Book 2 *Spoiler alert for book 1

[FlashWrogan he/him]

I disagree 1000000000%. the longer the better imo. id like to see the next book be a whoppin 2000 pages hardcover.

First off, 1000 pages is already pushing it for publishers to go ahead with. Let me tell you, you really wouldn't want a 2000 page book. That would drag on awfully before the climax

[KamKam]

First off, 1000 pages is already pushing it for publishers to go ahead with. Let me tell you, you really wouldn't want a 2000 page book. That would drag on awfully before the climax

nope, heres an example of how fast i go through books,

all 3 Hunger Games books 5.5 hours

A gathering Storm 3 hours

TwoK 2.5 hours

Learned to speed read in grade 9 for studying purposes. Now its a curse. Bring on the 5000 page Books!!!!!!

[dyring]

I wouldent mind 2000 pages. But then Im one of those whose only problem with say, wot book 10 was that I did not have the 11th one at the time so I could read more.....

(only 95% true, I did find the perrin parts somewhat dull)

Edited November 2, 2012 by dyring

[Arran]

Learned to speed read in grade 9 for studying purposes. Now its a curse. Bring on the 5000 page Books!!!!!!

Speed reading... Now there's a skill I'm glad I don't have. When I read, and especially when I read fiction, I want to take my time so as to be able to properly picture the scene and the characters in my mind.

[dionysus]

nope, heres an example of how fast i go through books,

all 3 Hunger Games books 5.5 hours

A gathering Storm 3 hours

TwoK 2.5 hours

Learned to speed read in grade 9 for studying purposes. Now its a curse. Bring on the 5000 page Books!!!!!!

Unless you are a prodigy or reading savant, you are not reading but you are scanning. You say you read every word? I am a really fast reader and scanner because I played a lot of old school text based MUDs in the early days of the internet. and I don't think I could even scan The Way of Kings in 2.5 hours because scanning generates a lot of brain fatigue. Not only are you reading fast, but you are prioritizing what you read very quickly.

Glad to see a lot of people posting in this thread have similar opinions on why Sanderson is so great compared to other authors. Not surprising though since it is a Sanderson fan forum, heh. As much as I criticize Wheel of Time, the first books were where I fell in love with the fantasy genre. Before that I had really only read Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (I really need to reread this, I think I read it when I was in junior high and most of it was probably over my head), and the Belgariad. I am excited to finally see WoT conclude, and Brandon has done an excellent job rejuvenating my enjoyment of the series. Still, there are so many open plot lines I don't know how he resolves them all. Personally, I hope he resolves most of them off screen and focuses on Matt and Rand. At this point I couldn't care less about the White Tower, Perrin, or the Seanchan (except where it relates to Matt).

Edited November 2, 2012 by dionysus

[KamKam]

Unless you are a prodigy or reading savant, you are not reading but you are scanning. You say you read every word? I am a really fast reader and scanner because I played a lot of old school text based MUDs in the early days of the internet. and I don't think I could even scan The Way of Kings in 2.5 hours because scanning generates a lot of brain fatigue. Not only are you reading fast, but you are prioritizing what you read very quickly.

Indeed it is form of scanning and reading. Im glad i ran into the forum police here right away, instead of when i broke some real laws. Ill make sure to start explaining my every word as if you were a four year old. My apologies great forum warrior.

Guess theres always one in every forum..... awesome.

For the record the problem people have when scanning is tryign to retain everything. The trick of scanning is not prioritizing what to retain, but what to dismiss and pass over while identifying the relative information your looking for. Ive never been interested at how hard the wind was blowing in a scene or the color of sky. "brain fatigue" interesting term, never experienced it while reading, but i do sleep like the dead after a few hours of reading.

And now since this post has nothing to do with anything else talked about, i guess i just killed this thread.

Edited November 3, 2012 by KamKam

[Inkthinker]

That could probably have been expressed just as effectively with like, 30% less sarcasm.

I can read about a page a minute. 1000-page book pulls in at about 16 hours, but it's rare that I would read a book in one marathon session. I know I pushed through A Dance With Dragons in about 3-5 days. I usually blast through a Butcher book in two, sometimes in one, which is a combination of frustrating and satisfying ("oh, that was good. Too bad I gotta wait a year or more for the next one"). Same thing with Hiaasen.

Some authors are easier to burn through than others, but I usually consume two or three novels in a week as a general rule of thumb.

[CrazyRioter she/her]

for the record, Brandon said some time ago that book 2 will be shorter then WoK.

Also, the time skip between the Mistborn trilogy and AoL is a completely different animal then time-skips within a trilogy.

[Yados]

for the record, Brandon said some time ago that book 2 will be shorter then WoK.

