Blessed by the Potato

I’ve taken a few days off here with a nasty sore throat that seems to just start to get better, only to remiss as soon as I spend a day back at work. I think I’m finally over it, but maybe I’ll say that only to be bedridden again tomorrow :( Anyway, this has given me an opportunity to so some reading, so here are a few short book reviews for you:

The Alloy of Law, Brandon Sanderson.

This is a follow-up book to his Mistborn series, and I have to say that I loved the Mistborn Trilogy. Uncharacteristically for Brandon Sanderson, the Alloy of Law is actually fairly short, which I think was good because it was just as hard to put down as his other ones, and I needed my sleep. The original Mistborn trilogy took place in a quasi-medieval setting with a particular brand of magic (allomancy) included. That world was facing some cataclysmic events, which naturally, were resolved by the end of the trilogy. The Allow of Law now brings us a few hundred years into the future of that world, now populated with guns and railroads. Part detective novel, part western, and part action-packed fantasy thriller, I was well-pleased. It’s a totally different tone, with a totally different set of characters, yet it all fit nicely into the Mistborn universe. I think he could build a lucrative career just writing allomancy books, but of course Brandon Sanderson is too damned prolific to be tied down like that. Ah, well. I await the next entry!

The God Engines, John Scalzi

This one is even shorter, I think qualifying as a novella. Part sci-fi, part fantasy, this story tells the tale of warring gods, who are made stronger by the faith their followers have. So far, the storyline of Populous. Anyway, instead of trying to flatten all the things to help organically grow their followers, these gods have wars to convert or exterminate those of their enemies. When we enter the story, one god in particular seems to have largely taken over the known universe, and has enslaved the lesser gods to use their god-like powers to run the ships (hence the title). It’s a neat take on the technobabble behind FTL travel, using tangible yet still metaphysical gods to bend space-time to their will while chained in the bowels of a ship. Anyway, I don’t want to say much more than that because it’s already such a short book it’s hard not to release spoilers. I will say that the characters are well-fleshed out, and it’s another solid piece of Scalzi writing. Though I did include a link above to Amazon with my affiliate code, I think $20 is a bit steep for a novella; you may be better-served by the $5 Kindle version.

Hull Zero Three, Greg Bear

I find myself torn on this one: on the one hand, I did not enjoy the book, on the other, of the three it was the one I spent the most time thinking about the themes and meaning. Before I get to that and have to get to spoilers though, I’ll just say that though I liked the concepts Greg Bear was writing about, I did not care for how the story played out. For a short book, it took way too long to get going, which was compounded by the fact that most of the first third of the book might be considered non-stop action scenes. There was zero character building until about the half-way point, which I think is why all the action-y stuff at the beginning fell so flat. The main character comes out of some kind of pod in a freezing cold space ship, not sure if he’s been in suspended animation or what has happened. He’s badly lacking in memory and ability to think clearly, which leads to a really broken first-person narrative. I find that kind of amnesiac story annoying at the best of times, and this one is not well-executed. From there, mysterious monsters chase him through the ship, which is in obvious peril. Sounds like Pandorum, the book. Now, on to the meat, right after a:

Spoiler warning!

The big concept here is a “generation ship” launched from a dying earth to the unknown void to carry on for humanity. The reason I threw generation ship in scare quotes there is because the ship is not your typical generation ship: though it’s moving at barely relativistic speeds on a journey that will take centuries, it is not carrying an awake human crew that will reproduce on the journey, nor is it carrying colonists frozen in suspended-animation. Instead — and this is where the concept gets cool — it’s carrying some really powerful genetic engineering technology combined with in-vitro memory implantation, so that it can grow colonists to spec, and have them emerge as fully-developed adults complete with skills and implanted memories. Then the concept gets even better because the ship’s designers tried to account for all possibilities, including in the genetic library the ability to not only make humans as we know them, but to modify them to suit other environments, and to create lesser organisms to build up a biosphere if the planet they find is lifeless. And more: a whole library of killer creatures, designed to wipe out any indigenous life if the distant target colony is inhabited. There are all kinds of ethical questions to mine in those scenarios: do you try to make peace and co-exist if you’re approaching a system with intelligent indigenous life, or do you strike first to ensure that you complete your mission to preserve Earth-based life?

