and decidedly enjoyable for being so.

We're not going to talk about how long it took me to get around to this book OR how quickly I went through it once I actually got started.

I like listening to Neil read his more fairy tale and fantastically oriented books; it's like hiring a world-famous to read you to sleep and do all the voices and everything. He captures that mix between talented performer and dad reading to kid which makes the audiobook even better.

The story itself--it's a brilliant updating of Kipling's "The Jungle Book" that rewards all its listeners, but is infinitely more enjoyable if you know its provenance. It's so clever and lovely and just the right kind of children's book. No one does gothic horror for the young like Neil Gaiman.

(Having said that, does anyone do gothic for the young OTHER than Neil Gaiman?)

I liked the premise of this book and I found the overall argument to be both interesting and, with some exceptions at the end where Jenkins tries to provide a voice for the future, persuasive.
What follows is not a review of the book, it's an observation.

If you're writing a book about popular culture, even for an academic audience, you might want to assume that some of your readers--while probably also academics--are what one might call huge nerds. Not that you have to write "for" them, but you should account for that and remember that we take our genres no less seriously than academic scholars and the difference between getting our canonical information wrong and misattributing a Shakespearean quote is one of degree, not kind.

1) It's spelled Gandalf, not Gandolf. Gandolf is the name of a priest in Robert Browning "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church" (and last year's January winter storm, for reasons still unknown). Gandalf is the wizard in Lord of the Rings.

2) Ewan MacGregor did not play a young Qui-Gon Jinn, he played a young Obi-Wan Kenobi. Liam Neeson was Qui-Gon Jinn.

I wouldn't exactly recommend this book, but if you're in the market for a tome about how intellectual property laws in particular shaped the reading habits and imaginations of three centuries worth of readers and reframes our understanding of who read what during the 19th century, this is an excellently written specimen.

So I actually thought I had a different Ishiguro novel sitting on my shelf for when I got bored ([b:Never Let Me Go|6334|Never Let Me Go|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1353048590s/6334.jpg|1499998], which would make more sense given my usual fare), but I had time to kill and had been meaning to read him forever.

Well, this book certainly deserved the Man Booker prize. It was subtly brilliant in character portrayal and Ishiguro strikes that balance between showing a flawed character and making you experience the flawed person in a way that allows you to both judge and accept. He reminds me of so much of what I like about the 19th century realist novel, only trimmed down into 245 pages instead of 900.

For all his...zaniness and unique storytelling, Fforde himself has become decidedly predictable within his own stories. I could feel the plot-beats in The Last Dragonslayer and came to expect the things that would happen at particular points.

Not a bad thing, but so much of what makes Fforde ffun is the unexpectedness of his writing. Granted, this is YA so he might have tried to turn it normaler (or not), but reading it felt like I'd read it before. Not...exactly, but between the writing tics (e.g. his car model descriptors assume a vehicular familiarity that I entirely lack), the overarching structure and the simple fact that he spends less time actually building the weirdness of the world in this book (and that's always been his finest work), I didn't find it exciting. A perfectly good read, sure. But not brilliant and I miss Fforde when he's not being brilliant.

(Shades of Grey 2, dammit!)

This was shelved in YA, presumably because it has a teenaged protagonist and a narrative that doesn't make you want to grab the author by the lapels and shout "But what's going on!?"

I actually prefer Miéville when he's writing for a younger audience; I think he's actually a better writer. Which is not to say that his fantasy for adults is bad - it's often wonderful in its own right - but he reminds me of an argument [auther: Diana Wynne Jones] made when discussing her one book that's billed as for adult, which is that adults are easier to write for than children because they'll forgive an awful lot that children (and young adults) won't. Your plot doesn't need to make sense, your characters don't need to feel as real. And I think Miéville recognizes this as well, that some of the stylistic acrobatics he does in books like [b:Embassytown|9265453|Embassytown|China Miéville|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320470326s/9265453.jpg|14146240] just won't fly in a story meant for kids. So he finds other ways to be acrobatic and interesting, ways that I find I prefer.

This book works precisely because it's written for a younger audience, but not down to a younger audience. The world is still weirdly intricate (Miéville does this thing where he takes the most outlandish premise you can think of and plays it completely and often brilliantly straight) with the mere premise of a rail sea (railway tracks between islands over a ground with ocean-proportions ground-dwellers) and a captain chasing a great white mole that, as someone who taught 19th century American fiction recently, had me utterly delighted. The sneaky (and less sneaky) homages to other works of literature are perfect. The narrative voice, reminiscent of the omniscient narrator of the 19th century novel who almost but not quite feels like a character, is done excellently. The weird post-apocalytic, quasi-fantastic and just comprehensible enough to remain compelling setting just works. And the story? Well, if Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey had a very odd looking baby, it would be something like this book.

I enjoyed this book, although I admit that I pick up every book from Pratchett wondering whether a) it will be his last and b) it will be as good.

This is a terrible way to approach an author's oeuvre. Don't do it. And one of the side effects is that I can't tell whether I'm less impressed by the more recent disc worlds because they're worse or I'm paying more attention. Or I just prefer the witches. It's probably the last.

It's disc world, it's Moist von Lipwig, it's Vetinari (who felt in less than top form in this book, except for one completely over the top moment, which I adored, especially since I was imagining Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister) reprising his role from the BBC miniseries), it's odd technology, it's fun. What else is there to say.

Oh, other than an article topic: Jewish Dwarves in Tolkien and Pratchett. Discuss.