hi :) it's Penny here and as usual I'm going to talk about some bookish things
specifically today I wanted to talk about the last a thousand pages of epic
fantasy I've read. I'll give you an overview of the books as well as an idea
of what I did and didn't like about the book and whether I would recommend them
to you. So in this case a thousand pages is only two books and the first book was
actually 998 pages so it almost covered the whole thousand pages itself but I
will also throw in a second book. But let's firstly talk about this 998 page
chunker and the book that i'm talking about is The Way of Kings by Brandon
Sanderson. So The Way of Kings is the first book in the Stormlight Archive which
is going to be a 10 book series and no doubt all of these books are going to be
just as massive as The Way of Kings so it's a massive series and a massive
commitment. So far only the first three books have been released but at least
Brandon Sanderson is an author that we can trust to keep pumping the series out
unlike some other authors who I won't mention right now but while I try to be
understanding when authors delay releases - shit happens - there are a few
authors that I'm feeling less than charitable about at the moment. But
let's not talk about that because we're talking about The Way of Kings. So
what is the story about? It's about a lot of things, hence the number of pages. So
in the beginning the story starts with these 10 warriors who are part of this
losing battle. Each of them has a different magical sword and they talk
about how they don't want to have to go back and so they're going to leave the
battle and leave everybody to manage without them. It's very mysterious. It
doesn't make a lot of sense and after reading the whole book where I thought
it would be clarified to some amount, I still don't really know what's going on
there. There are some hints about what's going on with that so I hope at some
point it's going to become clear. After that we follow this assassin who kills
the king of one of these two groups of people who have just formed a treaty.
This assassination completely ruins that treaty and so most of the story is
following the war between these two groups of people. So my absolute favourite
thing about this book was its analysis of leadership especially values-based
leadership and servant leadership. Which is perhaps something very specific to me
because that is very related to my working life but it's a very significant
theme throughout the book. Two of our main characters spend a lot of time
thinking about how they should act in positions of leadership. Of course this
being a Brandon Sanderson novel there is also an amazingly complex magic system
which I love although I will say that at the moment the different magic systems
seem quite separate. I suspect that at the end Brandon Sanderson's going to
bring it all together into a holistic view. You can already see some hints of
that but it does mean that it's very difficult to get a handle on what's
going on in the beginning because we have these magic swords that give people
extra strength, we also have soul-casting where people are able to change one
element to another element, we've got this assassin who has binding skills
where he's able to flip around gravity for individual objects and uses that as
part of his battling, we've also got these Spren which are these little
magical creatures that all have different kinds of elements I guess or
different aspects. So it's very interesting but very complex. And
correspondingly it's a very complex world. Brandon Sanderson is big on his
world-building but there is so much going on here that even after a thousand
pages I still feel like I've really only learned a tiny piece of what's going on.
Throughout the book there are these little interludes from random
individuals perspectives and while I expect that eventually the information
you learn in these interludes will be useful a lot of the time I just felt
overwhelmed with the number of characters that I need to keep in my
head. I also thought that a big focus of these books is Dalinar,
who is this prince who is struggling with visions. He's also an older man. He
has a magic sword. He has a lot of thoughts about leadership which I really
appreciated but he spends a lot of time in war and having battles and I felt
like a lot of that was a waste of time. I didn't care. There's another character
called Kaladin. Again he has a lot of thoughts about leadership and he is a
really interesting character but there's a lot of battles and war that again I
felt got a little bit tedious and became quite unnecessary. I would have liked a
lot more focus on the women that are researching certain historical event
events. So one is this princess and another is this noblewoman
trying to sort out some family issues. I thought they were much more interesting
characters and that they didn't get nearly enough page time. And I really
also would have liked some more time with the assassin. He was absolutely my
favourite. I have to say the very beginning of the book you start with
those epic warriors with their magic swords and it's really epic and then you
get pulled down straightaway into this assassin and he's not quite as cool as
the magic sword guys but he does have these binding abilities so he's still
pretty cool and then straight away again you get pulled down to this character
who is just a lowly child pulled into war who has no idea what's going on and
it just felt like very quickly you started out really epic and then you
were pulled down to like what's the point of this? So it meant the very
beginning of the story was quite disappointing or at least that's my
experience. But overall I just think that the plot was very slow-moving there were
a lot of really interesting themes investigated and the characters were
really interesting but I do think that it could have been much shorter than 998
pages and still got most of those points across. That said, if you like really
complex magic systems and world building and you're okay with putting in thousands
of pages of reading without getting much clarity. If you're happy to think about
themes of leadership and war and focus on character
building then I definitely think you will like this book. Of course if you
like Brandon Sanderson then you're probably going to want to read this book
anyway. I would say that I don't think that this is a great place to start for
Brandon Sanderson at all because it's just gonna take you way too long to get
a real feel for what he can really do. So I gave this four stars
mainly because I really enjoyed it. I'm definitely looking forward to reading
the next books in the series but I just do not think it needed to be that long.
So I probably talked about that for way too long
so how can I criticize Brandon Sanderson for going on too long when I do it
myself? But anyway let us talk about the second book and that is the Bear and the
Nightingale by Katherine Arden. So this is the second book in the Winternight
series so it does mean there are quite a few things I can't talk about without
spoiling the first book but the series is mainly about this girl named Vasya
who lives in Russia. I'm not sure exactly what year but historical Russia sometime
in the past. This is at a time when the Catholic Church is spreading across
Russia and Vasya has the ability to see different Russian folklore creatures.
Now this Russian folklore is at odds with the Catholic religion so Vasya is
put in quite a difficult place between these two belief systems and I really
love the character of Vasya. I think she is really strong and interesting and I
find the Russian folklore creatures are just so different from mythological
creatures that it's really interesting to read about. Unfortunately the series
doesn't have enough of those fantastical elements in my opinion. Even I think the
first book had more of it than the second book and in fact the second book
we don't even see Vasya for like the first 50 pages of the book. Instead
we're following her brother and sister who are at the capital interacting with
the king. It's very political and all about the traditions and norms in Russia
at that time. So I think if the political stuff is something you're
interested in that probably won't be a problem for you but for me it was very
frustrating. I just wanted to get into the magic and see where Vasya's
journey was going to take her next. Also for most of this story
Vasya is dressing as a boy and pretending to be a boy and that's never
really a trope that I find that interesting.
Luckily towards the end of the story the fantastical elements and the folklore
creatures become much more significant in the plot and the pacing did improve
and I felt much more engaged in the story. So I did eventually give the story
three stars but there was a time when it was a risk of getting two stars from me.
I will also say there is a romance throughout the first and the second book
and I didn't really feel like it felt very developed or realistic and it was
almost creepy. So that wasn't my favourite either. I do still want to read the third
book in the series though so once I read that I can give you an overview of the
series and whether I recommend the series as a whole. That's all I have to
talk about today. If you've read either of these books, I would love to talk more
details with you down in the comments. Do you agree with what I had to say about
them? Or otherwise I'd love to know whether you are interested in picking
those books up now based on my recommendations or do you think you're
going to avoid them now based on my recommendations? Either way I would love
to know! Otherwise thank you so much for watching. I hope that you're having a
wonderful day and I will see you next time :)