Rather than directly explore these questions and possibilities, the story instead spends the vast majority of its time mucking about on a broken space ship — far too much time on the issues of dealing with the cold and changing gravity as the cylinders spin up and down. Far too much time snapping out of the amnesic brain fog of being born/thawed out. Far too much time running away from barely-glimpsed impossible monsters. Yes, we learn at the end (I warned you there would be spoilers) that the whole point was that the ship went to war with itself after selecting a destination with indigenous life: the bioreactors started getting programmed for eliminators (hence all the monsters that have been spawned on board), but a small faction was having an ethical dilemma and tried to create something closer to a set of stock humans to take over and change course. But then recreating those same few individuals hundreds of times over, only to have them die in confusion… I just didn’t like it, and I don’t think much came of that. It didn’t even really seem to shake the main character when he found the freezer full of hundreds of copies of himself.

One interesting throw-away twist was the question of what if the indigenous life was other humans? That’s another theme sometimes explored in sci-fi with generation or sleeper ships moving out under conventional drive: after centuries in space, they arrive at their colony only to find that Earth managed to recover from its near-catastrophe, develop faster-than-light travel, and beat them to it. So what if your ship is busy breeding the best killers genetic engineering can imagine, and is setting up for an unannounced first strike on your own great great grand-nephews, who leap-frogged past you after developing warp drive?

Anyway, I didn’t think it worked very well as an amnesiac-finding-himself story, nor as a romp-in-the-monster-ridden-ship-with-variable-gravity-and-heat story, and the cool concept/big idea part just got relegated to a few pages at the end. A story I might like to see is with basically this ship (or I guess more properly, the gene library and bioreactor) that Greg Bear has come up with, but from the point of view of the indigenous population, or the crew when it’s not hundreds of years into a feud that no one remembers. How would the little ship-board war have played out if a conclusion was reached within a single generation, while people still knew what they were fighting over and had their brains and weren’t taking time to marvel at words like umbrella as their memory defrosted? What would it be like if such a ship appeared in our skies?

Maybe they’d realize they could hang out in lunar orbit, and it would take us a few years to build any kind of rocket to hurt them. Then the crunch is on to explore those ethical issues: can a peace be brokered between such different species? Can they trust us, can we trust them? Do we share the Earth, or let them have Mars? What is the interaction of their own hawks and doves? What if they realize their ship isn’t big enough to totally take on a planet the size of Earth?

There was recently a problem with Bell’s phone lines in Markham. It had been ongoing for weeks, and though it didn’t affect me directly, I do have friends and family caught up in the problem. It’s not a constant problem: the phones become useless in the rain. So it has to be raining, which makes diagnosis tough, especially when Bell doesn’t take the issue seriously enough to send service techs out until the day after a complaint is made. Even then, many times the techs (though themselves pleasant and hard-working) didn’t seem to be fully informed: one person might complain and Bell would dispatch a tech, and another person next door would do the same, and Bell might dispatch another tech, and the techs would never be told that the problem was affecting more than one house.

In the power outage of 2003, we were without power for days. The battery backups for our radios and cell phones went dead, as would the backup batteries for a competing phone technology like a VOIP system or Rogers digital phone. But Bell’s POTS worked, and continued to keep us in touch with the power company and our relatives across the country while the blackout was resolved. It is said to have “five nines” of reliability: it works 99.999% of the time, which comes out to about 5 minutes of downtime per year.

That is the one reason we are still with Bell: the call quality and clarity is so much better than a cell phone, and the reliability cannot be touched by VOIP or digital systems.

