Let's Read The Kingkiller Chronicle pt. 11: Mo' Money, Mo' Talents

It's finally time for Kvothe to leave Tarbean and get the real story (such as it is) rolling. After hearing Skarpi's tale of Haliax and the Chandrian, Kvothe's "sleeping mind" finally wakes up, and he resolves to track down stories of the Amyr to see if they might hold the key to defeating the Chandrian.

“The Chandrian had enemies. If I could find them, they would help me. I had no idea who the singers or the Sithe were, but everyone knew that the Amyr were church knights, the strong right hand of the Aturan Empire. Unfortunately, everyone also knew that there had been no Amyr in three hundred years. They had been disbanded when the Aturan Empire collapsed.”

I've harped on this multiple times already, but I'll say it once more: if you forget all this nonsense about Kvothe's mind being "asleep" and lift the Tarebean section out of the narrative entirely, this could easily be taking place days after the attack on Kvothe's troupe, rather than years. You'd have to explain an alternate means of Kvothe hearing the Haliax stories, but we've already been given a suitable candidate: Kvothe's father was a story-teller, and he was collecting information about the Chandrian. This could have been the story that drew their attention.

“The more I thought on it, the more questions arose. The Chandrian obviously didn’t kill everyone who gathered stories or sang songs about them. Everyone knew a story or two about them, and every child at one point has sung the silly rhyme about their signs. What made my parent’s song so different?”

"And then Kvothe went to the University and lots of other places in search of answers, but he didn't find them."

I've just summarized the rest of the book and the entirety of The Wise Man's Fear.

Saltiness aside, the next part of the story is actually quite good. Kvothe decides to gain admission to the University so he can search its great library, but this presents a number of challenges since he's penniless, dressed in rags and has no family or connections. Over the course of the next few chapters, he uses a combination of trickery, guile, street smarts and his natural intelligence to bluff and talk his way into a relatively secure position as a student, just barely overcoming every obstacle that the world throws in his way.

And it's all pretty fun! It's almost like--and stop me if this is too out there--having a protagonist with clearly-defined goals, who takes active measures to achieve them, makes your story more compelling and interesting.

Kvothe's first problem is a lack of cash, so he goes to a book shop to sell Ben's book of logic. The owner assumes he's illiterate and tries to trick him with a fake receipt, but our boy Kvothe is having none of that and manages to both get a good price for the book, and counter-trick the owner into giving him the option to buy it back for significantly less than he got for it. Classic Kvothe!

I know this is part of the book I'm quite positive about, but I want to go on a brief tangent about an element of qorld-building that really doesn't work: money.

Kvothe receives two silver talents for Ben's book. Over the course of the story, "a silver talent" is frequently given as the value of various goods and services, but the actual value of a talent seems to fluctuate wildly from chapter to chapter. For example, later on Kvothe's accommodation and meals for a whole term at the University costs a talent, but here he got two talents for selling a single book. Either it's an incredibly valuable book, or the cost of University accommodation is ridiculously cheap.

And then later still, Kvothe auditions for semi-professional status at a famous music venue, and has to pay a talent for the privilege of doing so. If a second-hand book costs two talents, then this isn't all that expensive; if University room and board for a whole term costs one talent, then it seems like a much more extravagant fee. Since both of those facts are apparently true, this leaves us with no objective comparison to determine how cheap or expensive anything actually is.

This becomes a big problem, because huge whacks of both books are taken up with Kvothe running out of money and engaging in various zany schemes to get more. But since we can't determine how much a talent is actually worth, that makes it nearly impossible to tell how dire Kvothe's situation really is, or how much he's pulled himself out of a hole with his latest money-making endeavour.

(In the next chapter, a pair of good shoes also costs a talent; most of the things Kvothe buys seem to cost that much, or close to it)

“I decided that he was not an altogether bad fellow. I smiled back at him and for a second I almost felt guilty about how I’d written the receipt.

I also felt guilty about the three pens I’d stolen, but only for a second. And since there was no convenient way to give them back, I stole a bottle of ink before I left.”

