Retros_x
Hero
Puh after 3 months I finally finished "The Way of Kings". I was excited for it, because many Sandersons fans said this is his magnum opus, his epic fantasy that is much more fleshed out than his other earlier novels. If flashed out means to tack just more padding onto it, I would agree but I am getting ahead of myself.
Sanderson is frustrating to read. Once again he has a great setup and a great finale, but there is so much boring padding in the middle that runs at glacial pacing, its frustrating to read. So much clunky exposition, so much telling instead of showing, so much artificial worldbuilding, illogical plots that get spread out so thinly, so much repetitive inner thoughts of protagonists, so much meaningless dialogue.
And I have nothing at all against slow-paced books. I love a good slow burner. But in a good slow burner we still have exciting prose to read, only the plot events happen more slowly, there is still interesting stuff to read and new stuff to lean in each chapter. And slow pacing doesn't mean bloated. You can have a good slow-burn book in 350 pages. You don't need over 1000 pages - if you write over so much pages than fill it with good content! But you could cut Way if Kings down by 30% and it would've been a better book. A good editor would've done that, I am not sure if Sanderson doesn't have one or doesn't listen to one.
Compare that to "A Game of Thrones" that manages to put in 400 pages less: more storylines, more characters, more worldbuilding and all that IMO in a much more engaging writing style. And people already complain about pacing in GoT! They would never survive Brandon Sanderson.
It doesn't feel like epic fantasy, because while the world is big we only stay in two places for 90% of the story and the rest of the world feels quite decoupled from these locations. We just have some random snippets of characters we don't know and care in small interludes, that probably come relevant in two books later down the line.
The only storyline I felt engaging and interesting for most of its runtime is Kaladins present time story and thankfully it has the most page count, otherwise this book would've not reaches 3.5 stars for me. He is the only character who makes a meaningful slow development and how he manages to form a squad out of bridge 4 is just great. I was very invested in Kaladins and Bridge 4's outcome in the story.
The actions scenes and the final twists are also great because that is what Sanderson is actually good at. But the more I read by him the more I get the feeling he has these scenes as book ideas and than writes bad prose and plot to get from one of these cool scenes to each others.
I am a bit worried about the quality of the rest of the series, because I have read that the books get worse and some people complain that volume 5 has YA prose and too much explaining and repetitions - But I think volume 1 already is full of that? How much worse it is going to get? Am I really ready to invest probably about 100 hours of reading for just the Stormlight Archive alone? I don't know yet.
Sanderson is frustrating to read. Once again he has a great setup and a great finale, but there is so much boring padding in the middle that runs at glacial pacing, its frustrating to read. So much clunky exposition, so much telling instead of showing, so much artificial worldbuilding, illogical plots that get spread out so thinly, so much repetitive inner thoughts of protagonists, so much meaningless dialogue.
And I have nothing at all against slow-paced books. I love a good slow burner. But in a good slow burner we still have exciting prose to read, only the plot events happen more slowly, there is still interesting stuff to read and new stuff to lean in each chapter. And slow pacing doesn't mean bloated. You can have a good slow-burn book in 350 pages. You don't need over 1000 pages - if you write over so much pages than fill it with good content! But you could cut Way if Kings down by 30% and it would've been a better book. A good editor would've done that, I am not sure if Sanderson doesn't have one or doesn't listen to one.
Compare that to "A Game of Thrones" that manages to put in 400 pages less: more storylines, more characters, more worldbuilding and all that IMO in a much more engaging writing style. And people already complain about pacing in GoT! They would never survive Brandon Sanderson.
It doesn't feel like epic fantasy, because while the world is big we only stay in two places for 90% of the story and the rest of the world feels quite decoupled from these locations. We just have some random snippets of characters we don't know and care in small interludes, that probably come relevant in two books later down the line.
The only storyline I felt engaging and interesting for most of its runtime is Kaladins present time story and thankfully it has the most page count, otherwise this book would've not reaches 3.5 stars for me. He is the only character who makes a meaningful slow development and how he manages to form a squad out of bridge 4 is just great. I was very invested in Kaladins and Bridge 4's outcome in the story.
The actions scenes and the final twists are also great because that is what Sanderson is actually good at. But the more I read by him the more I get the feeling he has these scenes as book ideas and than writes bad prose and plot to get from one of these cool scenes to each others.
I am a bit worried about the quality of the rest of the series, because I have read that the books get worse and some people complain that volume 5 has YA prose and too much explaining and repetitions - But I think volume 1 already is full of that? How much worse it is going to get? Am I really ready to invest probably about 100 hours of reading for just the Stormlight Archive alone? I don't know yet.