Except for customers in Markham, where Bell has failed them. In an area spanning several blocks, affecting many customers, their phones simply stop working in the rain. Sometimes it’s merely bad quality: crackling and popping noises that drown out any attempt at talking, though perhaps in theory some communications could still be made (e.g., dialing out to 911, at least enough for them to receive caller ID information). Sometimes though, the phone fails to work entirely. No dial-tone, no ringing in, nothing.

That this has been going on as long as it has is unacceptable. I understand that intermittent problems are the worst to try to diagnose and fix, but rain, though intermittent, is not exactly beyond our ability to predict. Bell gets the weather network, too. Bell could have laid all-new wire in that neighbourhood by now, and at least should have looked ahead to the forecast and had someone standing by to try to finally solve the problem the next time it rained.

But the phones weren’t ringing in Markham. Though they are ringing in Bell’s call centre. One long-time customer has called almost 20 times now, first to get the technical problem resolved, and then to get the customer loyalty one fixed.

This doesn’t even directly affect me, but I’m pissed off. Reliability really is Bell’s only selling feature: though Robbers Rogers certainly doesn’t put too much effort into competing for POTS customers, Bell is not really all that price competitive. Certainly not for feature-laden phone packages. And people aren’t exactly staying for the cheery and helpful customer service. So when reliability is gone, what’s left? I ask Bell: how are they going to make this right?

So far, they’ve offered to refund a portion of one month’s bill: the local calling component, which was largely nonfunctional anyway. But no refund of the long distance plan (which was equally useless for much of the month), no good faith go-forward discount, no sorry-for-the-terrible-inconvenience incentive, no cash to compensate for the many cell phone minutes used up while the landline was dead in the water. In short, no admission that taking weeks to solve a problem might be anything other than par for the course.

Bell: it’s time to step it up.

As I mentioned earlier, I received a Kobo Touch e-reader as a graduation present. My dad has a Kindle, and he finally remembered to bring it with him when I saw him on the weekend so I could get a bit of a comparison. Here’s my review:

Screen: pretty much the same for both units. For those unfamiliar with e-readers and digital ink, it’s a passive, reflective technology: much like regular ink, it’s a little more comfortable to read than an LCD, and has a wide (perfect?) viewing angle. The 6″ screen is a decent size: easy to tuck away in a backpack, a good amount of reading area without finding that your eyes are tending to over-scan. The “white” of the digital ink is still a little on the grey side. I find that leads to a really nice, comfortable amount of contrast for extended reading; Wayfare finds her preferences tend to higher contrast, and so she finds it a little too dark for her tastes. The print is quite sharp; I don’t know what precisely the resolution of the digital ink is, but it’s high enough that it looks as good as actual printing, and can display both serif text and images nicely. Sometimes when you turn the page, there are some residual artifacts from the previous page, the ghost images of previous letters. These are cleaned up by having the reader flash a full black page, and that is set to happen every couple of page turns. At first I found the flashing a touch distracting, but quickly got used to it (plus it only happens when the page turns, not when you’re just trying to read a page).

Turning pages: with the touch you can either tap the screen on the right-hand third of the screen to turn the page, or gesture anywhere with a right-to-left swipe of a finger. I find that sometimes my taps aren’t registered, but mostly the swipes are. That’s handy too if I’m holding the reader from the left side and just want to reach out a finger and swipe one-handed. I think that buttons (like on the Kindle and previous-gen Kobo) might be more consistently responsive, but it is awfully neat to be able to touch anywhere and turn pages, rather than having to hold the reader a certain way to get to the buttons comfortably. Plus without the need for buttons, the screen takes up more of the area on the device. I’m also really impressed at how the screen doesn’t show finger-prints. I thought a touch-screen would quickly drive me mad (I can’t even bear to look at an iPad for fear of the maddening portal to hell that device represents).