That's pretty funny. I enjoy fun-adventure-Rothfuss a lot more than angsty-grimdark-Rothfuss. 

Kvothe's next problem is that he needs clean clothes. He does some chores at an inn in return for a bath, and an idea occurs to him:

“I wiped the fog from the makeshift mirror and was surprised. I looked old, older at any rate. Not only that, I looked like some young noble’s son. My face was lean and fair. My hair needed a bit of a trim, but was shoulder-length and straight, as was the current fashion. The only thing missing was a noble’s clothes.”

I find this kind of hard to believe. Malnourishment and illness should have taken a toll on him, not to mention all those times he got beaten around the head--he'd probably have scars, if not a broken nose. People who've been living rough for a long time often look visibly unhealthy and worse for wear, but here Kvothe just has to wash himself and he can suddenly pass for a member of the rich aristocracy.

That said, the way he finagles some clothes out of a shop is pretty good: by marching down the street wearing nothing but a towel, and then feeding the shop-keeper a story about his buddies playing a prank on him. Kvothe's narration claims that he uses his acting chops to make himself seem like a spoiled, entitled little ass, but that probably just comes to him naturally.

“I lowered my voice menacingly, “If you don’t bring me something to wear-” I stood up and shouted, “-I’ll tear this place apart! I’ll ask my father for your stones as a Midwinter gift. I’ll have his dogs mount your dead corpse. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHO I AM?””

Our hero is now clothed, fed and has a small amount of money, so it's off to the University. First he has to get there, and during the journey he meets a very important character...but I'm going to skip over that for now, because I want to discuss that character entirely in one long post rather than tackle every appearance she makes in chronological order (the reason for this will become apparent in due course). Next time, we'll pick up with Kvothe's arrival at the University.

Break

How's everyone liking the new Kingkiller posts? 

I wrote most of what's gone up on the blog so far over the course of a few days, when the neurological problems I've discussed before were at a low ebb and my energy was particularly high. I did this on the assumption that another period like this would come along again before the buffer of content ran out.

That...didn't quite happen for various reasons, so: I've got two more posts lined up for Thursday and next Monday, and then I'm probably going to need a short break--maybe two weeks--to get things rolling again. I may put out something else during that time, if I'm up to it (I had a post going about anime, everyone's favourite topic, that petered out due to lack of energy).

This will likely be a regular occurance going forward, so we may as well get used to it now.

In the meantime, keep SMASHING THAT SHARE BUTTON, LIKE FAV AND SUBSCRIBVE FOR,

(that was meant to be a joke at the expense of Youtubers, but I actually did get too tired to finish the sentence or correct the spelling mistake)

Let's Read The Kingkiller Chronicle (again)

Roughly 13.5 billion years ago, the Universe took on its current form in a rapid expansion known as the Big Bang.

Nothing much else of note happened until 2007, when American author Patrick Rothfuss published The Name of The Wind, the first installment in a planned trilogy called The Kingkiller Chronicle. That book and its 2011 sequel would go on to be an unexpected smash hit, propelling its author to fantasy stardom and eventually leading to a planned 2018 TV series, to be helmed by Lin Manuel Miranda. As of the writing of this blog post, the world appears to teeter on the brink of full-blown Kvothemania, having barely survived previous onslaughts of Hulkamania and Pottermania.

But lets go back to 2007 for a minute. Unknown to all, on the other side of the planet, another historical titan was preparing to step onto the stage: Ronan Wills, unassuming secondary school graduate and soon to be biology student. In 2013, Ronan wrote a series of snarky and somewhat mean-spirited blog posts picking apart the first two entries in the Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy for a now-defunct blog. They attracted a mild following and sparked a several year stint of sporadic blogging in a similar style, until Ronan finally got a job and no longer had time for that sort of nonsense.

Then, in late 2016, an unprecedented tragedy occurred. No, not that one. Struck down by a car accident, Ronan (who will cease writing in the third person like this very soon) was suddenly handed a whole lot of free time again. Lacking the energy or health to use it for anything worthwhile, an idea bloomed: what if Ronan were to re-examine the Kingkiller Chronicle again, on the eve of its cultural domination, in a somewhat more scholarly and less slapdash manner? And without literally going through the damn thing line by line because really, that was frequently more work than it was actually worth?

