The Name of the Wind

I really thought this was printed in gold when I first read it >10 years ago. Now? Now it is a disappointment, and it a disappointment of three parts:

The first disappointment is too much tell, not enough show. Kvothe is the narrator, but he is also the dam at which all emotional investment gets caught.

The second disappointment is subtler, wormier: it is the realization that what younger me had mistaken for prose is actually middle-grade overexposition on steroids: nearly a thousand empty pages stuffed with so many nonsense similes it's like an overpuffed pastry, all sweet crunch and no substance.

The third disappointment was not an easy thing for me to notice, but when I read long enough I could feel it in my reluctance to return to the book, my feeling of duty when I cracked the mammoth spine open for the hundredth time. It is the disappointment of a reader who long ago accepted she will never read the conclusion of this series, who sadly looks back on the hours and hopes sunk into these pages. It is the doomed, cut-flower disappointment in an author who has given up.