Battery: I’ve been able to read one of George R.R. Martin’s tomes per charge so far, plus a bit of playing around with it for playing around’s sake. Each Kobo page is smaller than the page in a trade paper-back, so that’s about 3000 page turns. The Chapters page suggests that up to 20,000 page turns may be possible. That may improve if there’s any break-in to the battery, but either way it’s good enough that I can take it away and read for a few days before having to worry about charging it. The battery charges by micro-USB, which is handy for travelling because I just need to pack my laptop and a tiny USB cable, rather than an A/C adaptor. If you don’t normally travel with a computer though, an A/C adaptor is not sold with it, so you’ll probably have to pay extra for that. My one complaint is that there’s only a very rough battery meter on the home page of the device, and none at all while reading. There’s also no low battery warning at all: you’ll just be reading then all of a sudden try to turn the page and get the “please plug your device in to recharge” screen. A warning a few dozen page-turns ahead of time would be really nice (though once connected to power you can continue to read).

Getting books: both the Kobo and the Kindle have the ability to get content either via your computer and a USB connection, or directly to the device via WiFi. The Kindle also has the ability to connect via the cell phone networks if you don’t have WiFi [some models only]. For browsing with the device, the hardware keyboard of the Kindle may be more useful; I haven’t and don’t see myself ever purchasing books that way (but as a counterpoint, my dad prefers, even if slower, to buy books directly on his kindle so he doesn’t have to try to make two devices talk to each other). For books outside of the Kobo/Amazon market (e.g., when I was loading drafts of my own book onto the Kobo) it’s easy to put files on: the Kobo shows up just like any other removable USB drive, and you just drag-n-drop the file onto it.

Other neat features: Both Kobo and Kindle have apps for other devices (e.g.: blackberry, ipad, iphone, PC), and will sync up your books between these devices. That could be handy if I unexpectedly find I’ve got some time to read a few pages on my blackberry, and can pick up a book where I last left off on the reader. Unfortunately, this only seems to work for titles purchased through the Kobo store (and I hear that Amazon has much the same functionality with the Kindle app), so I can’t sync up my library-borrowed, free, or 3rd-party books. And speaking of library-borrowed, that was one of the big differentiators for me: both the Toronto and London public libraries provide ebooks, but they’re not available for the Kindle (just the Kobo and a few other readers). A web browser is also included, but is still beta for the Kobo (I haven’t tried the one on the Kindle). One big complaint is the keyboard: there’s no reason for numbers and periods to be on a different view than the QWERTY keyboard, especially for entering web addresses.

E-readers vs books: it’s hard to fully replace a book, but I have to say my Kobo comes closer than I ever thought it would. It’s a touch heavier than a light paperback, so if I were to sit down and read something in paperback form it might be a toss-up as to which format I would prefer. But it’s lighter than a larger trade paperback, and certainly easier to hold than a hardcover. It was a slam-dunk for the giant Song of Ice and Fire books, which were straining my wrist in physical form. Reading from the screen itself is pretty close to reading from paper, with the option to change the font size if I so desire. Images display pretty well, but one weird thing is that PDFs can be zoomed in on and rotated, but not EPUBs. In bright sunlight, I’d choose paper: the screen is matte, but still gets some annoying reflections from strong light sources at certain angles. Another advantage to old-fashioned books is the ability to flip ahead quickly to see when the next chapter break is. But with an e-reader, if I want to read while sitting at a table hands-free (e.g.: while eating), I don’t need to play the dance of getting something heavy to prop open the book, and then move that to turn a page, etc… For travelling on vacation, I think the e-reader is also a slam-dunk (except for possibly beach reading, which I still have to test out due to the reflection issue) since it’s so light and can carry hundreds of books in its memory, and thousands more on my harddrive. Storage is another big plus: my bookshelves are already full, and I’ve been good about going to the library less because I want to save money than because I just can’t store any more books. I’m sure the technology is going to continue to mature and in a few years we’ll have e-readers that will put these to shame, but I think it has now come to the point where it’s ready for the main-stream. Plus at ~$140 it’s not a huge investment, and may even break-even since some electronic titles are cheaper than their physical brethren.

