My wife genuinely suggested to me, half an hour ago, as I was telling her that I had to write this and that I was not looking forward to it, that I just make the entire post a single word:
“Don’t.”
And … well, no. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this series is how close to being remarkable it is. Most of the reviewers certainly seem to think it’s amazing; the lowest-ranked of the main Archives books is at 4.51 on Goodreads, which is hardly a failure.
And in many ways it really is remarkable. I stand by my repeated assertion that The Way of Kings is an amazing fucking book. But unfortunately the series follows what has become a sadly typical trajectory of the fantasy megaseries, that being that each book is worse than the book before it. And much like the best example of this phenomenon, A Song of Ice and Fire, the first book is so good that there’s plenty of room for the books to get worse before they even begin to approach being bad.
So let’s start off with some good stuff. The books are clearly carefully planned out. George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss are never releasing the next books in their series because they have written themselves into corners. I believe completely that Sanderson is going to deliver on books six through ten if he lives long enough, and I may even buy them if only to have them on the shelf. He’s going somewhere with this and he knows what he’s doing. And while I have some serious issues with his worldbuilding– more on that later– there is no doubt that it is both deliberate and meticulous. It’s not easy to write a five-book series in the first place! I certainly couldn’t do it! It’s even harder when each book is over a thousand pages long and all five of them come out in a fifteen-year period of time where you also write and release seven hundred other books.
By all rights, these books should be much, much crappier than they are. It’s amazing that they’re even readable, to be honest.
But about halfway through Oathbringer, a book that I abandoned early the first time I tried to read it, the books took a turn that I wasn’t expecting.
Unfortunately, that turn was directly up Brandon Sanderson’s ass.
The Cosmere has its fans, I am aware of this. I am very very much not one of them. For those of you unaware of the meaning of that term, all (perhaps most? Let’s go with most) of Brandon Sanderson’s books exist in the same universe. During the time where I was reading his work regularly, he hadn’t really revealed this little detail of his work, and any connections between different series either went unnoticed or were dismissed as Easter eggs of no particular real significance.
You can imagine my dismay when the fucking annoying talking sword from Warbreaker, by far my least favorite of Sanderson’s books, showed up in Oathbringer, and you will have to take my word for it that said dismay increased significantly when it became clear that not only was the sword not going away but it was far from the last intrusion his other books were going to make into Stormlight. It was never really explained why the sword was there. It just was. Other characters from his books showed up too, one with a pretty prominent role, others in cameos. Other planets were frequently discussed, and travel between them became a sub-theme. And after a while, every time I encountered a character I didn’t immediately recognize, I had to play this stupid game where I was wondering if it was just a minor character that after thousands and thousands of pages of narrative I simply didn’t remember, or if it was someone from another book and I was supposed to realize something about it.
Again, you may like the Cosmere. More power to you. Enjoy the wikis. It damn near destroyed the books for me.
I nearly started talking about his characters when discussing the positives of the series, and stopped; most of his characters are assassinated over the course of the series. Kaladin is amazing in The Way of Kings; he has the following exchange in Wind and Truth, which is treated like a mic drop:
“How?” Ishar repeated. “What are you?” He gestured toward Szeth.
“Are you… are you his spren? His god?”
“No,” Kaladin said. “I’m his therapist.”
…
Shut up, Brandon Sanderson. Mental illness is a theme of at least three if not four of the books, but it’s handled so, so poorly that I don’t even want to talk about it. Everybody’s fucked up somehow, and it becomes annoying after a while. The final book, one thousand three hundred and twenty-nine pages long, is 70% flashbacks, and the other 30% is mostly self-affirmations.
Which. Yeah. Bloat. I’m not joking about Wind and Truth being 70% flashbacks. Nearly all of the book is presented in a series of visions. What happens in Book Four? At the beginning of the book the bad guys take over a place, and at the end of the book they are driven out of that place again. The actual changes to the status quo over Rhythm of War’s 1200 pages or so could be done and dusted in 250 pages. Whole subplots just never gelled with me at all. Shallan spent two books chasing around something called the … Dustbloods? Ghostbloods! It’s Ghostbloods. They’re from Mistborn, apparently? They’re completely irrelevant to anything, as far as I was able to tell, and the entire subplot could have been cut with no damage. And it takes her away from characters who her interactions with are actually interesting. I don’t think she has a single scene with Jasnah after the third book. It’s fucking ridiculous.
The books are so thoroughly up Brandon Sanderson’s ass that it may be better to stop comparing the series to A Song of Ice and Fire and compare them instead to another megaseries written by an author so famous that he could shit on a napkin and sell a million copies: The Dark Tower.
What I’m saying is that were I to discover that Brandon Sanderson self-inserts into Book Seven, I would not be the least bit surprised.
Gah. I could keep going; I don’t want to. Like I said, I’ll probably buy the rest of the books if only because having half of the series on my shelf will annoy the shit out of me. Will I read them? Okay, I’ll probably read Book Six, because it’ll be interesting to see where he goes with what he’s calling the “second major arc” of the series. I make no promises after that, and I am absolutely not dragging myself through another reread of this monstrosity.
They aren’t terrible. They really genuinely aren’t. But there is six and a half thousand pages of this, and “not terrible” is not good enough motivation to read six and a half thousand pages, and it certainly isn’t enough to get me to recommend them. I won’t stop you, but … God, go read twenty books by other people instead.
Blech.
Discover more from Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 
Given all of the hype around Sanderson, your assessment of this doorstop series is a relief (and honestly along the lines of what I expected). I am happy to know that I am not missing out by spending my reading time elsewhere.
