Bear Flag Blog

Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy 8.5/10

The missus and I have recently gotten into the HBO television series 'Rome' (on DVD). Realizing that I knew a lot about the Roman Empire, but had never really read a biography of Julius Caesar, I picked up Adrian Goldsworthy's Caesar: Life of a Colossus. It was excellent, a veritable platonic ideal of how a biography should be written. It lacked only a certain narrative drive, the energy that propels one through a book like, say, The Guns of August. But excellent in any case.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss 7/10

I am also always on a quest for great epic fantasy. Nine times out of ten when perusing a fantasy section for such, I find only books I have read or books I have dismissed. But sometimes new books come along, and I'm certainly open to giving them a whirl. The Name of the Wind, the first in an incomplete trilogy, is good. It's not great. I plan to pick up the second book, but not in hardback, nor am I on tenterhooks awaiting it. Interesting world, good writing, interesting characters - but the book suffers greatly from its own pomposity. Grandeur is something an author must earn through storytelling; to start a book with "There were three kinds of silence in the inn" only serves to annoy me. Once I know and follow the characters, and have suffered and triumphed along with them, then the author can - and is encouraged to - whip out the sweeping poetic statements. But not until then. To start a book, try something like "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."