Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Retros_x" data-source="post: 9684500" data-attributes="member: 7033171">Currently reading "Dr. Sleep" after starting my Stephen King readthrough with "The Shining" and "Carrie". At the moment not really a scary book, although it has some creepy moments, but more a contemplative story about guilt, recovery, generational trauma.I think after 2,5 books what surprises me most is Kings ability as storyteller in terms of characterization and world building. I admit I underestimated his ability as a writer and my bias probably stems from watching too many bad or mediocre adaptions of his work.Interestingly I see a lot of similarities to Brandon Sanderson: Incredible high output and writing discipline, close contact to their fandom, always open for new marketing techniques (King was one of the first ebook pioneers), very popular and bestselling - but not that great with the critics (although that changed for King in his later career and the same is true for Sanderson), huge pagecount per book, slow pacing etc.But at least at the moment I prefer King over Sanderson by a large margin. I think their biggest difference is: Sanderson is an architect, King is a gardener - to borrow G.R.R.Martins terms. Sanderson is focussed on plotting and IMO is a slave to his plots while King focusses on a core idea and characterization and let his story evolve naturally. Sanderson delivers great plot twists and finales while feeling to me very artificially. King feels very naturally and his stories feel "lived in", but appereantly due to his critics he often don't stick the landing (I found them not as spectacular as Sandersons endings, but still satisfying enough).Also both have often a bit eventless middle part in their book - but in King it is still fun to me, due to his characterizations and prose. Meanwhile Sanderson has often some very boring parts in the middle for my taste.But it is very fun to read both of these authors and compare them a bit. I also finally started "The Way of the Kings" by Sanderson and will fully focus on it once I am done with "Dr. Sleep". The first chapters are intriguing and already seem to me like a big improvement over the first works of Sanderson.</blockquote>

Verification