Note: This reflection contains spoilers for Rhythm of War and other stories in Stormlight Archive. If you’re looking for my review of Rhythm of War, you can find it here.
I laud Stormlight Archive frequently here on the site, with references in various reviews and posts, but I haven’t actually read any of them in years. For that matter, I haven’t read a Sanderson novel of any series since The Sunlit Man in early 2024, almost two years ago. Rhythm of War came out in November of 2020, and I read it almost immediately, after reading the preceding three books in the series in preparation for Rhythm of War’s release. I read it a second time soon after the first, as I tend(ed) to do with Stormlight novels, and I enjoyed it both times. My review from that time calls it my second favorite Stormlight book and spends most of its time raving about how great it is.
Wind and Truth, the final book in the first five-book arc of the Stormlight Archive, came out in November of 2024, while I was in the midst of my Wheel of Time reread, and I chose to put off reading it until I finished A Memory of Light (much to my wife’s dismay, who read it closer to when it came out, having jumped onto the series more recently than me, and could not talk to me about it for a year until I got around to reading it). I also chose not to reread the entire series, feeling sufficiently familiar with most of the books, and instead chose to reread only Rhythm of War before going into Wind and Truth. This post contains my reflections on that recent reread, and yes, you can anticipate a review for Wind and Truth finally appearing in a few weeks. It’s only a little over a year late.
In the four-plus years since I last visited Roshar, I’ve read a lot of books in a lot of different genres and about a lot of different topics. I’ve studied writing and fiction, and I’ve developed my own writing skills further. I’ve also read some of Sanderson’s other Cosmere stories, including The Sunlit Man, which is decidedly Stormlight-adjacent. With Wheel of Time behind me, I was excited to return to Stormlight Archive, and I was glad to have another longform fantasy series to turn to after concluding Jordan’s epic. Though I know a lot of people did not favor Rhythm of War, and a few people even stumbled out of the series over it, I recalled how much I enjoyed it when it came out, and anticipated no reason this time would be a significant departure. Perhaps I should have. I did not enjoy Rhythm of War nearly so much this time around, and it did not leave me as excited as I expected to be to finally get around to Wind and Truth, a book I’ve been anticipating since I first read Way of Kings over a decade ago.
What I liked about it is still there, and I still appreciated those aspects: the focus on fabrial science, Kaladin’s struggles, the attempts by the last Listeners to find a place and path for themselves, the occupation plotline. The overall story, and the writing in particular, were less satisfying this time. I started to notice as I read the last three books in Wheel of Time, the ones Sanderson finished, that I don’t enjoy Sanderson’s writing style. Sanderson has never been an author I read for his writing, specifically – he’s a famous practitioner of extremely transparent prose, where the goal is for the writing to vanish from the reader’s mind and leave only the story – but, perhaps in contrast to the splendid prose in many of the books I read, or even to Jordan’s slightly more complex style, Sanderson’s prose struck me this time as particularly uninteresting. Even during the most interesting scenes, I found I struggled to engage with the words on the page, and the scenes and moments lost some of their impact as a result.
Parts of the plot are delivered in a heavy-handed fashion, especially if you have some idea what’s coming, and others are delivered in a mechanical way. What most kept me from enjoying the plot on this reread, though, is the integrations with the larger Cosmere. I mentioned this in my reviews for The Sunlit Man and for Bands of Mourning, and it is true also of Rhythm of War, albeit to a lesser extent – increasingly, reading a new Cosmere novel necessitates rereading Sanderson’s entire corpus in order to fully appreciate the stories. In earlier books there are “Easter eggs,” little tidbits and cameos to add a bit of extra interest for the observant reader, but they weren’t integrated with the plot and the main events. I’ve read almost all Sanderson’s Cosmere novels, and I have a pretty decent memory for story details, but I’m starting to feel like I’m missing important plot elements if I don’t reread the entire Cosmere before each new Cosmere book. Oh, they’ll be explained as necessary for a given book, but the foreshadowing and overall plotting won’t work as well. This is why Bands of Mourning fell so flat for me, and I had the feeling as I read Rhythm of War, too, though to a lesser extent.
All this might make it seem like I disliked Rhythm of War, which is untrue. It’s still an enjoyable book, and I still consider Stormlight Archive a genre-defining work of epic fantasy that pushes the potential for what the genre can do and be. Rather, I would say that I was somewhat disillusioned with the book in this reread. Sanderson’s stories – the style of prose, the deterministic magic systems and plots, the highly anachronistic characters, societies, and technologies, the expansive and deeply referential universe – speak to an aspect of the time in which we live. They are good stories, but between my changing tastes, and the increasing salience of Cosmere trivia, I do not enjoy them as much as I once did, and that’s a sad fact to recognize.
IGC Publishing 