Also, the time skip between the Mistborn trilogy and AoL is a completely different animal then time-skips within a trilogy.

Shorter, but still about 300k words.

[Rosa85 she/her]

As for the  4th one. I think Szeth (who's my fav character) will gaina backbone and somehow stop just in time not to kill Dalinar. I thought he was going to do this with Gavilar.

[Dros]

I'll have to say I enjoyed Martin's Song of Ice and Fire for many of the same reasons I really like Joe Abercrombie's works. Martin and Abercrombie created worlds where there are no true villians versus good guy plotlines. Sure, some characters are more heinous than others, but the characters don't see themselves as truly evil, just self-interested. For this reason, some people really don't like these series.

 

WoT takes the classic white hat vs. black hat plotline and does it very well, but I always thought it was a bit too neat in drawing the battle lines. Tolkein took the same path years earlier, of course. For this reason, some people weren't as drawn to these series as others.

 

I've got a feeling about Stormlight that it's going to fall somewhere in the middle. I don't see Odium turning out to be just misunderstood, but it looks like the Parshendi might be. In general, the Desolations seem to create an environment of us vs. them, but Sanderson seems to be doing a masterful job of creating a mix of competing interests, political struggles and missing knowledge that might just fall just right on the range between WoT/LoR and Martin and Abercrombie.

 

I don't expect all the characters introduced to live, but I don't think Sanderson will be near as callous in his treatment as Abercrombie or Martin. However, I think he has taken a more complicated approach to the conflict of Roshar (and really the whole Cosmere) than Jordan has in his world building for WoT.

 

In the end, I would love to see a crazy ending like Abercrombie pulls off, but I think a man needs to be realistic about these things. I would say Sanderson has a little more faith in humanity than Abercrombie.

[Inkthinker]

Abercrombie recently wrote quite an interesting post on his blog about this very subject, and went a long way towards explaining why it is that I really like his books.

 

The Value of Grit

 

He makes it very clear, this isn't about being GRIMDARK for the sake of shoving a middle finger up to the faces of classic fantasy lovers, but more about expressing that real people respond to the real world in ways that are often messy, dirty, and morally grey. He breaks it down to a tight focus on character, moral ambiguity, honesty and range.

And he admits, sometimes it is about the shock factor, because sometimes you want to punch the reader right in the metaphorical nuts, to shake them out of their complacency. I also like his reasoning behind his use of modern language (especially profanity).
 

Verily mine leige-lord but twas a time in ages of olde when a fearsome tranche of ye genre did aim upon an moste horrible approximationne of faux cod-medievalism in both language and dialogue.  Hey nonny nonny!  Let me state right now that unless you do it amazingly well I really hate that rust.  It may very well be that you’re aiming at creating a sort of medieval analogue, but we’re not writing in middle english, and even if our characters are from then, our readers are from now.

It's not for everyone, some people just want an escape. But I'll say that The Heroes is still the best book about a major battle than I've ever read, and it's because his characters feel like real people. When they succeed, it's a real success, and when they die it feels like real death. By the same mark, Best Served Cold is the best revenge novel I've enjoyed since Westlake wrote The Hunter.

 

He goes too far, sometimes. I feel like Jezal Dan Luther's plotline in the First Law trilogy ended realistically, but I hated that ending so much that I nearly gave up on his books altogether. Luckily it was offset by how much I really liked Logen Ninefingers, the Dogman, and just about every part of The Bloody Nine's story, right up to the very end.

I don't think Brandon will ever be as gritty as Abercrombie, but that's fine... Brandon's not the same kind of person as Joe, just reading their blog posts can tell you that. They're not writing from the same place, or with the same intentions, and as such they won't write the same books, and that's just fine.

 

Sanderson does focus on his characters, and they certainly have nuance, and failures, and are often not what they claim or appear to be. And that's more than enough ambiguity to keep me interested.

 

Edited March 21, 2013 by Inkthinker

[Cheese Ninja he/him]

In the end, I would love to see a crazy ending like Abercrombie pulls off, but I think a man needs to be realistic about these things. I would say Sanderson has a little more faith in humanity than Abercrombie.

Subtle, nicely done.

 

It seems to be a balancing act between how people behave in the real world, and how you would enjoy reading about characters behaving in a fantasy world.  I feel like Abercrombrie's and Martin's characters behave the most like real people, but that's not always the sort of story I want to read.  On the other hand, if a character is a perfect Mary Sue or Gary Stu, they come across as flat and uninteresting.  I think Brandon's characters are good, the main characters tend to noble idealists, but they have enough flaws to be still be engaging, and the side characters run the gamut from scum to heroes.

 

Now I'll actually read that blog post... Pretty good, he wrote much the same as I expected, and I agree on most of Abercrombrie's major points, with the exception being that I'm not completely tired of traditional fantasy at this point.

