fantasy, brandon sanderson, the stormlight archives, et cetera, et cetera

 The summer between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, I read The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. That summer, the summer of 2015, Brandon Sanderson was just starting to REALLY blow up on BookTube, alongside other authors like Sherwood Smith and Scott Lynch. It was bookTube's foray into adult fantasy, and I read it all. 

I don't know that I should have, because for most of college, after reading all of these books, I would claim that I didn't like fantasy. I enjoyed the Gentlemen Bastards series because they were funny, mostly, and I liked the Mistborn series, and I guess I liked the Inda series? But one series I could not get into for the life of me was the Stormlight Archive. 

These past few years, when I've been teaching high school, I had a boy, a sophomore last year, who loved Brandon Sanderson. Desperately loved him. I could talk to this kid about these books because I had read a good chunk of them, but his love for the Stormlight Archives eluded me. 

This week, I re-read The Way of Kings. My old Goodreads review, the one from 2015, reads thusly:

~3.5 Stars~

Sanderson's got this thing where he's so good at endings, like the way everything just culminates and comes together is just so fantastic, the greatest thing in the world, but then there's also this thing where it takes me forever to get into any of his books. It happened with Mistborn, it happened with Elantris, and it happened here.

It took me about 600 pages to get into this book. I mean, I was enjoying it, and it probably wouldn't have taken me two weeks if I hadn't taken a break for the Booktube-A-Thon, but I just didn't really care. I didn't feel the need to find my Two Steps From Hell radio on Pandora and curl up in a corner and read and cry a lot.

As well as that, a lot of his other books have made me want to try and guess what was going on, guess the twists, and this one... not so much. It wasn't a good 'not so much', it was a 'I didn't really care enough to try and guess, unlike in Hero of Ages, which was a bunch of annotations of me trying to figure everything out.'

But then the ending came, and I really loved it. So I'm giving it a rounded-up 3.5 stars, because of that incredibly rough beginning. I did really care about a lot of the characters, I'll give it that. Mostly Kaladin. I made him a Superhero character in my Hollywood U, that's how much I loved Kaladin. My love for him sort of sneaked up on me, too; it was like, page 1000 or so and I'm just really adoring Kaladin more than just a little bit of "aw, he's cute, I like him". And Renarin. I liked that kid. Adolin. Their father. Just -

I think that it'll be easier for me to get into the second book, once I eventually get around to it, and I am very excited for the rest of the series. It just takes me forever to get into this guy's books, no matter how amazing they're professed to be.

 

First of all, goddam, I used to write long reviews. 

Second of all, that was not my experience this time. Of course I still love Kaladin with all of my heart because I like, have a soul, but from page one I was in love this time. Maybe it's because this time I had a pretty hardcover instead of that stupid 1200-page mass-market paperback. Maybe it's because now I'm eight years older (eight years older???????). I dunno. This time page one I loved it. It was so fucking good. This series is so fucking good. Oh my god. What the hell. I need book two. 

And now that I'm an adult with adult money, you can bet that book two's also going to be a pretty hardcover, because fuck those shitty mass-market paperbacks.