So yeah, we're doing this again.

Why? Well, like I said, our pal Kvothe does seem to be on the rise in a way that I never would have expected back in those halcyon days of 2013 (especially with the third book still seemingly no closer to publication than it was back then). If ever there was a time for blog-length Hot Takes, this is it. And I wasn't kidding about not having anything better to do. 

Even if you read all of my previous Let's Read posts and bought the Lego playset and commemorative mug, do still stick around, as this is going to be significantly different in style and tone. If you didn't, maybe don't rush off and check them out. I'm not particularly fond of my old stuff these days, especially after I discovered Cinema Sins and realized that my previous style wasn't all that dissimilar from that...thing.

This series will consist of fairly long posts, which means the schedule will by necessity be slow going and dependent entirely on the whims of my symptoms, which are capricious and ever-changing, like the winds. If you don't hear from me for a few weeks (or a month), don't worry.

Writing blog posts--writing anything--takes a much bigger investment in energy for me these days than it used to when I was healthy, so if you enjoy these, please take the time to comment and let me know, as I will probably not continue if it doesn't seem like they're finding some sort of an audience. And consider clicking that share button down there by the heart (click that too) and get the word out that more Kvothe-related content is available for the masses.

All About Ready Player One

A few days ago, a trailer and poster for Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One came out, and everyone had a hearty chuckle at the protagonist's bizarrely elongated leg. But it also served as a launching-off point for a discussion on how bad the book is, with choice excerpts flying thick and fast across twitter.

This is kind of a strange situation, because when Ready Player One came out back in 2011 it was an instant hit among the online geek crowd, seemingly universally beloved. For years afterwards, it felt as though most people who read the book, liked it; even my own negative review was more muted than outright hostile. Then Ernest Cline released a follow-up that was pretty much universally panned, even by people who loved his first outing, and opinion on Ready Player One soured via that strange phenomenon of internet collective opinion-making that also turned The Phantom Menace from the most exciting movie in the world to the worst (and which now, oddly, seems to be in the middle of exonerating it again).

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the twitter hive-mind is wrong on this one. I dipped back into Ready Player One and yes, it's bad. It's bad in all the ways I remember it being bad when I first read it, and it's also bad in ways that I somehow missed the first time around. Here, in bulleted list form, are the salient points you need to know so you don't have to bother reading the thing for yourself (spoilers, obviously):

