Ralif Redhammer
Legend
Yeah, the whole spoilers in the headline thing needs to go away.
Speed Running Entertainment
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
Unfortunately, the financial incentive is in getting the clicks now.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
You'd be shocked mate.
Some people have a lot of time on their hands and are fast/keen readers, and not every show/book/game benefits much from slow consumption - some do, but I'd genuinely suggest it's a pretty small minority.
Also:
Presumably this is Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson? Part of the Stormlight series? If so, it's an inch deep and a mile wide. There's absolutely no benefit to reading it slowly - you're not going to get more from it except maybe more Cosmere references (which are valueless nerd trivia/fanservice). It's the kind of book you can 100% put on to 1.25 or 1.5 speed and not miss anything of any value. He's not a wordsmith and doesn't have beautiful prose. He's not a philosopher, and doesn't have deep ideas. His characters are not deep and complex and most of them don't grow much either. He's a world-builder and magic-system designer par excellence, but that can easily be appreciated at speed.
There are fantasy novels where some real stopping and considering adds hugely to them - Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun for example, if you don't regularly stop and think about it you'll get like, 20% of what's going on. And his prose is incredible, brilliant. But that's the exception not the rule.
R_J_K75
Legend
Sounds like my kind of guy
Ruin Explorer
Legend
He's a lot of people's kind of guy! For exactly those kinds of reasons!
A lot of fantasy novels have troubled characters, challenging morality you need to think about, ideas about life and the human condition and so on, and Sanderson largely just dismisses all of that. The few times we have his characters have a genuine moral quandary, they always pick the easy "good guy" option, even where it flies against everything in their personality and experiences so far, the authorial hand-of-god reaches down (sometimes almost literally!) and redirects them, or in the literally two other cases I can think of, they are briefly stressed out for doing the "wrong" thing morally and then fate conspires to make it actually be the "right" thing.
Also they are so focused on world-building and magic systems, which are essentially meaningless lore, but some people really love learning tons of meaningless lore. Sanderson has also gradually added cross-book/cross-universe lore, which I personally find repulsive and caused me to stop reading his books, but a lot of people love.
There's also, like, basically no sex and little sexual desire, which again, I think for a certain kind of median reader is absolutely an asset.
(As an aside, to be clear I don't dislike Sanderson personally, I respect how honest he's been about some of his failings (c.f. hand-of-god redirects, overly chaste characters, etc.), and I think a lot of the problems come down the rather astonishing fact that he is IRL, for real, incapable of feeling either physical or emotional pain. On the flip side I think that the lack of that makes his books vastly less challenging than other works, like, say, those of Joe Abercrombie, who writes about and understands pain in a pretty deep and sharp way.)
Last edited:
R_J_K75
Legend
I'm not familiar with him at all. I don't do much, if any fiction reading these days mostly due to the fact that I don't want to think that hard anymore. I read the first Song of Fire and Ice book about 12 years ago, but after a few pages of the 2nd book I decided it wasn't for me. I bought the first season of the DVDs from HBO and maybe watched the first season, or most of it, gave it to my friend and never got it back. Never watched anything after that. For as much as I like D&D and RPGs, I can't concentrate enough to keep up with things like Star Wars or the MCU, DCEU, the market has become too saturated for my pea brain. I just watched the whole series of Coach from the 90s, that's more my speed, not too many moral quandaries there.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
I think the issue with Sanderson, on this basis, is that he does expect you to remember who basically a bazillion characters with silly names are, and to actually keep the lore straight in your head, or it's going to be very confusing. Stormlight is kind of MCU (not Marvel, MCU-specifically) levels of complexity just in one series of (incredibly long - the most recent one is 1344 pages) novels.
So might not be a good choice for you.
There are other more-accessible fantasy novelists out there, who don't make the same demands - including some of Sanderson's own works which aren't Stormlight (the first three Mistborn books, for example). Ironically the huge amount of lore to be memorized for Stormlight is part of its smash-hit success though.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
It's not literal speedrunning, he just means people reading through stuff quickly, binge-watching, etc.
R_J_K75
Legend
At this point I'd rather appreciate from afar than dive headfirst into a series of novels. I have commitment issues. I still have a stack of comics from the last 6 months I have to read. I just don't have the wherewithal to follow through with a few hundred-thousand-page novel series. I've read "Dune" at least 7 times, I got to the last 20 pages and never finished it. So, I think it would take quite a bit to get me to read a novel these days; I don't have the attention span or memory anymore.
Similar Threads
