I am not the biggest fan of fantasy books. Lord of the Rings never captured my interest, I enjoy a select few Terry Pratchet novels for their sarcastic jabs at religion and history, and even at a young age the Narnia books got very boring after the first one. Once in a while, however, there is a series that I love, that absorbs me. Harry Potter was one of them, Robin Hobb's trilogies are another. I strongly suggest anyone, even if you are not all that in to fantasy, to pick up the fist book of the Farseer trilogy and give it a shot. If you like it, you'll have 12 books to keep you company, if you're like me and are finding it always harder to get your hands on books you love. I've been devouring them, always disappointed at myself for making them last so little but not having the free will to ever put them down. I've thrown them across the room in anger when they did not end the way I wanted them too, found myself waking up when I was hoping some light bedtime reading would help put me to sleep, hungrily re-reading passages in a vain effort to make them last more than a couple of days. I've just finished the second-to-last book, and I'm already starting to feel the sense of loss I feel when I know there wont be any more for me to read, like coming to terms with a landmark of your childhood, like your grandmother's house or favorite uncle's dog, is gone and will just be part of your memories of it.
Moving on from how dramatic that sounds, it would be impossible for me to write anything resembling a review of these books. I don't want to give a single detail away, and I feel anything I can say about them sounds extremely hollow unless you've read them yourself. So give them a try, let me know if you love them and keep it to yourself if you don't :)
That aside, there was a passage in this last book that struck an unexpected cord with me. I wanted to post it here:
How could [I] have continued unaware of how things had changed, of how Hest had changed [me]? [I] hadn't, [I] admitted now. [I'd] known. But [I'd] stumbled on blindly, excusing Hest's cruelty and slights, blaming the disord on [my]self, pretending that somehow, things would go back to the way they had once been.
Had it ever been that good? Or was it all a dream that [I] had manufactured for [my]self?
Shit do I know how that feels. The sentences that hit most home are the last two, ones that even when you realize how bad your relationship was and talk about it, you don't always have the courage to ask. Was it only bad at the end, or were you made a fool of from the very beginning? I don't think I'll ever get the answer to that from my own life, something that makes me angry that I was so fucking good at hiding the source of my unhappiness from those around me. At least I'm lucky enough to have been able to move past it without ever getting that closure, been able to forgive myself for being so stupid, and know now what it looks like so I'll never fall in to one of those traps again :)
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