1. Ready Player One takes place in the year 2044, but its teenage protagonists are all obsessed with pop culture from the 80s. Not only are they completely uninterested in whatever entertainment and commercial art is coming out in their own time (to the point where it seems as if there is none), it begins to feel as though all movies, games and music made after the mid-90s were somehow erased from history, barring a handful of exceptions like The Matrix. 
2. The book exists more or less entirely to deliver 80s references, which it does in the same manner as those pop-culture mash up t-shirts that have Deadpool cosplaying as Darth Vader or whatever. This is best demonstrated by the scene where the protagonist arrives at a virtual party in a flying DeLorean that has the Ghostbusters logo on the doors and also the KITT AI from Knight Rider (yes, of course he also has a lightsaber). The entire book is like this; it's not so much a celebration of old school geek culture as it is a regurgitation, the author constantly tapping the reader on the shoulder and asking "Hey, you know what this thing is, right? Right? You get the reference, right?"
3. All of the main characters are very clearly expressing Ernest Cline's own opinions, regardless of how little sense that makes. At one point, the main character laments that cereal manufacturers don't put toys in cereal boxes anymore, even though he has never personally experienced this and only knows about it from watching 80s cereal commercials--which is a thing that he does, for some reason.
4. There are two Japanese characters in the book. This sit in the traditional seiza position and talk about honour and their ancestors all the time. At first I thought they were meant to be roleplaying--they're as obsessed with old samurai movies as the American characters are with Ghostbusters and Star Wars--but they keep doing this even when they show up in the real world.
5. The book is extremely blatant wish-fulfillment. The main character goes on a quest to inherit the fortune of a vaguely Steve Jobs-esque tech mogul, which his trove of 80s knowledge (of course) allows him to do better than any of the millions of people competing with him for the prize. He shows up the rich corporate snobs trying to get the money ahead of the plucky nerds, gets a hot girlfriend, and becomes a multi-millionaire at the end of the book. Nothing ever seriously goes wrong for him. He spends a portion of the middle of the story struggling with depression and gains a large amount of weight, but manages to overcome both issues easily through the application of technology. At one point he sells himself into indentured servitude in order to access the evil corporate villain's headquarters; this plan goes off without a hitch, and presents absolutely zero tension at any point.
6. At one point, the main character discovers that his virtual best pal--who presented in cyberspace as a fit, white, straight dude--is actually an overweight black lesbian. As far as I can tell, this occurs solely to highlight what a totally woke and open-minded guy the protagonist is. Their relationship continues on with zero problems or conflict, and they have no trouble relating to each other in real life as well as they did online (after this twist, this character's role in the plot severely diminishes, which makes me suspect they were written into the book solely for this purpose).
7. At the end of the book, the characters all decide to leave the virtual world behind and embrace reality. This makes no sense. The near-future America they live in is a poverty-wracked hellhole, teetering on the brink of ecological collapse and ruled by all-powerful corporations. Cyberspace is the only way most people can get an education, socialize safely, express themselves or experience what it's like to live in a world that isn't a dystopian nightmare. There is zero actual reason for them to declare that actually it's bad and the real world is good, except that Ernest Cline thought these kinds of stories had to end with moral lessons about how the real world is superior to the digital one.
8. Actually wait, there is a reason for them to do that: they're now rich beyond their wildest dreams, so they can just buy their way past all the bad stuff that they were using cyberspace to escape from. This is not acknowledged at any point.

All that said, I will give the book credit for one thing: it has the characters become rich (even before winning the grand prize) and famous due to their exploits online and starting streaming web-channels that are watched by millions, which given that the book came out in 2011 is a pretty good prediction of the phenomeon of Twitch and Youtube celebrities (PewDiePie only hit a million subscribers in 2012, so Cline was pretty ahead of the curve with this).

The Crimes of Johnny Depp

Last year, I went to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would, having not assumed that I was in the target audience for a Harry Potter prequel/spin-off. In fact, I liked it so much that I found myself pretty invested in the next movie in the planned five-part series.

Except there was a bit of a catch. See, Fantastic Beasts was based on a novelty in-universe tie-in book which was itself spun out of a textbook glancingly mentioned in the first Harry Potter novel (because Hollywood is a shining cauldron of pure, unfiltered creativity) and mostly told a self-contained story about a lovable buffoon chasing some monsters around New York. Then, right at the end, it turned into an epic Harry Potter prequel detailing a confrontation with an evil wizard that was discussed during the action of the main Harry Potter books. It did so by introducing this character, Gellert Grindelwald:

I want to assure you that this is the least ridiculous image of him I could find; in the actual movie, he looks even more like a boiled egg with a porcupine taped to it.

So that was kind of discouraging, especially since Grindelwald had been played (kind of) by Colin Farrell up until that point, who seemed way more like a proper villain and didn't look like a boiled egg. I was kind of hoping that J-Ro and the film's producers would quietly retcon this disastrous bit of character design for the sequel and just lock Farrell in for the next four movies. Alas, it was not to be: the second movie has been given a (incredibly stupid) title and a first image, which confirms that egg-Grindelwald is still part of the plan.

Now, back when the first movie came out, there was another reason why people were disgruntled with all of this: Grindelwald was played by Johnny Depp, whose then-estranged (now-former) wife Amber Heard claimed had beaten and abused her. At the time, this was met with the sort of reaction from the wider public that celebrity "scandals" usually were: a brief spike of outrage, and then almost everyone more or less forgot about it. Hell, I didn't even think to mention it in my review of the movie; one of my blog readers brought it to my attention.

