CB # 20 The Wise Man's Fear

The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

               I'm so proud of myself for finally reading a series in the right order on this blog. This is the sequel to The Name of the Wind, which I read back in May. It was pretty much what you would expect if you had read the previous book. There is still magic and Kvothe is just as un-self-aware as before. 

              The major surprise for me was that this book, although longer than the first one, felt a little less padded than the first. I mean, an editor could still be used. There is a bit too much time spent wandering around the woods and fooling around with a fairy (in the most literal sense). The Kvothe who tells the stories of his adventures does not seem to have any of the skills he acquired over the course of the adventures, and it makes you wonder if he’s a completely unreliable narrator (he did spend a long time talking about his amazing physical ability to subdue a sex-crazed fairy).  However, this book was enjoyable, kept on pushing the narrative forward, and made me excited for the next book, which will finish the series off (at least I assume it will).

If you’ve read the first book and enjoyed it, then I’m fairly certain that you’ll enjoy this novel. 

           Dear readers, I'm sorry for the short review, but I'm finding myself far behind where I want to be in the Cannonball Read. I've read about 40 books so far, but sometimes it's hard to say anything interesting about a book. Sometimes a book is just a book; something that makes your lunch hour more enjoyable. Sometimes a book has more going on inside of it, but then it takes longer to read, and it's even harder to write about it. Sometimes you just can't put your finger on what you liked and what you didn't like.

CB # 19 One of Our Thursdays is Missing

One of our Thursdays is missing by Jasper Fforde

            I really enjoy the Thursday Next mysteries. Thursday Next lives in an alternative verison of our world, where cloning has allowed dodos to be pets, strong cheeses are traded on the black market and Wales is a socialist republic. Oh, and also it’s possible for a person to read her way into a book. I love the series as a whole. Fforde obviously love books, as seen by the way that Next can travel throughout BookWorld and meet all of her favourite characters. I love the allusions that occur throughout, they're always surprisingly funny. Some of them, especially in the earlier novels have caused me to pick a book up and read it myself. However, this (the 6^th novel by my count) was not his best work.

This novel is told not from the perspective of real world Thursday whom readers have come to know and love, but from the perspective of the written version of her, the one who is regularly read in the books about her adventures. These books are similar to what those who have read the series have read before, except that all the sections about Justification as well as the explanation of how Thursday read her way in, in the first place. The fictional Thursday is a bit of a hippie, and honestly, rather dull.   “Real” Thursday is simply more fun to read than written Thursday and a lot of the joy of the novel has been lost to me. Another factor is that  the geography of BookWorld has changed dramatically, as demonstrated in the prologue, when Thursday explains how BookWorld now consists of islands. This probably made the whole plot of the novel more reasonable to write, but it was sort of aggravating after being used to things.

There is a fun mystery in this novel, and there are still the fun allusions to other works, including War and Peace and Harry Potter fan fiction. If you haven’t read the Thursday Next books before, I definitely wouldn’t start here. Instead I’d read the first one, The Eyre Affair and continue on from there. For me at least, this one really completes the series, but it isn't a necessary read.