I’ve seen this odd phenomenon before. Not me personally (as far as I know), but other writers I know.
But Rothfuss may have the best Goodreads post commenting on that situation.
And now I’m following Rothfuss’ reviews on Goodreads, too. Because, y’know, I desperately need to expand my TBR pile.
I may be the only reader of fantasy on the planet who hasn’t yet read THE NAME OF THE WIND, btw. I’m waiting for the third book to come out. God knows there is no shortage of other things to read while I wait.
Incidentally, I do expect my TBR pile to explode over the next couple of months, because I’m now hardly reading fiction, because yes indeed I am writing and no I don’t want to get seriously distracted.
Though I am working at a very easy pace (1300-1500 words per day, more only if I feel like it), so I doubt I’ll have to stop all fiction reading completely. But step it down, oh yes.
However, I did just finish 2312 by KSR and it is really excellent, in case you wondered. I even sort of wound up tolerating, maybe even kinda sorta liking, Swan, even though she is such an emotion-driven histrionic character. Anyway! I am thinking that KSR may be a good choice for reading-while-also-writing, because even though I love them, all the beautiful descriptions about geology and terraforming and stuff are not as distracting as a faster-paced character-driven story would be. I think this may be a good time to re-read the Mars trilogy, finally.
Plus I will be listening to one or two audiobooks while weeding, because hey, no end to the weeding! I can’t even tell you. Look away from the vegetable garden for three or four weeks and WHAM, impenetrable jungle. Crabgrass and this weird vining succulent weed are the hardest to grub out. A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP by David Weber is the first one I’m going to listen to, because (to be frank) I don’t like Weber’s books all that much, so I don’t expect it to be too compelling a story. And if I’m mistaken on this one, great! It’s a win-win.
And thanks to Heidi at Bunbury in the Stacks for the link to that Rothfuss post on Goodreads!
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Well, here’s at least one person who also hasn’t read THE NAME OF THE WIND — I was burned by A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE and now have an inherent distrust of most unfinished series. I’m less leery of YA series because there publishing schedule seems to more reliably be every six months to a year.
I’ve definitely noticed some of the weird ratings things on Goodreads — you definitely can’t trust that average rating to mean much of anything. It makes me wish it were possible to sort for longer reviews so there’s at least a better chance of seeing one with useful thoughts in it… Though I have seen screens-long reviews that rant about how the book is getting one star because it has a stupid cover or the author looks goofy or the summary sounds too cliche… I’m not sure what the point of bashing (or praising) a book they haven’t read is. :P
I have read NAME OF THE WIND, but wasn’t blown away, and haven’t gone on with the rest. I wasn’t interested enough. The voice of NotW was wonderful – I can understand why DAW pushed it so hard, and others like it – but the story and character weren’t completely successful as far as my taste goes, although I did finish it.
Yeah, Rothfuss’ publishing schedule hasn’t been too quick, has it? That’s why I’m waiting for the third before I start the first. I swear I’m pretty likely to just give away the first four GRR Martin books I have rather than keep waiting for the last several to come out. I’ll probably just read reviews to find out if I guessed right about where the series is going to end up, rather than ever reading the books themselves.
Sorting by length of review would be very nice! I do think it’s good that reviews with more “likes” move up in the queue; surely the ones that complain about the bad cover will eventually drop out of sight — though it’s just fairly offensive that anyone would drag a book’s average rating down for such a stupid reason.
I haven’t read it either, and from all I’ve read about it – good and bad, I’m not the target audience.
I am SOOOOOOOOOO happy that it’s making money for DAW though, because I really want them to keep publishing all those midlist authors who aren’t breakout successes, especially since most of my female writers writing female protagonists in the 80s and 90s were DAW writers (and they still release one short story anthology per month as far as I remember, which of the other big sf&f publishers does that?).
I somewhat cynically think that the fact that Betsy Wollheim finally got the Hugo was due to the fact that Rothfuss managed to get his fanbase to vote in great numbers. Has Sheila Gilbert got hers yet? Why not if they can nominate Patrick Nielsen Hayden every time? Why has Jody Lee never been nominated for best artist?
OOps… severly off-topic. I guess this has built up.
TL; DR – I haven’t read it either.
Hi, Estara — I hope DAW does keep supporting midlist authors; but I’m not sure any of the big publishers will for much longer. I’m grateful that we have self-publishing as a viable alternative these days! I wonder if you’re right about why Wollheim got the Hugo; it’s a little hard for me to believe that the voters usually keep track of editors very closely. I mean . . . I don’t, unless they happen to be one of MY editors.
I read parts of THE NAME OF THE WIND, which is a pretty bad sign: interesting enough that I wanted to know what happened and skipped to the end, but I had no sympathy for Kvothe. I want to call him an idiot but he’s fairly intelligent, though foolish and thinks he’s entitled to Magic for reasons that are beyond me. I actually want to like it because Rothfuss’s writing struck me as pretty good, and he does a good job depicting characters as individuals instead of stereotypes; and that he is taking so many years to work out the writing problems is probably a good sign for how it will end up; but disliking the main character is the kiss of death.
Also, I am not a voter for any of these awards, but I have noticed certain publishers whose books I tend to consistently like: Atheneum, Viking, Arthur Levine. Not that I like all of their books, but the books that I tend to pick up by them I do. I am pretty sure that is correlated with editors, perhaps ones who share my taste in books. :)
Tor seems variable, Baen perhaps more so, and DAW seems consistently mediocre: though that may be unfair since I tend to note that a book is from them only once it starts dragging on for far too long.
Sounds like I better read the first one before picking up the second; I’m totally with you about disliking the main character means the book is just not going to work for me.
I never used to notice publishers / imprints / editors — I still don’t, honestly, unless it happens to be one of MY editors. If I didn’t base my buying mostly on book bloggers’ recommendations, I’d probably notice editors more.