[duncan_idaho]

Originally Posted by Mennonite

I've been reading the Kane series by Karl Edward Wagner. Nothing fancy; just pulpy sword & sorcery. The protagonist, Kane, is closer to being a villain than an anti-hero. He's Cain from the Bible, if the Bible had been written by Robert E. Howard. Elder gods, ancient Lovecraftian aliens etc. There are about a dozen short stories and three novels. I prefer the short stories. The best of the bunch, imo:

The Dark Muse
Misericorde
The Other One
Reflections for the Winter of my Soul
Two Suns Setting






I'm also reading The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfus. I'm not really enjoying it. Young orphan boy trains to fulfill his destiny and avenge the death of his parents. The plot is so standard it almost feels like a YA novel.

The worst part is that the main character is awesome at everything. He's insufferably confident - and for good reason - because every setback is just a minor prelude to his next triumph.

I kind of get that with The Name of the Wind. The pace is maddening - it has been 10 years since the second book was released. Dude writes at a Martinian pace.

But the writing, the actual composition and word choice, is genius. This passage still haunts me.

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music...but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint.

The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.

The man had true-red hair, red as flame. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with the subtle certainty that comes from knowing many things.

The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.