The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Edgedancer isn’t very long, so there will be a longer post later today, but as of midnight last night I’m done with the first two books. I’ll finish #3 today and give myself next week to get through Oathbringer.
Also, this was taken in exactly the same spot as the previous picture and the difference in the wall color is kind of fascinating.
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.
So as it turns out, it appears that I got Raised Right in at least one respect: I have a pretty fuckin’ healthy work ethic, and despite being down to five shifts left at my job I think it’s fair to say that I worked my ass off for at least the last couple of days, and Monday was an exhausting mess for a number of reasons as well. And I strongly suspect I will continue deliberately outhustling everyone around me just out of pure spite until I actually leave the job for good on August 8th. I’m back for Saturday and Sunday and then taking my last week of vacation, which I hope to spend working hard on a book, but we all know how good I am with follow-through on those sorts of plans. I did finish a short story this week, though! One I plan to submit to a market, and once I get rejected, put on Patreon! So that’s exciting.
(You should be one of my Patrons. One, because the next one is number ten, and that seems like a big deal, and two, because I post stories and stuff over there and there will be a Special Project over there soon too that I’m planning on working on this weekend.)
Anyway, point is, I’m not lazing about just because I’m quitting, and I’m tired because this week has been especially busy.
On to being wrong: I read the first little chunk of Kate Elliott’s Black Wolves in … 2016, maybe? And I hated it, cutting out early and one-starring it on Goodreads. For no clear reason I got a wild hair up my ass about it a couple of weeks ago and decided to reread it, and while it took a while, the book being damn near eight hundred pages long, I finished it last night.
And, uh, loved it, and put it on my best of 2018 shortlist, and found out that the sequel isn’t coming out until December of 2020, and oh God that’s too long, and while I don’t have the energy for a full review right now? I don’t know what the hell I was thinking the first time I read the book and you should consider checking it out.
Yeah. Got that one wrong.
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