TheStormlightArchive

Five volumes, over a thousand pages each. It sounds like a sentence you serve; it is the opposite. You get months with somewhere to come back to, and you are never alone in there, because the world is built so densely and so consistently that after a few chapters you know how the air behaves before a storm.

The Shattered Plains. A plateau cracked into thousands of islands, with chasms between them that no army can cross. So the bridges are carried by men. Bridge crews run under fire with a wooden bridge on their shoulders, drop it across the chasm, and the army walks over while they stay behind. The first time I heard that, I stopped my bike.

Kaladin Stormblessed is my favourite character. I went through every high and low with him: soldier, then slave, then a man who takes so many beatings that nobody would blame him for staying down. And he gets up. Not in a poster way — slowly, with relapses, the way it actually goes.

Dalinar was too rigid for me. I understand what the code is for and why he is so straight about it, but I never got along with him the way I did with Kaladin. Shallan, on the other hand, was unreadable to me for a long time, and honestly that probably says more about me than about her.

And the Shards. A knight in Shardplate walks into an army the way you walk into water, and a Shardblade does not cut flesh: it burns out the eyes and kills by touching the soul. The picture of one of those unbeatable knights on a battlefield stays with you for a long time. And Sanderson keeps the thing I care about: this magic has rules, and it has a price.

I walk the dog, drive to work, run by the river, and the images shimmer in my head. The three pictures below are exactly those: the bridge on the bridgemen's shoulders, the world cracked into pieces, and the storm going over all of it. Start with The Way of Kings. It builds slowly, and a few hundred pages in it stops letting go.

— Marcin, the person behind this site