The Way Of Kings (2010)

Notes

2026-08-31

At first I was like 'this is bad'. And it is. On a sentence by sentence level it's solid enough, though no cliché is left on the shelf. But the world building, supposedly Sandersons strong suit, is just of stupid, the great foot of nerdism is clomping all over the shop. But if the sentences are weak, the stuff at the other end of the spectrum is what won me over; macro scale plot architecture. Like the joys of detective fiction are in the minute mechanisms of the plot within the rules of the genre, like appreciating the movement of a swiss watch, the pleasures of this kind of epic fantasy are the appreciation of infrastructure. How Sanderson maneuvres his slabs of story into place, laying the foundations for the next 4000 plus pages of the series, is something to see. He's very good at it, and on the strength of this first volume I have every confidence in his ability to put together a solid if slighly naff piece of fantasy engineering. Very Mormon. Will I be reading the next 4000 plus pages? Remains to be seen. There is a temptation to try and blast through the rest of "the stormlight archive" before xmas but I think that might be too much tbh.