Tag: brandon sanderson

One down

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading3 Comments

1001 pages read as of about 10:00 last night; as I’m typing this I’m just over a quarter of the way through the second book. Goal is to have that done by Sunday night, and then a couple of days for the first novella, and then I’m back to Oathbringer, which I haven’t finished yet.

This was my third read-through of The Way of Kings; I last read it when Words of Radiance came out in 2014. I had genuinely forgotten how good of a book it is; Sanderson gets lots of credit for his magic systems but the worldbuilding throughout this book is just superb, and the characters are some of my favorites in his canon. The Way of Kings does a tremendous job of lining up its mysteries; some things are absolutely not going to be explained in the first book, but just enough is revealed that you don’t feel like the whole book is a pointless mystery box. The book feels carefully planned in a way that first books of series often don’t, and that’s a hard thing to pull off.

I remain concerned about the Parshendi as an element of the series; it didn’t really sink in that the series felt like the “good guys” were the wrong side until Oathbringer came out, and that was definitely a major contributing factor to me abandoning it. The whole book just feels way too comfortable with “Hey, this entire species is our slaves, except for the ones we’re massacring, and those are constantly referred to as savages and monsters” for me, and I know full well it’s going to get worse. The thing is, in the years since Oathbringer I’ve literally never heard anyone make that criticism other than me, and it’s not like I have some sort of special insight. Like, people figured out that slavery was bad in the Harry Potter books, so … either they just didn’t apply that level of analysis to this book or maybe it gets resolved after I stopped reading. We’ll see, I guess.

2025 Reading Goals

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading4 Comments

I was hoping to get to the stats nerdery post today, but I took a nap this afternoon with a cat on my chest, so it’s just going to be this. 2024 was one of the heaviest reading years of my life, and it was a year with no particular reading goal beyond “whatever I want” and “clear my TBR shelf,” which not only never happened, it never came close to happening. I want next year to have a little bit more focus, and I’m going to throw one ridiculous challenge at myself in January just for the sheer hell of it.

Reading Goal the First: In January 2025, I will read all five of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives books, plus the two supplemental novellas. That is, according to Wikipedia, 6,335 pages. I have read the first two books and part of the third. My guess is that if I can get through Oathbringer this time without the issues I had the last time I picked it up, I’ll be fine; 204 pages a day during a month where I have one three-day weekend and don’t have work until the 6th is not even a particularly demanding pace. That said, shit happens. We’ll see if I can pull this off.

Reading Goal the Second: Setting a number of books goal is almost meaningless at this point, but let’s go with 100 again. Most years I don’t have to push too much to hit that number, and unless I rediscover some other hobbies I’ll blow it away again, but I don’t want to set it so high that I start adjusting what I’m reading to hit a number. That said …

Reading Goal the Third: At least 22 nonfiction books over the course of the year. Why 22? That’s two a month if you ignore January. I may adjust this after I look a little bit more closely at what I read in 2024; I’m pretty sure I didn’t read that many nonfiction books this year and I want to up the number somewhat.

Reading Goal the Fourth: At least six of those 22 books must be about teaching and, ideally, teaching math. I joined the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics this year and one of the benefits of that membership is deep discounts on their professional library, which is good; that said, these books tend to be hellaciously dry so I’m not going to commit to too much. Six is one every other month. That’s not bad at all.

Oh, and one more thing: Starting with January 1st, I’m going to start looking into moving away from housing everything at Goodreads. I’m going to start simultaneously recording my reading on Goodreads, Storygraph and Bookly, and we’ll see which app wins out. Right now Storygraph looks pretty cool because it appeals to the numbers nerd in me and there appear to be a thousand ways to generate charts and spreadsheets and such from your reading, and really, if you can’t make a spreadsheet out of something, is it even worth doing? I’ll report back on this as I get into what the different apps can do.

That’s what I’ve got for right now. Do you have any plans for your reading next year?

In which I am annoyed, also anal

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

Can’t wait to see what sort of suggested tags the system throws up for this one.

So I’m definitely doing this stupid “read the entire Stormlight Archives in January” contest with myself, and I decided to make it even harder, because there are two novellas alongside the five canonical novels, and I decided I’m going to read those motherfuckers too. Pictured there is the doorstop-ass hardback copy of Wind and Truth, weighing in at 1344 pages and 2.31 pounds. Worth pointing out: while this is the longest book of the series, it is not the physically largest of the series, which still goes to Words of Radiance, the second book, which is about 300 pages shorter but presumably uses thicker paper.

Pictured next to it: the two novellas, which are somehow smaller than they look there.

And if you are like me you are already aware of why I want to have a conversation with someone about this, and why that conversation might involve hitting them upside their fool heads with one of those three books, or perhaps all three of those books stuffed into a pillowcase.

Because come on.

