"Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss

This should not have been a book I liked. Very long, at 722 pages, with painful detail and slow pacing, one might say it is Dickensonian in its scope. I don't like Dickens (the horror! A librarian dislikes Dickens!) but I did like this book. A lot. Recommended to me by a colleague, this felt like a very comfortable return to the kind of fantasy novels I read in my youth. With minimal "magic" there are many sections that could be mistaken for a story set in the middle ages. The tale begins in a tavern; with the familiar hallmarks of working folk, wooden tables, dark corners and a bartender who knows more than you might think. From there, the story meanders along, giving the reader stories within stories to weave a rich tale of heroes. The essence of heroism is one of the central themes here -- what makes a hero heroic, how mythology muddies the nature of a story and how legend changes truth. Some are comparing this book to Tolkien, and while I can see the surface parallels, in many ways this is an anti-Tolkienesque novel. Tolkien is about the journey (a metaphor for his own spiritual journey). Rothfuss is about the individual. The character of Kvothe spends the book describing his journey, but the things that happen along the way are less important than the person being forged out of these events. Rothfuss (or Kvothe) is also clearly not a fan of organized religion, making out the religious leaders to be clueless or corrupt and the faith of these simple folk as silly and pointless. A better comparison would be to the work of Ursula K. LeGuin, who is quoted on both the frontispiece and back of the book. LeGuin was a favorite author of mine for many years, and this writer seems to echo her dark sense of the world and the ongoing battle of our inner demons that was present in her Farthest Shore trilogy. Although nearly nothing happens for the first 50 pages or so (the so-called "First Day" for which the book is subtitled doesn't begin until page 59) I was intrigued and definitely felt the pull of turning the next page, charging on to the next chapter, to see what would happen. It's a credit to Rothfuss, whose writing is so rich, engaging, layered and beautiful that you just feel that you are sitting there in the tavern listening to a tale well-told. The story is downright palpable. Maybe it's the Irish in me, but I truly felt "drawn" to this book. The challenge, however, is that my life doesn't accommodate long books very well these days, and this is the first of a trilogy. Don't know what I will do about that, but I'm dying to read the next book in this Kingkiller Chronicle, entitled "The Wise Man's Fear."