I loved this one. I'm not a space nut, not even a real sci-fi fan, but this book just really, really worked for me. The combination of space, and magic, and physics, and human and alien conflict, sprinkled with a bit of time line technicalities? Yeah, more, please.
I really liked this book - it hits all the sweet spots for me. Brilliant language, not-too-overbearing fantasy setting, believable characters, good pacing and narration (and a bit of training in the $arts).
Kvothe is relatable even when he's making mistakes, which is really important in protagonists. Halfway through the book I started thinking that he was maybe just too much of a Mary-Sue character, but when I stopped to think about it, it turned out that he isn't one, really. He just comes off that way because he's allowed to tell his own story, and with enough conviction, everybody's their own Mary Sue.
Can't wait to read the second part.
Short story collections are tricky things, and tricky to rate. You never love all of them, but when one or two of them truly grab you, you're good. And of course, nobody gets grabbed by the same stories. The three stars represent the amount of stories that didn't do a thing for me, even though I fell for a few of the others.
There was a lot in here that struck me as stereotypically gothic or "just a" story, even though Gaiman always finds beautiful words for his stories. But beautiful words don't make a story. That was The Flints of Memory Lane, The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch (I kind of felt that you had to be Kurt Vonnegut to pull off telling the ending first), Feeders and Eaters, Pages From a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky (maybe how Kafka would have written, if he was Neil Gaiman), Keepsakes and Treasures, and the Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves …, also nearly all of the Poems.
There were also some that I liked, but did not love; they were nice to look at, but did not touch me: A Study in Emerald (because apparently you can pull off the Holmes/Cthulhu crossover if your name is Gaiman), October in the Chair (nice little precursor to the Graveyard Book), Bitter Grounds (too Kafka to touch me, but very, very well done), Harlequin Valentine (I can go with that symbolism), How Do You Think It Feels (I don't like affairs, but I do like Gargoyles), In The End, and Goliath, which he wrote for the Matrix website when the movie got out, and I think I liked it as much as the movie. Also, How to Talk to Girls at Parties and Sunbird, which I knew and liked already.
And then, sometimes, stories or poems or ideas just touch you. Some even grip you, and some of those won't let go for a long time: The Problem of Susan, even though (or maybe because) I did not like Narnia. Instructions, which I need to write down in the nicest lettering I can manage, and put it up, or give it to somebody who needs it. The Monarch of the Glen, because Shadow. Oh, Shadow. And, last and foremost, Other People. Yeah, that one is not going to go away.