Not much to brag about, I know— the Edgedancer novella is only around 40,000 words and the “prologue” is actually a chapter from Words of Radiance, so this took a couple of hours at most to get through today. I didn’t really love it; Sanderson says in the afterword that Lift is one of his favorite characters in the series, but the word “awesome” really doesn’t fit the tone of the first three books, and while it was okay to see it in that one interlude chapter, seeing it over and over and over again in this book gets kind of jarring.(*)

As far as Words of Radiance goes, I would compare it to A Clash of Kings; when you’re following up on one of the best fantasy novels out there, you can have a pretty serious drop off in quality and still be a really good book, and that’s what happens here. You start seeing the world really opening up in this book and a whole lot of different characters and organizations (there are at least three different groups, I think, who are trying to kill Elhokar? Four, if you count the Parshendi?) and I think you can be forgiven if your head is spinning a bit at the end of the book, particularly since a whole lot of major stuff happens in the last hundred and fifty pages (out of, remember, 1080) of the book. Even with all of that we’re still seeing some bloat; despite being the focus character in the book, Shallan doesn’t have nearly as much to do in this book as she did in the first one, and Kaladin kind of spends a lot of time spinning his wheels as well. There are also issues with plot armor; Kaladin being near-unkillable is a plot point so that’s not as big of a deal, but two other major characters are killed and then resurrected in this book. It still retains the propulsive energy and readability of the first book, though; I’ve read 2353 pages in five days, not counting whatever I manage from Oathbringer today, and I didn’t mean to finish Words of Radiance until today but chose to finish it instead of sleeping last night. And, again, it’s not a bad book, it just suffers in comparison to the first one.

This week will be the pivotal one. I don’t remember how far exactly I got into Oathbringer the first time but it wasn’t very far. If I finish it this week I think I’m probably good with finishing everything that’s been released. If I hit a brick wall again … we’ll see, I suppose.

(*) I’m also real real worried about that thing that that other thing says to Szeth at the very end of the book. And the thing itself also worries me. WordPress doesn’t support spoiler text AFAIK or I’d say more.