Of course, the likelihood that I would try to read the series is pretty low. Doorstop sagas are not my thing. As soon as I found out Rothfuss hadn’t written book three, I stopped reading book one and gave it away. Games of Thrones could be summed up in to words: Kings die. I only read it because after the first three episodes of the TV show, I was hoping for more out of the book. I was disappointed.
Not to worry. My shelves and stacks and tbr list are bountiful.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The awesome thing about books is I’m never gonna run out of them.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Haha – this was such a fun post to read, although I view things differently (barely made it through Way of Kings after stopping and starting two or three times; LOVED Words of Radiance and was hooked once it became clear all the Cosmere crossover stuff was going to play a major role).
I’m so impressed by your completed challenge (with time to spare! AND the novellas!), but I’m feeling better about my own method for epic fantasy reads (avoid most of them, and take long breaks when I feel like it).
Hope your year in books gets better and better. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Me too, honestly. I just finished a pair of S.A. Barnes novels that were pretty good, but I also read the sequel to one of my favorite books of the past several years and it was terrible. I’m going into Onyx Storm now, and I just want that to be terribad, which it will probably live up to. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ooo, looking forward to it! I gave Fourth Wing a solid try, but a couple hundred pages in I started skipping around to read the interesting bits and then got to the end REAL fast.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m enjoying the series still, but it’s candy. It helps to not have high expectations.
LikeLike
Alright I guess I’ll be a shill.
Let me start by saying, that after coming from reading the Legend of Drizzt Do’Urden books, all 30 something of them, it was an adjustment to understand Sanderson’s writing style. Going from Salvatore’s tempo of build up, proto-climax, escalation, then final climax, to Sanderson’s seeming drag to his avalanche of knowledge and revelation was difficult with WoK being my first book. However, as I worked my through this and his other Cosmere series, something happened I’ve never experienced in books before. I started treating them like little mystery books. Making minor connections here, paying attention to certain details there, and trying to piece them together like Charlie Day in the It’s always sunny meme/gif. This has led me to multiple rereads. It has honestly renewed my love for reading as everything had been so stale.
With that said, your complaint about how much of this book being a flashback seems like you missed the forest for the trees. I went through 4 books wondering how the hell he was going to tie in the prologue of WoK more than just a way to setup and reveal that someone had been martyred and was being tortured for 4k years. And then the answers came in true Sanderson fashion, at the end.
Your complaint about how Sanderson handles Mental Health without even justifying your thoughts are a bit smug. To say the least. I’ve spent the past 6 years of my life working in mental health and substance abuse, and I was brought to tears at time with how accurate it is. I was able to see people I know in these characters and even myself. Whether I wanted to or not.
I’m sorry his books don’t hit it for you like they do others. I don’t think his books are for the faint of heart, and I basically have not even touched the wikis. There is so much depth in these books and their characters. These books don’t follow most fantasy tropes. I believe it’s because of this it displays a truth we all seem to forget. There are much larger and greater forces at work I. Peoples lives and things rarely go to plan. The hardest thing to remember about this book was it’s supposed to setup this Cosmere’s BBEG. And that was a hard pill to swallow at times because I loved this series
LikeLiked by 1 person
Stormlight was sort of my introduction to Sanderson. I say sort of, because I slogged through the Wheel of Time series well before The Way of Kings, knew he finished the series for Jordan after his death but he never really registered in my mind aside from that. I really enjoyed the first three books in the series, but have become somewhat less enchanted with four and five. It seems evident now why he was chosen to complete Wheel of Time, as he has the same skill for drawing out a story and introducing so many characters that you have to backtrack to remember who they are and why they are important.
I am currently about three-quarters through Wind and Truth, and the constant flashbacks have become truly annoying, especially Szeth’s journey to becoming Truthless. I groan every time one of his flashbacks comes up. I also don’t understand why Nightblood is in the story, when he has a radiant shardblade at his disposal. The only real purpose the sword had was to facilitate the transfer of Odium to a new vessel, and now he’s just an annoying side character for comic relief, sort of Stormlight’s Jar Jar Binks.
I picked up the Mistborn series, Elantris, Warbreaker, and some of his side projects as I was waiting between Stormlight books, and find them all to be more concise and to the point, still wordy, but not to the point of being frustratingly so. I wish I had Sanderson’s skill at character development and description.
As I finish slogging through this one, I don’t think I will pick up the second ark in ten years to do it all over again, but who knows; I made it through all fourteen Wheel novels that never got to the point until after the author was in the ground.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Occasionally I swear to myself that I’m going to finish The Wheel of Time, dammit, and … it’s never going to happen. My first try I got six or seven books in before I had to bail, and realizing that the entire second book was bloat probably is going to keep me from ever going back.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s actually one single “Archive” though
LikeLiked by 1 person
Holy shit. How did I never notice that???
LikeLike
lol it happens. I haven’t finished WaT yet, but I can appreciate the criticism. However, Sanderson forced his own hand for this book by writing a hard timeframe of only 10 days from page 1 to the end. While I can be jarring to have so many flashback chapters, they do help pace the book so it’s not over in 400 pages.
LikeLike
Your point on crossovers is spot on. Easter eggs and references are fine, but as soon as it becomes clear that the whole point of the story is self-indulgent fan service, the whole plot unravels into multiverse slop. The same thing happened in Lost Metal where characters from other worlds crossed over just to have aliens in the story with zero impact on the actual plot.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This must be what people who didn’t like Marvel movies felt like.
LikeLike
Pingback: On Dungeon Crawler Carl – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com