The Name of the Wind

Let's start with some good points: the plot and pacing are engaging, the currencies and magic systems are worked out excellently, and the narration and frame narrative complement each other. I genuinely enjoyed reading it. But good grief is it male-gazey. Every women is introduced as physically beautiful, and most are in some way enamoured with the male protagonist. The double-edged respite is that the story doesn't include many women. sigh I found my enjoyment improved tenfold whenever I ignored the author's decision to make a character masculine. Honestly most of those choices of gender were just pointless and detracting on the author's part — why only men? Rothfuss' is a world I would abhor to live in. The author tries to get as much mileage as possible out of every interesting word; he does this by repeating that interesting word a couple chapters later, as if scared it'll slip back into the thesaurus if he doesn't use it again quickly. All this to say, the writing style is a little uninspired. My edition also had spelling mistakes. (Several.) So while the detailed magic system, economy and systems of measurement are rare — exceptional — in a book, perhaps the author had more pressing aspects of this novel he should have devoted attention to instead.