It’s hard to get through… it’s huge, but keeps bludgeoning you with the same cartoonish ideas over and over again until you’re just exhausted. Kind of worth reading, just because it does come up in discussions so often, but don’t necessarily expect to enjoy it.
Hah, I did mean it in the spirit of good discussion. (Though maybe I also feel like I have a sacred mission to keep the unwary from inadvertently Goodkinding themselves!)
I’ve actually been having a hard time getting into anything new lately for some reason, but I recently reread C. S. Friedman’s Coldfire and Magister series (serieses? trilogies), which are kind of dark, but not so “gritty, gorey” that I thought they’d be a good recommendation for this thread. The former in particular is excellent, and they’re both fairly unusual takes on fantasy.
I regret that I have but one downvote to give. Wizard’s First Rule is literally the worst book I ever read. (A lot of people do seem to like it, though.)
I think you’re thinking of italics, not cursive.
But we never use “America” to refer to North and South America collectively. You can say “the Americas”, or just “North and South America”. And there’s no adjective that means “of the Americas”; you can say “North or South American”. But just “American” unambiguously means “of the USA”.
I’ve always wondered if disagreement over this comes from the fact that in some parts of the world, North and South America are considered to be one continent just called “America”, whereas we consider them to be two separate continents. And we don’t have a word for the pair of continents, any more than we have a word for Europe and Africa together. (I mean we do have “Eurasia”, which kind of pokes a hole in the hypothesis, but maybe that’s a special case because a brief glance at a map makes it clear it’s pure fantasy to count those as separate continents.)