 

There was actually a reddit discussion of usage of profanity in fantasy a while ago that inspired me to actually read Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora.  A few people considered "Nice bird, cremhole." to be the funniest bit of dialogue they'd ever come across in fantasy, and I'm inclined to agree.  It's all about proper usage.

[Gloom he/him]

I think, that if their was a flaw in TwoK's, it was that each of the primary characters had a single plot each, and those plot took 1000 pages to reach their climax. Any subplots that were completed didn't really pack enough punch to give the reader a sense of satisfaction. This is an anomaly for Sanderson, because his Mistborn books were filled with subplots that culminated in minor accomplishments that were satisfying. I still hold TWoK's in high regard, because ultimately, those single plot lines, while they dragged more than a little reached very satisfying conclusions, and because I'm a fan of deep worlds and complex magic systems.

[JoeAgain he/him]

I consider it a good sign when I reach the end of a viewpoint and think, "Aw, man, I want to keep reading that!" as opposed to "Finally, I can continue more interesting stuff." In that respect, TWoK very much succeeded. It never dragged for me; you had to feel Kaladin hit rock bottom to believe in his turnaround, and you had to feel Dalinar was really struggling to give his decisions punch. Also, Brandon's good at avoiding the Daenerys trap by maintaining meaningful connections between threads. My concern for book 2 is that once the worldbuilding that Brandon so excels at slows, especially with all the viewpoints converging on the already heavily featured Shattered Plains, the plots will start to drag.

 

With Mistborn, I found FE superior to WoA and HoA. I thoroughly enjoyed the overarching story, and the grand finale was chock-full of crowning moments of awesome (I even teared up!), but quite frankly, add the "Ruh roh!" ending from WoA onto FE, then the highlights of WoA and HoA could have been condensed into a single sequel. Also, the caracters who all started out so distinct and interesting--even flawed--trended toward Mary Sue, stalled, or dead in the later two books, crowded out by newer viewpoints. For example, Spook was fantastic, but Allrianne was superfluous (even if likeable), and the annotations talk about Ham being given a family as cheap characterization that Brandon at times forgot about (at one point even forgetting about Ham). Instead, put Ham and Breeze in a relationship, and Ham fills Allrianne's spot and fits better with Breeze's background (currently an out-of-text explanation as random as Ham's family was) and Dockson's distaste for Ham (which was told but not shown--now partly from Ham's "affliction of the nobility"). Or make Ham a woman (Allrianne of Tarth anyone?) who then also takes over the old Allrianne's spot.

 

Despite those worries, I'm very optimistic about Words of Radiance. Gloom complained above that it seemed Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar only worked through one arc each in TWoK, but I think those arcs worked for a first book and left room for continued development; Kaladin worked through his depression, but he still has his anger (Amaram's appearance is going to be interesting, as the OP noted); Shallan's theft fell through, but her work with Jasnah feels important and her family is still in danger; and Dalinar worked through the shock of some drastic changes, but the visions are not done with him yet! There's also Szeth. I don't like him, but not because he isn't well-written, and that certainly leaves room to grow. And speaking of Szeth, I thought the interludes were used brilliantly to showcase the world and minor characters in a way that was not distracting or overwhemling, so I'm even looking forward to those.

[Miyabi She/Her]

I think that TWoK (and while I'm on the topic, Mistborn trilogy and Warbreaker) all suffered from pacing problems. I didn't notice this while reading Elantris nor during my re-read of the Mistborn trilogy but I am noticing it while re-reading TWoK. Don't get me wrong; he writes great climaxes.. but it's like everything leading up to the climax is empty.

Anyway, I'd be perfectly content if Brandon's ONLY major issue was pacing which I'm sure is something he'll improve on. And while I suppose I can understand his praise towards other major authors, the only 'epic' series I've read have been the SoIaF books out. And I just.. lost interest hard in them. It's slow, the plot is going nowhere, Dany hasn't even met any major characters, and her Dance chapters were a joke. As a reader I really cannot take SoIaF seriously anymore. But that's obviously just my opinion. It's nice to discuss it with others from time to time. Eesh this became a big tirade.

This my good friend is known as the Brandon Avalanche. It's a problem he has had for a long time, though over the last .... 8 years has improved significantly. One day you should try to get a hold of Dragonsteel through an inter-library-loan. That book has quite the avalanche.

As far as "everything leading up is empty" one of Brandon's philosophies is that a book and characters are written well when you are happy reading about their day to day lives. We see that through a large chunk of TWoK. Just people and their day to day lives, leading them into a grander story to come.

I think I'm most excited to learn more about the magic systems... I'm a sucker for them and how they work and I just want to know everything RIGHT NOW. xD