World Without End, by Ken Follett

Yessssss! I'm done! It's done! I never have to read this book again! Woohoo!

Ahem. That... that didn't sound right. Hold on. Let me try this again.

Did you know that thousand-page books turn into 36-disc audiobooks? Thirty-six. Three six. That is a lot of discs. And a lot of audio. And considering it took me two months to get through Pillars of the Earth while actually reading it, I'm happy it only took me five weeks to get through this sequel.

The problem, I find, with Ken Follett's books (well, the two I've read, anyway) is that sure, they are huge sweeping epics of time and place and they are quite beautiful in a big-picture sense. But. On a chapter-by-chapter basis? Soooooo repetitive. I summed up this book to my husband approximately like this:

Stuff. Sex. More stuff. More sex. Treachery and betrayal. Stuff. Awesome uses of logic and reverse psychology. Rape. Betrayal. Logic. Psychology. Sex. Psychology. Dude being flayed alive. Stuff. Sex. Plague. Etc.

The dude being flayed alive bit, I had not predicted. The other stuff? All the same from Pillars of the Earth. Well, not the Plague.

And so the plus side of the audio is that I can zone out while listening and pretty much not miss a thing, because few specific scenes are terribly important and if they are, Follett will, I promise, repeat whatever happened at least six more times, sometimes in the same chapter. The minus side is that I hear repetitions more easily than I read them, and so I couldn't listen to this book for more than a couple hours at a time, hence the taking forever.

Anyway, what's this book about, you say? Um. Well. It's this sweeping epic, right? And so it starts off with these kids and ends with these same kids as old men and ladies. One of the kids is the raping and pillaging and murdering type, two are creative and ambitious but one's a girl so she can't play with the nice toys, and one is of low self-esteem and comes from a ridiculous home life. And... they do their things.

Follett does an excellent job with the characters and how they interact and grow and change or not change, and I cannot say he doesn't bring the action or the drama, see Man Being Flayed Alive. I just wish he could be a bit more concise about it!

Recommendation: For fans of Pillars of the Earth and other sweeping epics, or people who need something to fall asleep to at night over the next several weeks. Definitely best read in small pieces.

Rating: 7/10
(TBR Challenge)

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

Another frame story! This is becoming a theme, it seems...

And darn this frame story all to heck. I picked up this book not knowing too much about it except that a) I keep seeing people mentioning it as a pretty awesome book and b) it was published in 2007 and therefore necessary for my Countdown Challenge. So when it started in all epic fantasy with its innkeeper with a shady past and creepy spider things that are not demons but are probably something more terrifying, I was like, "All right. This will be fun." AND THEN YOU NEVER FIND OUT ANYTHING MORE ABOUT THE SPIDERS.

Ahem.

One of my pet peeves in epic fantasy is this conceit of showing the reader a gun in Act I and then waiting until act, like, XVII to have it go off. This is only meant to be a three-book series, so I suppose there won't be that much waiting, but UGH.

Anyway, after the whole spiders thing happens, it turns out that one of the characters is some famous scribe who writes down the lives of other famous people, and also that the innkeeper with the shady past is a formerly Very Famous Person now languishing in Do You Remember That Guy land. After the scribe works some psychological magic on the innkeeper, the innkeeper is like, "Fine. I will tell you my story. It will take three days. Hope you don't have carpal tunnel."

This book is Day One of the story-telling, and here the story veers away from Epic Fantasy and settles into a more Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire land, with the long rambling stories that don't really have anything driving them (see: Quidditch World Cup). It is also similar in that most of Kvothe's story here takes place at an Academy, where Kvothe is like the smartest kid there, but waaay too cocky, and also very poor, and he's like Hermione and Harry and Ron all rolled into one, with even a vicious Draco to play against.

But... I liked the Harry Potter book. For all the long rambling quidditch and the ridiculous school antics, I at least knew that something was going to happen, and the things that happen generally lead toward that something. The Name of the Wind is just a set of stories about Kvothe's life, from being a gypsy kid to going to the Academy to trying to track down the thing what killed his parents. But there's never anything really driving the action, and for all I hoped that there would be spiders in the end, there were not. I'm sure that this is all building up toward something in the second and third books, but I'm the kind of reader who has to have at least some little morsel now, if you're going to keep me interested for another couple of 700-page books. And I don't feel like I got that.