But that was then. You might have noticed that things have changed in the last month and a half.

To say that Hollywood is cleaning house would be inaccurate (Brett Rattner doesn't seem to have suffered any consequences yet), but powerful, once-untouchable men are having their careers ended more or less overnight due to allegations of sexual abuse and harassment. This has even taken the form of a major role in a fully-shot movie being recast, something that would have seemed unthinkable before. And given the new climate, a lot of people are figuratively glancing at Depp's involvement in the Fantastic Beasts movies and saying "Nice franchise you've got there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it" while leaning against a doorframe and chewing a toothpick in a vaguely threatening manner.

On one hand, this makes perfect sense; most of the allegations against Weinstein, Spacey etc revolve around events from years or even decades ago, so if they should be held accountable for those actions then Depp absolutely should be as well for something he is alleged to have done last May. I think this is where the majority of the outrage stems from.

But on the flipside, after trawling the Harry Potter fandom circles a bit, I can't help but suspect that there's a significant portion of people calling for Depp's firing who don't actually care about his abuse, and just see a potential opportunity to boot him and his goofy-ass hair from the franchise going forward. Which, if true, would be terrible. I'm of the opinion that "fandom" as a capital-t Thing has a strong tendency to be really toxic and negative as an online social force, but co-opting a revolution in how we respond to sexual and physical abuse in the entertainment industry would be a new low.

As for my own opinion, I absolutely think that Warner should have ditched Depp when Heard's allegations first came to light, but that they are probably not going to. It would have been extremely easy to do before the first movie came out--Depp is in it for all of thirty seconds and his involvement had been kept secret until days before the movie came out--whereas his role in The Crimes of Grindelwald (ugh) is probably far more substantial. It's not too late, the movie is still a year away and probably has the vast majority of its post-production left, but I don't think they'll do it.

And because of that, I won't be paying to see the movie when it comes out. I'd encourage anyone reading this not to, either.

What I've been reading lately

I didn't read as many books over the last few months as I wanted to, but the ones I did read had maximum impact.

Darkmouth - Shane Hegarty

There seems to be a rash of prominent middle grade books by Irish authors recently, and Darkmouth is one of the more notable. It presents a fun universe and a protagonist you want to root for right off the bat, although it perhaps expects you to keep rooting for him a bit too long--I found Finn's constant treadmill of failure kind of repetitive after a while.

The Sympathizer -  Viet Thanh Nguyen

One of those rare literary novels with an ambitiously expansive scope--the kind that some critics might be tempted to describe as being about, like, humanity, man--that comes close to justifying the praise. Come for the writing, stay for the deliciously acerbic critique of American culture.

And he has another book out next year!

The official Ronan Wills Did Not Finish Pile for October 2017

I start a lot of books. I don't always finish them. Sometimes this is the book's fault, sometimes it's not (this is particularly true lately, as medical issues sometimes render me unable to read even if I want to). Here are the ones I didn't finish lately.

Alias Grace by Margeret Atwood

I got halfway through this, and then a certain other book we'll discuss below came along and demanded my attention. I definitely mean to go back to it.

A Place Called Perfect by Helena Duggan

I feel bad about this one, because it's another prominent middle grade debut by an Irish author, and I feel like I need to represent the home team. The premise was interesting, but the story was just a bit too meandering in the early going. I might give it another shot.

SPQR by Mary Beard

At the end of August, I was suddenly taken by a desire to read some Roman history, and this is the Roman history book nearly everyone recommends. Unfortunately, a rogue migraine swarm stopped me in my tracks a third of the way in.

In Progress: La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman

I rushed out and got this as soon as the positive reviews hit, being something of a fan of the earlier His Dark Materials books. So far, it's not impressing me all that much, mainly due to flat characters and a story that takes its sweet time cohering into anything solid. From what I've read, the second half is distinctly more His Dark Materials-ey, so we'll see.

On my to-read list

Here's what I want to tackle next, on no particular timeline:

Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend

The Girl Who Drank The Moon by Kelly Barnhill

Winterglass by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

The Wizards of Once by Cressida Cowell