bolingrice-blog

[brechtian]

it's like the natural progression of dalinar's character arc wouldve been for him to be a monarch & caste abolitionist and actively work to undo the harm he directly caused through imperialism but instead sanderson has him do the opposite and advocate for the continuation of these systems which. under normal circumstances i would be fine with a character having horribly wrong views so long as the narrative clearly doesn't agree with them except dalinar spent the entirety of the first 3 stormlight books supposedly becoming a better person all for him to end up being a like political moderate lmao.

[shinylitwick94]

Finished “The Way of Kings”, by Brandon Sanderson, first in the Stormlight Archive.

I liked it, but the things that annoy me about the way Sanderson writes didn’t magically stop annoying me. Go figure.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the whole book! And very long post!

Dislikes:

1. This book is far, far too long.

It’s 1000 pages long and...not much happens. It’s mainly worldbuilding and setup for future books. A few things do happen, of course, but they’re mostly concentrated at the end of the book. Almost nothing happens in the entire middle portion.

It depends on the POV characters of course, but really, you could remove almost half of it and have a better book. Dalinar’s story is the only one where I feel you wouldn’t have to cut out much. Shallan could easily be 1/3 shorter. And in Kaladin’s case you could (and IMHO opinion should) remove half of it.

Kaladin’s story in particular I found was repetitive and dragged down the pace of the book. You could remove or condense half of those small incidents and still keep the story. Same for his flashbacks. You could have had 1 flashback or maybe 2, and still keep the same elements, instead of what felt like 20.

I’ve had this complaint about a lot of other fantasy books (Wheel of Time, Malazan, Memory, Sorrow, Thorn, even ASOIAF...), but the fact is that the genre is far too willing to tolerate barely edited 500+ page monstrosities. Yes, sometimes it’s justified, but most of the time it’s really not. This didn’t bother me as much when I was a 12 year old with nothing else to do, but as an adult, having to push through 500 pages of fluff to get to a story pisses me off.

To contrast, as usual when I complain about this, the entirety of LOTR is also roughly a thousand pages long. Frodo went to Mordor and back in the time it took Kaladin to get out of Sadeas’ warcamp.

2. I have multiple issues with Sanderson’s writing.

Two major problems here: repetitiveness and action scenes too detailed for my taste.

Sometimes both at the same time.

By which I mean stuff like this:

“Ten heartbeats after the passing of the guards, Szeth Lashed himself to the wall. That direction became down for him, and he was able to run up the side of the stone fortification. As he reached the top, he leaped forward, then briefly Lashed himself backward. He spun over the top of the wall in a tucked flip, then Lashed himself back to the wall again. He came down with feet planted on the stones, facing the ground. He ran and Lashed himself downward again, dropping the last few feet”

(quote thing not working, so italics it is)

This sort of paragraph makes my eyes bleed. And Sanderson’s action scenes are unfortunately always full of this stuff. This was the primary thing that made me decide not to continue with Mistborn and was also the thing that made me drop this book the first time, because the first chapter is like this.

Basically what happens here is that Sanderson really likes his worldbuilding and his magic. So he feels the need to beat you over the head with them again and again and again and again.

It’s most noticeable in action scenes like this, and granted I’m not super fond of action in the first place and tend to skim it,  but it also happens in regular prose, since he also apparently thinks his readers have the attention span of a goldfish and so repeatedly explains something he already explained three chapters ago.

In the first ten chapters I felt like he taught me how spheres worked a good 4-5 times.

It just makes me feel like I’m going through a forced tutorial and being treated like a child. FFS trust that your readers can pick up on stuff on their own.

From what I’ve seen a lot of people actually like this overexplaining BS, so it’s clearly a matter of taste, but it sure as hell isn’t to my taste.

Things I’m neutral on:

Characters

The characters land themselves in neutral because while there are some very good ones (hi Dalinar!), most of them are just kind of meh.

Looking at our POV characters, I’d class both Shallan and Kaladin as meh. They’re interesting enough, but not really captivating to read. Just very standard archetypal characters. Nothing wrong with them, but also nothing stands out.

Dalinar and maybe Szeth are the only POV that I really enjoyed as characters on their own.

The secondary cast is fine, with some characters I really liked (Navani, Jasnah, Sadeas - yes, I know, I’ll get to that in a second) and a lot of others that were just ok.

Bridge Four for me falls into this last category. I mentioned in an earlier post that this part of the plot brings to mind Spartacus, Gladiator and now that I think about it even prison movies. Essentially things where an heroic main character is dumped in with a group of dispirited hopeless men and tries to do something with them, which is Kaladin’s whole story here. More importantly, the characters in Bridge Four also largely follow the archetypes for this kind of setting - you have the Gentle Big Guy, the Clever Guy, the Guy Who Does Not Trust The Hero, The Unexpectedly Cultured Guy, The Old Veteran, etc.

Which at the end of the day meant I had trouble connecting to bridge four because I couldn’t look past the archetypes.

To get back to Sadeas - he’s introduced as such an obviously evil character that I really hoped he’d turn out to be something else up until the very end. It would have been far more interesting to have him be a genuine if rahter unscrupulous rival than a very boring, very predictable traitor. This hope is what made me like him so much at first. Alas, it was not to be.

Things I liked:

1. Worldbuilding

Of course.This is what Sanderson is best at and it really shines through here.

Roshar is massively detailed at every level and Sanderson makes sure his big choices regarding the world’s setup are reflected in both the natural world and the societies he creates.

I loved the focus on the natural world, in particular. It’s an aspect that most other fantasy authors don’t usually devote a lot of time to, but Sanderson clearly loves it.

Forget adaptations - I’d kill for an Attenborough-esque documentary on Roshar’s fauna and flora!

The worldbuilding feels a little bit shallower when it comes to peoples and societies, but really this is just nitpicking on my part, it’s great overall.

2. Plot

The plot itself is pretty interesting, even if the pacing could use some improvement.

I particularly liked Dalinar’s part, and Shallan’s once it actually picks up speed.

The ending was also very intense and a lot of fun to read, with what I felt was a good mix of action and big reveals.

Honestly, regardless of my complaining above, I enjoyed this book and had a great time reading it. It’s fun, it just takes a while to get there. And I will be picking up the rest of the series eventually.

For me it’s a solid 4 stars.

As for recommending this, I’d say it’s good for people who already enjoy fantasy a bit, are looking for something completely different and don’t mind a slow start. Oh, and people who want a series that is ongoing but very likely to be finished in a timely manner. Sanderson delivers when it comes to his writing. No Martin/Rothfuss surprises here.