I'm even a little embarrassed to be posting this, but I feel it's more important to be honest than to hide something that I actually read. The reason for my embarrassment is insignificant but perhaps a little revealing. The Last Wish is a collection of short stories set in the world of The Witcher trilogy of video games. The books came first and the video games later, but that makes neither no less nerdy nor suspect. Sci-fi and fantasy have been making more excursions into the pop culture world - just consider how big Game of Thrones has become - but the connection is still mostly held together by couplets of video game and book or movie and book. Without its game counterpart, The Last Wish would languish in book shops among hundreds of similar looking fantasy romps, exotic elves or glistening swords or dragons adorning their covers.
That is not to say that The Last Wish is all bad. Its decidedly more mature than typical teenage fantasy books (which is not the only thing it has in common with Game of Thrones). Some of the short stories are genuinely good (especially The Lesser Evil and The Witcher) and they make use of the format's strengths: the increased weight of every line of dialogue, the opportunity to focus on smaller themes and the natural tension of wondering how each story will end. Sapkowski does a good job of giving characters personality even within the confines of individual chapters and the individual stories add to the others as well, as the reader starts to understand Geralt's, the main character's, predicament.
I would never had given The Last Wish the time of day, if I hadn't enjoyed The Witcher 3 video game so much, it's as simple as that, and having read it, it seems unlikely that I'll read any of the four other novels in the series. I couldn't shake the feeling that there is little of consequence in the world of The Witcher. How am I the wiser having read this? The Last Wish didn't really surprise me, nor did it delight me. It's good, but it represents a genre that I tend to categorically discount. It may be beloved in its original Polish, but some of the context is clearly lost in regions that are not familiar with what kind of fairytale monster a striga is. Geralt isn't your average monster slayer, but he isn't that unique either. In the books, at least.