The Way of Kings

Several people have said I should try reading a Brandon Sanderson book. So I read one. And I thought it was fine. I will probably not read another one.

The Way of Kings is a very long book, and that length is taken up with worldbuilding rather than storytelling. The actual plot moves at a glacial pace. The worldbuilding is interesting, but not that interesting. I found my mind wandering during long passages of the book. At over a thousand pages, I am presuming that somebody suggested to Sanderson that he cut it down. So everything that is in this book, was, I am presuming, kept in deliberately. And rather than lose myself in the story, I found myself wondering "why is this particular chapter in here? What is it doing?" It really feels like some careful editing and rewriting could have removed a good three hundred pages from this book no problem.

On top of that, it's the first part in a series, so despite its prodigious length, Sanderson felt no need to provide any kind of satisfying conclusion to the story. I guess this is a feature rather than a bug for those who like this sort of thing: it's all set up for rich and interesting stories to take place in the further volumes. And maybe that's true, but that doesn't detract from the fact that this book, on its own, is average at best.

I don't remember having this problem with, for example, A Song of Ice and Fire, or the Kingkiller Chronicles. Things happened in those books, along with the worldbuilding and set up for sequels.

Beyond the length and pace issues, I think the politics of this book are pretty awful. The good guys are the slave-owning monarchy trying their best to commit a genocide? The bad guys are just wholly other and nobody seems interested in trying to understand them? Some characters express some disquiet at the phenomenal scale of the death they are causing (at something like 900 pages in to the story), but come on.

The writing is functional. It's bland. It doesn't try too hard, and thus doesn't fail often, but the words are there to tell the story of the world, not to be enjoyed for their own sake.

So, I imagine there's an audience for this kind of book, people who like diving in to these multi-book arcs, thousands upon thousands of pages of pedestrian prose telling a long story set in a richly imagined world. I am not one of them. I like things to happen in the books I read. A one word review of this book: prolix.

The Way of Kings is a worldbuilding masterpiece. Its characters are rich and internally complex, their stories are fascinating, and their motivations compelling (even when you disagree with them). The single exception to this is the Shallan arc.

This is not because Shallan is a bad character, but because she's a decent character surrounded by great ones, and because it takes too long for her arc to connect to the main story.

I highly, highly recommend reading this book, and most of this author's other works.

A really great start to an epic fantasy series that I cannot wait to see the rest of. If you love well defined magic and alien settings then Stormlight is for you. Sanderson goes beyond any fantasy world building that I had seen or heard of before and has created a living, breathing world that is so different from Earth that you can't help being sucked in just to find out how all of it works.

This is the kind of high fantasy I love best: epic scope, fantastic world-building, interesting characters. My favorite Sanderson for sure. Just as in Mistborn, the first book of the Stormlight Archive shines when it comes to the development of a magic system. The use of Stormlight is just as interesting as Mistborn's Allomancy.

The three main characters of the story couldn't be any more diverse: we have Kaladin, dark-eyed soldier and slave, Dalinar Kholin, highprince and uncle of the king of Alethkar, and the one female main protagonist, Shallan, who apprentices as ward to Jasnah, sister of the king of Alethkar and renowned heretic scholar. The world is set up in an interesting fashion. Women are the learned ones, the scholars, the ones who can read and write, as opposed to men who mostly seem to focus on warfare and trade, assisted by the women. The eye color seems to determine the leaders, and lighteyes are supposed to be men full of honor. Only it isn't so, as especially Kaladin who really appears to be the hero of the story has to find out. We learn a lot of his personal history through flashbacks as his story progresses.

I know that all of Sanderson's stories share one universe, the Cosmere, and it's mentioned in the story, but I can't grasp the bigger picture yet. All I know is that The Way of Kings is a huge book and still only scratched at the surface of all the things I want to know. Who were the Heralds? What caused the fall of the Radiants? What are spren? What's the real story behind the Parshendi? What is Szeth's backstory? I want moooooore.

Waiting for book 2 to actually be written will suck. I hate starting new series that get you hooked and then you wait forever, and fear it will never be finished. Yup, I am looking at you, Melanie Rawn.

Highly recommended!

This was a hard book to get through. It was so long that it was a daunting task to read it. It wasn't until I was about half way throughit that I found the plot to be interesting. I understand why it was so long, and how all the pieces fit together, but I sincerely hope the next one is shorter.

i think another reason why it took me so long to get into this book is that it isn't your average fantasy world. Props to Sanderson for creating a unique world with it's own set of races, rules and challenges, instead of your run-of-the-mill Earth-like world with elves, dwarves and men. I think the world has grown on me, and I like it, but it did take a while for me to get used to it.