Kobo vs Kindle: there isn’t a huge amount of difference, but I’d lean towards the Kobo. It’s a bit lighter and smaller, though with the same screen size — so less casing, helped by the lack of keyboard. If you foresee any need to actually type on the thing (like if you don’t own a computer and would need to buy books directly on the device) then the Kindle may be a better choice, since the touchscreen keyboard was painful. Yet aside from just playing with it, I’ve had zero need for a keyboard; so I figure, why waste the space on the device with one? Being able to download library books is a pretty big perk in my mind (even though I haven’t actually done that yet). Plus, I’m creeped out by the 1984 incident with Amazon.

Links out for those interested in purchasing: Kobo @ Chapters, Kindle @ Amazon [the latter a referral link].

Out on the Island there’s a minor fad in putting giant decorative stars on the sides of houses, and more recently butterflies/dragonflies. We asked around to try to see if there was a reason why people had these stars on their houses here, if it was some kind of local tradition, superstition, or signifier. It’s apparently a common question from tourists, and there’s no real answer. The stars don’t signify anything in particular (though one person suggested it may have started as an Acadian thing), they’re simply decorative. It’s just a fad that happens to have caught hold here, but not back in Ontario.

The vacation was very much needed. Very much. I didn’t take my full vacation in 2010, and the week I took off I didn’t go anywhere, so it was good to just get out and sit by the ocean and read some books completely for pleasure, as well as play through some video games and watch the Game of Thrones mini-series. I can’t say that I’m fully, completely de-stressed from the thesis/future career uncertainty stress, but I no longer find my heart seizes and jumps 3 inches higher in my chest every time my email goes “boo-woop.”

Even on my vacation I had a to-do list. Some of it was merely playful: the top few books/games I wanted to read/play through (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Leviathan/Behemoth, Portal 2, Assassin’s Creed), some of it was things to do out east (garlic fingers, biking, visiting relatives, and garlic fingers), and some was to be somewhat productive in a non-thesis related way (enter a short story competition, draft a few posts to have a backlog for when my time is precious for the thesis, write some cover letters). While I got through most of the reading/playing list (didn’t get to a few books or Assassin’s Creed), I didn’t even touch the writing part of the to-do list.

I’ve already burned through many of my reserve drafts, and that was with a nearly complete shut-down of posting while I was gone. I expect then that I’ll only post once or twice a week at most for the rest of the summer, unless someone says or does something stupid that I can’t resist commenting on. Oh please say something stupid! Anyway, this post will have to last you a while. Fortunately, it’s long. Also, the comments have been re-enabled now that I have a stable internet connection to clear out the spam folder every day or two.

Speaking of internet connection, tethering to my BlackBerry was reasonably useful. For most of the trip I could access the internet, and it was reasonably fast to load (often a long latency time before it started, then the page would snap in pretty quickly). But as the trip went on, it got more and more screwy: taking longer and longer to resolve DNS requests, and often failing at that. It would give me a message about a hardware error in the modem and disconnect (i.e.: lost connection between PC and BB). Then one night the internet just went dead completely, even on the handset itself, though the signal meter still showed one bar (down from 3/4). Then, mysteriously, my BB displayed the red message light on solidly and shut itself off. I thought it was dead, but it came back to life not too much afterwards and I could connect again with the handset, but with less luck on the PC. So except for those last few days, it did work quite well. Haven’t received the bill yet to say how much Bell ended up deciding to charge me for the tethering.

Book mini-reviews:

Spoiler warning start!

