You guys really need to do a show on Joe Abercrombie's books, especially the First Law trilogy. It completely blows away Patrick Rothfuss as well as every fantasy book you talked about on this show.

If you're looking for some new fantasy authors to take a look at, I'd try Jim Butcher. He has an urban fantasy series about Harry Dresden, a magician/detective, and is set in modern day chicago. You can pretty much read them in any order as each book is a complete story, however there is also an overall arc going on that the later books touch on.

It doesn't have a lot of the old fantasy tropes that you complained about in the podcast, and I think his world building is great. I really enjoy fantasy books where there is a logic and rules to the magic system and they're actually followed. Butcher's great at that. The magic is similar to the sympathy in the Name of the Wind books.

I really enjoyed the 'Dead Beat' book, but even from the first book I've enjoyed them all.

Butcher's also written a series of straight fantasy, 'Codex Alera' that I really liked. First book is the Furies of Calderon. Again with some nice world building (different set of magic rules than the Dresden books). Each book is stand-alone in some regards, but the overall arc is much tighter than the Dresden series. You need to start with Book 1 here.

It has some interesting comparisons to The Name of the Wind. It starts out with a backwater poorish kid (although not as bad off as Kvothe) who goes to a university to learn something. However where Kvothe is the best at everything, especially magic, Alera, the main character, seems to be the only person in the world who has zero magic. He has to get by on cleverness alone. He's pretty darn smart, but doesn't seem to have the same issues as Kvothe who seems more arrogant in his cleverness.

You guys do have at least *one* 'gypsy' listener (though we prefer to be called Roma) :)