Godā¦I mean itās one of those books that I bought based on reviews and then by the end I was completely done with it. But the thing is, itās a third-person ācontemporaryā narrative that wraps the main first-person memoir of the Kvothe character and the third-person stuff is really really good and interesting.
So like @maggieloveshopey I just couldnāt be arsed when I finished book one, but that wrapping narrative just kept ticking over so I bought The Wise Manās Fear. Iād have to say I thought it was better than the first book by some way but also, not really different.
Anyway, I ended up re-reading them both with this podcast I follow where she was a total fan of them and it did show thereās a load of clever depth to the writing, lots of stuff you can speculate on and so forth, really impressive world-building in the background in a sort of āshow not tellā way. But the main story is just somehow very straightforward: guy goes to Wizard University and has to scrape by, but heās really really good at scraping by.
Like @epimer says, thereās a reasonable chance the whole point of the story is for it to be a parody/satire of the thing, given the third-person section, but as heās taken 9 years to write the 3rd book itās hard to really know if it can ever be worth the wait.
At least GRRM gives us the yearly lie of āIāll have finished the Winds of Winter next yearā.