A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book One: A fantasy book, with undead creatures and dragons present in the universe, but not making much of an appearance, so mostly court intrigue and betrayal. Knights and war and honour and blood. A very large set of characters seemed really well laid out, with depth to every one. In particular though, George R. R. Martin has no qualms about who lives or dies, or where the plot may take us. He is ruthless, and I have to say I was genuinely surprised at the plot twists (last chance before spoiler-ville!): for most of the book he seemed to be building up the Dothraki threat, even giving Drogo a good reason to get good and mad and charge across the narrow sea. I was so sure that that was what the book was building towards… when all of a sudden he’s felled by a common infection. The HBO min-series was also great: very true to the book, and in the few places where it wasn’t, I thought the show offered some improvements. For example, Catelyn Stark wasn’t as mean to Jon Snow in the show, which made her more likeable off the bat, and I much preferred “white walkers” to “the Others”. Who uses such a vague term as “the others” for a menace? I hated it in Lost, too. Very well-cast all around, too.

If you’re a fan of fantasy, or even just fictional political intrigue (and can at least tolerate swords and a fictional medieval setting), then I recommend it. And I’m highly looking forward to finishing the rest of the series.

End of spoiler warning section!

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: This has been a pretty popular book, with two movies made of it now (a Swedish-language one, and a Hollywood version). It’s a murder mystery thriller, and it was pretty good, though I’m not sure I’d have even bothered to write about it if it weren’t already popular (and perhaps sadly, it’s popularity means my opinion matters even less). There are definitely some points in the book where you can tell it’s a translation. My favourite was the “and he was up for the Big Journalism Prize” — presumably translated from a named Swedish prize that English readers wouldn’t recognize. But it does read well. I liked the main characters, and the suspense built, making it a real page-turner. However, it’s not for the faint of heart: the crimes involved are vicious and graphic. The sex scenes are plentiful, and the morals are loose. Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that it was already an international bestseller with lots of publicity, I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending it: though it was a good murder-mystery novel, it wasn’t spectacular enough for me to want to come out and recommend it in light of the subject matter. If you have a sensitive personality, you may want to give this one a pass, despite the hype.

[Note, the above links are to my affiliate link at Amazon, and at the moment, Game of Thrones is on a pretty good sale. I do get a small kick-back if you buy via that link, but it doesn’t affect my enthusiasm for the books.]

A site I hadn’t seen before, Metal Augmentor put up a thorough look into some of the background issues with Sino-Forest, including the confusing terminology. Indeed, quite aside from any fraud issues, MA points out that I made one of the mistakes mentioned, over-counting the amount of owned plantations (where seedlings are planted and money is made by patience and silviculture) based on the company’s confusing use of terminology.

I was just having an off-line discussion about the Sino-Forest issue, and how the MW report had at least a few mistakes, while the company’s response was lacklustre, so it was hard to say what the truth of the matter was. Though I had a passing interest in the many hunters of Chinese frauds, and had heard of MW before the scandal broke, MW wasn’t one of my most esteemed detectives. The person I was talking to was interested in making a small bet on SF, and I said that if one were in a gambling mood, perhaps this could be the one sketchy-looking company that was indeed real. But, I warned, while I might bet on MW getting this one wrong, I wouldn’t bet against Hempton. Wouldn’t you know it, the next bloody day Bronte Capital has weighed in on the side of shenanigans in a series of posts. John says:

“As for analysis of the accounts – the Sino Forest accounts contain enough red-flags to make any eagle-eyed observer cautious. I am sympathetic to making an investment without looking at the accounts at all because limited time and shortcuts often make that an efficient way of behaving. […] But if some analyst really did a detailed look at the accounts and did not spot the red-flags then they are incompetent. For that I have no sympathy at all.”

Well, I guess I have to publicly admit I’m incompetent. I’m an amateur and lack experience, granted. But before I bought I was looking (albeit with a much more limited time budget than a full-time professional fund manager) specifically for signs of fraud. I’ve been up on my game enough in the past to avoid a few doozies (though never gone short), and to follow along with the analysis of some other alleged frauds, but totally missed this one. Indeed, I still can’t see it as clearly in TRE as these guys allege. I’m merely confused, as I was before, which is how I ended up making an investment based on a weak heuristic.

