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Notes -
I really liked The Way of Kings but looking back on it the reasons I liked it are not that good.
For background, I was in college, depressed, and hadn't read a physical book for pleasure in a long time. In search of a familiar comfort from my childhood, I got a library card and picked up The Way of Kings because it was the first of a series and the author seemed familiar - like one of those you saw come up on Reddit threads.
I liked that the world felt like a puzzle. It was a truly alien world! And there were mysteries that happened in the past. It felt like the reader had more clues than the characters, so we should be able to put things together faster. This wound up disappointing me in the sequels, but for the first book it felt full of potential.
I liked that the book was easy to read, which makes the motivation required to read it much lesser. I think a lot of the "I enjoyed reading as a kid, but now I don't" that young adults experience is tied to attempting to read more difficult books, when as a kid they were probably reading books with simple prose and an uncomplicated plot.
But what I liked the most was that Kaladin seemed to get it. Yep, there's no point. Nothing matters. But he made the oaths to put life before death anyways. And then goodness was vindicated in the end. Trite? Sure. But it kept me off a bridge of my own.
Now my reading palate has expanded and I can see all the flaws with it. But it still holds a special place in my heart.
In my experience, it's more that as a child and teen, people were happy that I would disappear for hours straight to go read a complex novel. They were happy both that I was reading the novel, and that I was occupying myself. So I would read things like The Brothers Karamazov or Les Miserables or Light in August as an older teen, and enjoy them.
Now, as an adult with children, I read things more like The Way of Kings, because I might be interrupted at any moment, and even if I fight back, and glare, and say that I'm reading and want to keep reading, the immersion is not there. Brandon Sanderson writes in a way that invites immersion even if read late at night after a full day of work and putting the kids to bed for an hour. Emotional fatigue has the same effect. One winter, I was living alone in rural Alaska, and read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, because I was making up six different classes, from scratch, spanning 12 grade levels, and wasn't up to much else, but was also bored.
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Based. I feel the same about Feist's Magician, which in hindsight is almost painfully simple. But sometimes you just want simple comfort food.
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