On Finishing My First Brandon Sanderson Novel

I’ve been hearing good things about Brandon Sanderson for years, and since I like getting my money’s worth out of an audiobook, I finally tried Sanderson’s first Stormlight Archive novel. The Way of Kings. But holy hell, that audiobook is long. How long?

Forty-five and a half hours long.

Artist’s rendering of Sanderson declaring war on your TBR list.

And the headline is, I really liked it. It’s got the “character-with-a-dream-slowly-wins-over-cynics” plot line that I love, lots of action, and all the trappings of a truly epic fantasy. You couldn’t make a movie out of this book. You would be foolish to even try making a prestige fantasy series like Game of Thrones, which at least starts off with less magic and more movement. This is the first in a series that is supposed to eventually have ten books. That story is just too big for any other medium.

That said, those forty-five and a half hours didn’t always fly by. I had picked up the prologue a few years ago and put the book immediately back down; terms like “shard blades,” “the desolation,” “voidbringers,” and “the Dawn Shards” had me thinking that this was really going to be a whole thing. And that was the first of three separate prologues, only one of which touches on the three main characters, and this book only really dives deeply into one of those characters. In between their stories, we flash around to other countries and religions for reasons I’m told will make sense when I read the next three books.

There’s a lot going on.

And yet, I was rooting for the tritagonists, wishing violent ends on the villains, and putting a good-faith effort into keeping track of all the names the entire time through. It’s quite a book, and if you enjoy disappearing into large fantasy worlds, it will most likely be worth your (very long) while.