Oathbringer

I was immensely disappointed.

I was an apologetic Sanderson superfan, to be blunt about it, until I picked up Oathbringer the day it came out and slogged through the entire thing that day, setting aside work and other, more important and more timeworthy things, to finish this paperweight that was about as profound as your average fanfic or, to be more generous, an average conversation on the street.

I wasn't surprised–ever since Shadows of Self, which I still think is Sanderson's best book to date, I'd gradually noticed a stylistic change in his writing, replacing unremarkable prose with cliches spilling off the page, and a general attitude, ever since he finished the Reckoners series, to write every character as if they were about to feature in the next MCU film. Which, I mean, isn't too far from the truth now. I clearly didn't like this shift–it took things that were neither good nor bad about Sanderson's writing, and just made them worse. His strength–worldbuilding and plot–couldn't shine through the way it had in his previous novels, when he'd managed to mitigate any negative effects of his prose and characterization.

Was it bad? Not entirely. I won't complain about specific details of the plot, because there's a good story here, and plenty of complex plot fodder for the Seventeenth Shard to debate about for years on end. But it seemed that every inspirational quote that Dalinar managed to produce ex nihilo was something paraphrased from Goethe or Nietzche, and the puzzles and ciphers, even the worldbuilding in general, will never stand up to someone like Umberto Eco. (However, I will admit that reading Eco's Name of the Rose will cause anyone to view Sanderson's fairly good worldbuilding as pedestrian).

I particularly liked the plot, actually, and Sanderson's willingness to drag characters into basic moral gray areas was refreshing given his relatively black-and-white stance in the past. But the other aspects of a good story just weren't there, and I didn't give this book particularly much thought after I finished it. I didn't have any complaints about the length, but for an author who wants to write fantasy works with the profundity of literary titans, it just wasn't there.