At the begin­ning of this pan­dem­ic, or what some cru­el­ly call a sum­mer, I am sure I was not alone in cre­at­ing a far-too-ambi­tious read­ing list. I had dreams of com­ing back to class in the fall semes­ter as an entire­ly remod­elled Eng­lish stu­dent; I was imag­in­ing some­thing Dead Poets Soci­ety-esque, except with more Shake­speare.

These dreams were quick­ly dashed, as I found myself strug­gling to even pick up books I’d pur­chased for plea­sure read­ing and instead chose to leave the books yearn­ing in var­i­ous cor­ners of my room while I start­ed yet anoth­er trashy real­i­ty show on Net­flix. The only book that was able to cross the bound­ary from my bed­room floor into my hands was The Name of the Wind by Patrick Roth­fuss. The only rea­son this book made the cut was because I had already start­ed this nov­el, so it felt like less of a daunt­ing task to re-enter Roth­fuss’ fan­ta­sy world com­pared to start­ing a new one.

            I am a per­son who usu­al­ly shies away from fan­ta­sy nov­els, steer­ing more towards cre­ative non­fic­tion, which are all usu­al­ly depress­ing and not the sort of thing I felt moti­vat­ed to read dur­ing quar­an­tine. Roth­fuss’ books offered a won­der­ful escape from my real­i­ty; it has been a long time since I have found a book as cap­ti­vat­ing and immer­sive as this one. His world-build­ing is impec­ca­ble. The read­er is left guess­ing and pulling at threads that seem to have no end­ing, at least not in this one nov­el. NoTW is the first in the Kingkiller tril­o­gy, but before you pick it up you should know that the third book has not been pub­lished. It has been nine years since the sequel was pub­lished, so fans of the series are slow­ly los­ing hope. If unfin­ished busi­ness in sto­ries excites rather than frus­trates you, you will find your­self at home with Roth­fuss’ loy­al read­ers. An online fan­base remains active to this day, con­tin­u­ous­ly upload­ing new the­o­ries and dis­cov­er­ing new details. Roth­fuss does not write a sin­gle word that does not car­ry a deep­er mean­ing, which is why I think this series appealed to me—the close-read­ing skills I have learned as an Eng­lish stu­dent height­ened my enjoy­ment of this nov­el and allowed me to dive deep­er into the hid­den mean­ings than I would have pre­vi­ous­ly thought were pos­si­ble or even exist­ed.

            This nov­el opened the flood­gates, so to speak, and restored my love for read­ing. My read­ing habits also changed over the sum­mer: now, I find myself going for walks or runs while lis­ten­ing to audio­books of Made­line Miller’s nov­els The Song of Achilles and Circe or read­ing col­lec­tions of sto­ries by David Sedaris. I even pur­chased and began to read a lit­er­ary critic’s book on Ham­let. 

            So, like the unex­pect­ed pair­ing of Ham­let and car­toon lions, this unex­pect­ed sum­mer became irrev­o­ca­bly inter­twined with unex­pect­ed sum­mer read­ing. 

Josiah Lamb

This post was pub­lished on the orig­i­nal UVic ESA web­site.