Argent

The Name of the Wind is a... it's a beautiful book. I wouldn't call it either cheerful or depressing - it has a bit of both, but above all it's a piece of wordsmithery (which my Chrome recognizes as an actual word...).

The entire Unhewn Throne trilogy is a bit on the dark side, at least as far as smaller plotlines are concerned. It has its ups, but most pages are on the down side.

What it does we don't know Many of the Aons have effects that are strongly in line with what the Aons mean, but it's not all of them - Aon Ien means wisdom, but Elantrians use it to heal. So for all we know Aon Soo could be used to pack one's bags in the most volume-efficient way.

I have it on good authority that Redditor Quantumplation is an intelligent, beautiful, and/or handsome human being. As such, they have procured the name (and hopefully a picture) of a new Aon for us - Aon Soo, the Aon for mathematics. Go give them the upvotes!

The Stormlight Archive (2/5) now has a snazzy Shardbearer for its cover!

No. I don't want to derail the thread with spoiler-hidden answers to spoiler-hidden questions, but it's clear that this is not the case.

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The Suvudu writeup left the fight without a clear winner. With 3 days left on voting, Vin and Elend are 16% ahead (though that led was bigger a couple of days ago).

Eh, it's not like the skillsets of the finalists actually matter. The way things have been going, the last match will be a spitting contest or something...

What the @#$% was that fight?! It feels like half of this year's matches are just a mockery...

Up to you really, but I found that Calamity didn't require me remember much of Firefight.

So, I finished Brian Staveley's The Last Mortal Bond and was really happy with it. Looking back to the previous books, one thing Brian does wonderfully is raising the stakes. The first book was largely about the (endangered) lives of three siblings; the third one is about the fate of all humankind, and the buildup is gradual and well written. That's, I think, a major selling point of the series - there is always stuff happening, and it's usually bigger stuff than the stuff that just happened. Adare was, unfortunately, the least interesting character - again - but I strongly suspect it is because I don't enjoy the role she had to fulfill (i.e. the politician). After TLMB I went through Terry Pratchett's Mort, and boy am I glad I did! I remember reading (a translation of) it back in middle school, but reading it now and reading it in English has given me a whole new level of appreciation for it. Not to mention that I barely remembered anything from my original read. I've had some hiccups in my grand Pratchett (re)read, but Mort was just all sorts of great. Right now I am kind of jumping between the World of Warcraft: Chronicle (Volume I) and Reaper Man, the next book in the Discworld's Death-centric subseries.

I am vastly disappointed by how Vin & Elend are written. The reason you want to see fictional characters duel is so you can see how their personalities and abilities compare, not so you can see one stab the other. So if you are not showing off those characters'... well, if you are not showing off anything about those characters, why are you writing about them? In that last battle Vin and Elend could just as easily have been two walking sacks of meat - barely any personality shown, no magic.

I don't think any of us understand Connection, but my take on it is that it shows, well... what things are connected. And maybe how. This by itself only grants knowledge of the present, but because location and (to a large extent) time are irrelevant in the Spiritual Realm, anyone who can see Connections there will be able to see those Connections as they were, as they are, and as they will... will some limitations. The limitations are coming from (what I believe is) a WoB about how time is not entirely irrelevant in the Spiritual Realm, it still has impact on how far back or ahead you can "see." So seeing the future is a threefold skill: it requires one to be able to see Connections (in the Spiritual Realm), make sense of all the Connections one sees (the "white noise" problem), and have the (mental) capacity to follow those Connections into the future. We don't have a good way of gauging the difficulty of these requirements, but we know that even some Shards are not very good at it, so it's probably safe to assume they are difficult. Specifically the last one.

I am seeing some pitfalls here, so let's address them before we start falling in them. Using population demographics - from Earth, no less - is not a good (or even valid) way to determine how many literary characters should fall into one group or another. Not only are Earthly statistics not necessarily applicable to imaginary worlds, which characters get chosen for the spotlight is entirely up to the author. You can have a world where only 10% of all people are women, and you can still have a story about a military unit composed entirely of women. Granted, I don't think we are dealing with anything nearly as extreme as that, but extreme examples prove points. The more important factor here, however, is that Brandon doesn't feel comfortable enough to write an LGBTQ character with more screentime, he doesn't think he knows enough to write them well. And writing them poorly would be far worse than avoiding them until he gets good at it.

It's possible, but why would you think it's too much for them?

Senna. We don't know anything about her (if it is indeed her).

Yeah, the big difference here is the crossover between different planets, different worlds, not just different books. There is plenty of fantasy where different books in the series explore different regions of the world and different characters.

If I recall correctly, Kelsier believed Fuzz was showing him what he was able to see - a shared vision, if you will. Kelsier's mind couldn't comprehend as much of it, but that's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.

So April 30 is apparently Independent Bookstore Day, and at least one of the participating stores (Tattered Cover) will carry something called The Stormlight Archive: A Pocket Companion to the Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. It is a "fan collectible," which I understand to mean that it was compiled by fans, but I still think it would be cool to check if your local participating bookstore will carry it, and then snag a copy if that's the case. Here's the full description from Tattered Cover's Independent Book Day page:

I am almost entirely certain - though I could be misremembering - that I asked if Dalinar was Renarin's biological father, and Brandon confirmed that he is. It was during one of the Chicago signings, possibly Firefight.

It's certainly possible, but at least as far as the imprisonment goes, I thought it was made clear that Preservation did it for humankind, not for Ati.

Ah, great, now I will forever imagine Adolin as Brad Pitt...

Hooboy, dodging spoilers left and right here. I am about halfway through, but I want to make sure I come back and write things when I am done.

It's definitely possible - Ati was, in fact, a kind man when he picked up Ruin. I had assumed it was because of the combined nature of the two Shards, their ability to create, that they chose - or were driven - to start from scratch.