Review of "Way of Kings"

I am currently listening to the audio-book of Brandon Sanderson's "The Way of Kings." I've read the book before, and I have at least a hundred other new books to read so I shouldn't be spending my reading time listening to it, but I can't help myself. It's really good. Plus, I just moved and I don't have most of my books (that's mostly true).

So while I am listening to it, I thought I would write up a book review and post it. I don't know how well this will go, as I am extremely biased because this book is just that good and I love Brandon Sanderson('s writing). But I will do my best to not just gush over the book.

The first thing I should say about Way of Kings is that it is ungodly long. Like really long. Longer than Game of Thrones. It is a massive novel and it is the first in a series that is still in-progress. Last I checked, Sanderson was planning to write ten books in the series. So yeah...there's that. It's also high fantasy, but that's kinda my thing. It's what I'm into.

Way of Kings is about two main characters: Kaladin and Shallan. It starts off, however, with a prologue featuring an assassin named Szeth (after a seperate prologue for the series as a whole). Szeth is really cool, but we get very little from him beyond the opening chapter and a few others. The story is really about the other characters.

Sanderson takes a very interesting approach in that he introduces both characters (separately) at a point in time and over the course of the books tells their relevant backstories. With Kaladin, we meet him for a chapter and then immediately jump forward several years following a significant and life changing event. The story continues from this point in time, hinting at what happened to him but focusing initially only on flashbacks to his youth that lead up to where we first saw him. This can be quite frustrating at time because you want to know what happened, but Sanderson does a great job of keeping the story interesting and never leaving out details that you need to know. His pacing is well done, if incredibly long, and his word-building is amazing. In fact, that is probably what I enjoyed the most about the book.

The world in which this story takes place is incredibly well fleshed out, and that is very apparent. We see multiple countries and cultures with numerous races. There are entire belief systems that are well defined and interesting. Culturally, people with light eyes are the nobility (an interesting concept). What I appreciate the most is that you never feel like you are just being told about the world because you need to know. There isn't any needless exposition and there isn't some foreign character who is there just to receive detailed explanations about culture, history, and other stuff. You just sort of pick up the details as you read.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys fantasy books and isn't daunted by the size of the book. It is definitely a long one, but if you are able and willing to work your way through it the story is worth it. I also recommend the audio-book for this series, as it is very well read (though it is 45 hours long).

Alex can't be trusted with money

So I bought a lightsaber as a reward for finishing Nanowrimo. This is no $20 toy lightsaber. No. I decided to buy a high end +$100 lightsaber from a website called ultrasabers.com (for those interested, I got the Dark Initiate V4). It's a red saber and it just arrived.

It's awesome and I don't regret my purchase at all. I kind of wish I had sprung for sound, but that was an extra lot of money and I am happy with what I have (though I want another one or two). This lightsaber has become the single coolest thing ever. I carry it with me most of the time and use it as the world's coolest flashlight. There is nothing more fun than walking outside in the dark and igniting a lightsaber. My neighbors probably think I am a little weird, but whatever. I have a lightsaber and they don't, so who's the real winner here?

Playing a new game

So I recently (if December is still considered recent) got some new board games. Carissa says I/we got a lot of board games—perhaps too many. I say differently, because you can never have too many board games (just like you can never have too many books). One of my new games is called Letters from Whitechapel and it is a game that I recently tried out with Carissa.

Letters from Whitechapel (LfW from now on) is a game set in old-timey London in which one person gets to be Jack the Ripper and one person (or multiple people if you have friends) gets to play as the police. It's got a massive board that looks like a city map and on every street are spaces  for movement. The goal for Jack is to murder his victims and make it back home for tea, and the police try to catch him or find out where his hideout is.

The trick is that Jack isn't moving on the board. The player tracks his movements secretly (all the spaces are numbered). The police can't see him, but they can search for clues to find out if he has visited a space or not. And because Jack leaves a body, they know where he started from. If Jack is ever surrounded, he instantly loses.

So Carissa and I start out our first game and she immediately regrets her decision to play the police. When you start out you really just have your own little police meeples on a board and you randomly start moving around and making guesses (it can be really time-consuming if you track your moves, which Carissa does).

Before I go on, I should explain one rule. When police look for Jack, they choose a space near their person and they can either search for clues to see if Jack has been there or they can make an arrest and if Jack is there he loses. You can only do one.

So back to the game, I start by moving Jack. Carissa randomly makes one move and arrests me. On the first turn. Game over. Done. End. Finished.

So that went by pretty quick.

The second game lasted much longer and was way more fun. It took a long time, but the police ended up winning the game at the very end by surrounding my (Jack's) hideout so I couldn't go home.

In summary, I bought a game and it was pretty fun. It works really well as a two player game, but definitely know that you are getting into a long and in-depth game. I would compare it to a very elaborate version of the game Mastermind.

Writing a Foreign Tongue

So throughout book two of the Knight's Journey I have been introducing a lot of new characters. With Rowan travelling to Lauratrea, many of these characters are Lauratrean. I'm having a blast with it because I can play with the new characters and give them strange cultural mannerisms and stuff. I can also make them speak in another language.

Now this was really fun at first. I got to make up a way of speaking and create new words that sound cool. I made my own curses too (obviously that was the first thing I did). But it got really difficult really fast, and not just in the obvious ways. Yes it is difficult to create a new language with its own sentence structure, words, and all the other wordy meat that makes up a language. I cheated and used English as a base and just changed the words and sentence structure. Not to hard. It's basically like writing pig-latin where you mess with the words, but can still sort of tell what was being said originally. But even so, it's really annoying to stop in the middle of typing normally and then start slowly typing a single sentence, creating about half of the words as I go.

I suppose I could just highlight those sentences as I go and translate them later, but no. I won't do that. I like to have things done as I do them so I don't have to come back later. Besides, there's the annoying hassle of having some characters who speak both languages and switch back and forth. They even do it mid-conversation sometimes. I'm actually starting to hate them for it, because they make my life difficult.

So here's the kicker: I've got like three chapters where Rowan is travelling with a group (all Lauratrean) and he doesn't know the language.

Now obviously Rowan is going to need to learn the Lauratrean language. Otherwise I am going to have an entire book with him interacting only by gesturing and drawing crude pictures (Rowan can't draw to save his life). So yeah, he needs to learn Lauratrean. It'll make his life easier and my life easier (I care more about mine than his though). Also, once he learns the language I can write dialogue that is in the language without translating it because he will understand the words (most of them at least).

But I still have a bunch of scenes where people are talking and arguing and none of it will make much sense to the reader. So I guess I'll have to do something about that.

At least now I can curse in my own language.

tch'ek