Words On Wednesday

Over the past few months, I’ve read a lot of books by the same author, frequently in the same series. Because of that, I’m experiencing a lot of book burnout. It probably started with Brandon Sanderson. I was flip flopping between his Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series. These books are long, with some very dense content. Mistborn books are around 20 hours of audio each, and Stormlight Archive books are roughly 50 hours each. They’re great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a lot of material. I wanted to finish book 3 of Stormlight Archive before book 4 came out, and then I wanted to read book 4 while it was in that new release phase. After I finished book 3, I also read the final book in the Mistborn trilogy to wrap that up. I started book 4 within a few months, but goodness gracious, I was just so spent on it from the beginning. The characters and plot are interesting, but it’s so much. After reading about half of Rhythm of War (book 4 of Stormlight Archive), I just… stopped. The check...

It’s been a long time since my last Book Report segment, and I’ve read a lot of books since then, but this series seemed most relevant. Oh, right, and this is a series, not a single book. Anyone who has read Sanderson can tell you that he does fantasy right. His worlds are large and complex, but he doesn’t drone on about them in the style of Tolkien. His characters are deep and dynamic, but none is singled out as the real main character. In short, his writing is just plain amazing, pretty much every bit of it. One note about the books in “The Stormlight Archive” series, though: they’re huge. Over a thousand pages per hardback book, and 45 hours for the shortest audiobook. These things are not for the faint of heart. They are large time investments, but they are worth it by an enormous margin. Book one, “The Way of Kings,” is a little slow to start. It jumps around to different character perspectives, and at the beginning, these characters have no clear link to one another. However, as ...