Chasing "the Wind"

I had just finished reading the seven Harry Potter books again. While it was the fifth or sixth time for the first ones, and the third time for the seventh, it was the first time for all in a row at once. And there was a lot there I had missed when reading them separately.

I shared some of my insights with a friend who was duly impressed with what I had seen swimming there in the waters beneath the sunlight reflected off the surface of the story. Then he grinned a really curious grin and asked if I had ever read “The Name of the Wind”.

Read it? I’ve never even heard of it.

He recommended it highly, and said he would just love to hear what I got from it.

Such recommendations can be problematic. But I had just finished a big read, and was looking for something new … and as luck would have it, I could get a free sample on my digital reader! Fifty pages to decide if it was worth the cost of the download.

Patrick Rothfuss had me on page 1.

It was the poetic notion that a wind would have brushed silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. Delicious. So much so, I read that line three more times before continuing.

J.K. Rowling has given the world a great gift in Harry Potter. But she is not the world’s greatest writer. And she is definitely no poet. Whenever poetry was needed in that series, if it wasn’t straight up whimsical or irreverent (a la Peeves), it came off somewhat perfunctory. Perfunctory poetry is like graceful hippos: you may find it in a far-fetched Fantasia, but even then you won’t believe it when you see it.

Rothfuss on the other hand -- here beats the heart of a poet! If this is what I could expect from this book, I was down for the ride. I immediately bought both “The Name of the Wind” and “A Wise Man’s Fear” and settled in for a good read.

What I found instead was a mixed bag. There were some truly fine moments. There were some equally frustrating ones.

Kvothe routinely made the worse possible choices. How could one so smart act so stupidly? How could a man who boast of memory above all forget so much? Why wasn’t the rest of the novel as poetic as the Prologue?

I also felt it lacked big thematic ideas and was too episodic, lacking the normal bones of story structure that most novels are built on.

I was mostly self-important and wrong.

At the end of "The Name of the Wind" I was a bit non-plussed. By a third of the way through "A Wise Man's Fear" I was a full on fan, and realized i really needed to re-read the first book again.

By the end, I knew i needed to really pick this whole thing apart. Not since reading "The Rule of Four" did I have such a solid conviction of a lot more going on than what the writer was admitting to. And while "The Rule of Four" left me with that awareness, it was shared with an equally absolute lack of interest to find out what.

This time, I do want to see what else can be seen.

So, rather than doing this on my own, I thought we could make it a party. Join me while we dig through these two books again and see what we can see!