Bring it, bitches

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, TeachingLeave a comment

The storm that was supposed to hit Monday night fizzled, leaving us with not even a dusting of snow, but I am assured that the predictions of 4-8″ in the next several hours plus 45-50 mile an hour winds are real. We have a new superintendent this year and it’s always hard to predict how the new dude is going to react to things, but nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard and definitely nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard featuring 50 mph winds.

So fuck it, I am predicting an actual snow day tomorrow. There are literally no consequences if I’m wrong other than mild disappointment early in the morning so I’m making the call.

The best thing about this? Because my building is planning on some standardized testing tomorrow– today went as predicted; I don’t have any real complaints other than I’m tired as hell– we kept everyone’s iPads. There are always going to be some kids who leave their iPads at school rather than taking them home, but in this particular case it’s all of them, so if we have an e-learning day tomorrow there’s genuinely no point in even posting something because nobody will be able to do it. Which means no one will be bothering me about it all day.

Does the district know this? They do not. Don’t tell ’em, either.

There’s a new book in Brandon Sanderson’s massive Stormlight Archives series coming Friday. It’s going to be over thirteen hundred pages in hardback, supposedly, and no volume of the so-far five-book series has come in at under a thousand. I have read the first two. I started the third one when it came out, way back in 2017, and never finished it. I should check and see if I wrote anything about it here, (Edit: I did!) but my recollection is that I decided the books thought the wrong people were the heroes, and I ended up not ever picking it back up.

It crossed my mind yesterday to see if I can read the entire series in the month of January. That would mean rereading the first two books, finishing the third, then reading the fourth and fifth for the first time– nearly six thousand pages in 31 days.

For a normal person that would be insurmountable. I am not a normal person. I’m up to 161 books in 2024 so far, with three weeks left to go, and this is Brandon Sanderson prose, which reads faster than normal. I also have the entire first week of January off and a three-day weekend for MLK day, plus potentially another snow day or two if I get really lucky. It’s not even 200 pages a day. I’m pretty sure I’m already pulling off higher numbers than that, but I’m not about to do the math and my Goodreads summary isn’t out yet.

What do you think? Should I do it?

On TV and books and daylight savings time

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading, Television4 Comments

1912257_10152217545273926_821713658_oBut not in that order.

This has been… kind of a shitty day, though not in any way I can put my finger on.  I normally don’t notice the time change, and don’t remember ever having reason to gripe about it before, but I am messed up today for some reason.  I may just be getting sick, in which case that sickness can go straight to hell because this is ISTEP week and I do not have the goddamn time.

I took a nap this afternoon, for God’s sake, which I don’t do very often, and which just made everything worse– I woke up feeling sicker, tireder, and crabbier than I’d been when I went to sleep.  I’ve spent most of the rest of the day reading.  Ordinarily “read and then took a nap” would be a good Sunday, and it’s not like there’s any work hanging over my head or anything like that; I finished that huge pile of grading yesterday.

Item: I have to go on a complete internet blackout starting around eight or nine, because I’m not going to be able to catch the True Detective finale, to say nothing of Walking Dead, until tomorrow… this has been the case for the last several Sundays, of course, but I figure tonight it several times as important.  True Detective has been the best thing to happen to TV for years, as far as I’m concerned, and I ain’t going anywhere near the Web so y’all can screw it up for me.

Another item: I’m never pre-ordering anything from Amazon again.  Brandon Sanderson’s Words of Radiance will have been out for a solid week before it finally shows up at my house on Tuesday (it might be here tomorrow; I often find that I get things a day earlier than they project.)  Ordinarily this wouldn’t bother me except that I pre-ordered the motherfucker in July.  See, Amazon, I pre-order shit so that I can get it right away when it’s available.  That shit shoulda been shipped to be at my doorstep at the latest the day after release.

I finished a re-read of The Way of Kings– that’s the first book in the series– this afternoon, meaning that my last four or five books have all been fantasy epic doorstops.  It’s stunning to me just how much better the Sanderson book is than The Wheel of Time.  I know I’ve done two posts about that reread already, but… man, while I enjoy Jordan’s writing on a sentence-to-sentence level, going through the series again (I’ve finished the first three books) has convinced me that the books really aren’t any damn good.  They’re engaging, which is a good thing, but nothing fucking happens in the entire second book, which is like eight hundred goddamn pages long.  In the SECOND BOOK.  The characters are all literally in the exact same place at the end of the book as they are in the beginning.  In the third book, the main character barely shows up.

This is bullshit.  And I’m not making it to the end without a massive expenditure of willpower, as there are fourteen books in the series and I haven’t hit the long ones yet.  My wife is trying to finish the final book as we speak; she was about a third of the way through it when I started The Eye of the World and I finished the first three WoT books plus the first Sanderson book and she’s still not done with it, and I’m pretty sure nothing but bullheadedness and spite are keeping her reading at this point.  They’re just not very goddamned good, that’s all.