I don’t have a ton to say about Dawnshard, the second of the two-so-far novellas in the Stormlight Archives. It’s a fun little story and gives a lot of screen time to Lopen, one of my favorite characters, although it introduces yet another set of adversaries and uses the word “Cosmere” too much. I’m finding that I don’t have a ton of patience for BrandySandy’s desire to knit each and every one of his books together into the same universe, particularly since the most obvious transfer so far has been the sword from Warbreaker and that was my least favorite of his books. I’m sure I’ve missed other bits here and there; it’s been forever since I read any of the Mistborn books and I don’t think I ever finished the second trilogy, but … blech. There’s no reason for it to be here and much like Lift and her constant use of the word “awesome,” It really doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the series. Hell, it didn’t fit the tone of its own book, if I remember right, although I may not.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It’s Friday, and in keeping with my usual Friday state of exhaustion I have little to say tonight, but I wanted to mark this moment: the final books necessary to finish the goal of reading books from all 50 states have been ordered. Now all I have to do is read the rest of them. 🙂
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 