Recommendation: Don't go into this expecting classic epic fantasy, but read this if you have the patience for that sort of story that's going to ramble on for a few books.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge, Chunkster Challenge)

See also:
books i done read
medieval bookworm
reading is my superpower

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Mistborn: The Final Empire, by Brandon Sanderson (3 April — 9 April)

Hmm. What to say about this book. Well. It's one of those epic novels, and the first in its trilogy, so there's something. The general plot follows a rebellion: the nobles are subjugating (as they do) people called skaa, who are not really different from the nobles but hey, someone needs subjugating, yes? And there are some skaa who don't like the life they have and who want better. And there are some crazy skaa who decide to rebel. But not just like, "Hey, let's rebel!" but like, "Hey, let's rebel in like a year and spend that time making this rebellion AWESOME." So they do. But things, of course, go right and wrong on a whim, and then there is epic fighting. Sweet!

So that was good.

Now, the fantastical conceit in this novel irked me for about the first three or four hundred pages. It is this: certain noble people who have some good genes can use magic. And even certain-er noble people with excellent genes can use lots of magic. But the magic comes from, um, swallowing metals. And then "burning" them. So, like, you can "burn" iron to pull on something made of metal, like a coin or a piece of armor. And you can burn tin to enhance your senses. And you can burn bronze to see if other people are using magic metal flakes. Not so irksome, you say? But, see, I know these things because Sanderson KEPT TELLING ME EVERY TIME SOMEONE USED A STUPID METAL. "Oh, this guy used pewter and got awesome strong!" "Falling was okay, because her pewter-enhanced muscles were awesome strong!" "If only she had some pewter, so she could become awesome strong!" Oh. My. Gosh.

But then at the end it seems Sanderson decided to trust the reader, and of course then I got confused about whether a metal was being used or not. -sigh-

Whatever. The end of the book was totally worth it, and it was great that his main protagonist was a girl, and I definitely want to know what happens to all these cool characters in the next book. But I swear, if I get babied about again, I'm going to swallow some pewter and then throw the book in the general direction of Brandon Sanderson.

Rating: 7/10
(Chunkster Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett (19 October − 27 December)

Good job, Alison! I finally (finally!) finished this book, which, as you can see, I've been working on for two months. Now, obviously, I've read maybe a few other books since I've started this one, so two months is not terribly pathetic, but it certainly feels like I've been reading this forever.

Pillars of the Earth tells the stories of a whole bunch of interconnected people — Tom, whose life goal is to be master builder on a cathedral; Phillip, a monk in a small cell who hopes to make his priory strong; William, whose marriage to a girl called Aliena is called off by the girl herself and who decides to take revenge on, well, everyone; Aliena, who vows to right the wrongs done to her family; and Jack, who loves Aliena from the moment he meets her. It's all set over many years in the 1100s and brings in a lot of history, like the fighting between King Stephen and Empress Maud and later the murder of Thomas Becket.

It's really very good. The problem I had with it is that it's just so long! At 983 pages, it's definitely the longest novel I've ever read. I just could not focus on it for more than an hour at a time when I started it, so I relegated it to my at-work bathroom reading since the book is surprisingly small and easier to fit in my bag than many of the books I read. Hooray mass-market paperbacks.

Brilliantly, though, and as I would have hated had I read this more quickly, Follett spends more than a few sentences of the novel reminding the reader what has happened in the past. I caught myself a few times going, "Oh, right, Ellen did curse that fellow at the beginning of the novel!" and such.

You should read this if you have a few months to spare, or a long weekend with nothing to do.

Rating: 7/10

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan (27 May − 6 June)

By request of the boyfriend, who is in love with epic fantasy series. In this one we have an attack on a farming community, after which three boys must leave the village and go on terrifying adventures in order to save the world. You know how it goes. This book was kind of disappointing in that the mysteries that crop up throughout the novel are not all taken care of by the end. This is clearly so that you'll read the next one, but I'm almost disinclined to do so. I don't mind getting a new mystery at the end, but when I've been waiting for nearly 800 pages to find out Rand's true lineage and I don't get to find out? Boo on that.

Rating: 7/10