Reading Rhythm of War, Sanderson’s 4th novel in the magnificent Stormlight Archive has led me to two major realisations:
1) This man is an absolute master of world-building and overarching plot. Everything is meticulously detailed, from the history, to the culture to the clothing, even the flora and fora get the occasional couple of descriptive paragraphs. An unparalleled achievement.
2) For someone like me, with very little free time, these books are too long
I started reading Rhythm of War in December. I finished yesterday. And I honestly felt like it could have been maybe 300 pages shorter. There is a great deal of meandering, a fair amount of pondering, and a light sprinkling of introspection. For someone who can only read a couple of hundred pages a week (to be fair they are quite big pages!), I often wished for things to move forwards a tad more briskly! In my opinion the middle section of the book is especially guilty of this, and at some point I even found myself dreading to pick the book back up again which I never thought would happen with a Sanderson novel.
As for the ending … I liked it, though I thought it less interesting than the previous entries. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely eager for more. But my next few reads are going to be some shorter, faster-paced books, just so I can say I’ve read more than one book in 2021!