Brandon Sanderson, you son of a bitch.

I made it 450 pages into Oathbringer when it first came out back in 2017. I was pissed when I decided I had to DNF it– but it had taken me a rather astonishing twelve days to make it those 450 pages (for comparison’s sake, on this reread, during a week where I was working, I finished the entire 1240-page thing in a week) and not only was I not having any fun with it I was finding myself slowly convinced that the book was on the side of the bad guys, and I wasn’t in the right headspace for it one way or another.

Well.

Oathbringer is boring as hell for 900 pages.

I mean, that’s really all there is to it. I can’t recommend reading this book to anyone. I can’t tell anybody to endure nine fucking hundred pages of wheel-spinning and navel-gazing and characters that desperately need to invent antidepressants and irrelevant subplots that could be excised in their entirety without affecting the overall structure of the book. It is exactly the type of bloat that so frequently settles into this type of megaseries, especially when the author has already proven themselves to be someone who could shit on a series of napkins, bind them between two covers, and sell a million copies. Sanderson’s untouchable, and I mean that as a compliment. He doesn’t need to write good books anymore. He can do whatever he wants.

I do not feel bad about abandoning this book on the first pass. I damn near didn’t make it on the second.

And, if anything, the most frustrating thing about this miserable slog of a novel is that the last, oh, 300 pages of the book are some of the most exciting shit he’s ever written. Somewhere toward the end of Part Four or the beginning of Part Five, this motherfucker steps on the gas and he absolutely does not let off until the book is done.

Which meant I was really Goddamned irritated when one of my fucking cats jumped on my chest while I was reading– not in itself a surprising event– and, with about 80 pages left, pissed on my fucking book.

It was a splat, not, like, a full-blast stream, and she somehow managed to not get a single drop on me or on the chair I was sitting in, but my cat fucking pissed on my book while I was reading the fucking thing and I somehow did not immediately kill her or throw her outside in retaliation.

And then, upon discovering Amazon can’t get me another hardcover copy for a couple of weeks and the only other new bookstore in town didn’t have any copies, I had to fucking finish the book after doing everything I could to, more or less unsuccessfully, soak everything up and banish the cat piss smell from my book.

The cat? Seems to be fine. I would immediately suspect a UTI, right? But I’ve had cats get UTIs in the past, and it generally involves lots of little pee accidents and a general feeling that maybe they’re struggling when they do pee, and this little asshole seems completely fine. We’re keeping an eye on her, obviously, and they were all due for vet appointments anyway, but right now I’m assuming this is some deeply weird and unexpected bit of shitheadery and not a sign of something more alarming.

This marks the second pet I’ve had that has ruined one or more of my books by pissing on them, but Hector at least did it while they were on the shelf and close to the floor and not in my Goddamned hands.

Christ.

At any rate, 3601 pages down, 2845 to go.