This post also happens to come at basically the half-way point of the year, so I figure I’d update my spreadsheets and see how I was doing. I thought it would be absolutely dismal: I took a bath on Sino-Forest, and lost nearly as much on TEPCO. I’ve been holding Yellow Media since 2008, and it’s had yet another bad year — down some 60% (not including dividend). Was it really just a few months ago (when it was trading around $4.50) that I said you couldn’t get much more contrarian sentiment? Yikes. Though I mercifully kept my positions in TRE and TEPCO small, I can’t say the same for YLO, so I figured that those three big losers would pretty much sink me here.

Indeed, I did underperform my personal benchmark (50/50 TSX/S&P500) by a noticeable margin, but not as badly as I feared. I was saved by a few good moves: Canadian Helicopters was up ~50%, TD was up 10% YTD, and up 16% at one point (where I sold half so locked in some profit). A few other positions had modest returns, in particular Canexus and Veresen — though the moves weren’t big, the positions were (and I’ve since trimmed them both down, trying to not let any one position get over 10% of the portfolio). My Freddie Mac preferred shares are up nearly four-fold in the last six months, but since it began as a small position and was down 65% in the first place, that big percentage gain was small in absolute terms, and just barely balances one of the TRE/TEPCO losses. Overall I’m down less than 1%, compared to the TSX up about 1%, and the S&P500 up about 5% in CAD (I’ve estimated the dividend yield since I don’t know of a good site for total returns stats, though in the past I took the time to create a model portfolio with XIC & XSP). So a miss of about 3.5%. Not terrible for having made some truly godawful investment decisions recently, but not the kind of performance I can keep up if I’m going to continue attempting active management. Unfortunately I don’t see any catalysts for outperformance through the rest of the year, so I don’t think I’ll be making it up this year.

One thing I did do right was my rabbit analogy for the way the TFSA works. Someone even called it “perfect” in a recent CMF thread, which is a nice ego boost :)

Oh, and finally: I have a defense date! Just another month and a half, and I get to run the Gauntlet of Science and prove myself a true doctor. Or you know, fail miserably or whatever. Either way, it’ll be done before the end of August!

Brandon Sanderson fantasy epic. For some of you out there, that may be all you need to hear to go pick up the Way of Kings now that it’s out in paperback.

Once again he’s crafted a whole new world with its own set of magical rules, only this time the people themselves are only just re-discovering how the magic works, so we don’t get a clear picture of it ourselves. This can be a little frustrating at times, but that’s perhaps just the curious child in me wanting to know what the answer is, because I know he almost certainly does have one, and isn’t making this stuff up on the fly. The main characters are noble and engaging, with just enough of a flaw to their personalities to keep them interesting and relevant.

It’s extremely difficult to criticize the Way of Kings, but I don’t want to spoil too much by gushing. Fortunately, I’m very good at criticizing: first up, it’s looong. Most of it seemed very justified and engaging though, but be warned that WoK, book 1 of this Stormlight Archives trilogy, comes in at about the length of lesser trilogies. There were only one or two chapters I’d have cut, in particular the one with the fisher-people didn’t seem to have a point in this story, and wasn’t revisited in this book. I’m sure he’ll bring it up again in the next book, but it really stuck out for me as being out of place. Often, I wanted to follow one character’s story arc for longer than the chapters were laid out, so at a few points I found myself skipping ahead to the next Kaladin chapter, then going back and reading a few Dalinar chapters, etc. But that’s really stretching to find things to critique.

One final issue is that I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the book in its own right. It was definitely an enjoyable read, and I’m eager for the sequel to come out, but a lot of plot threads seemed to be left open for the following books, so I would find it a little hard to read this one as a stand-alone work. That’s somewhat troubling because according to his blog, Brandon won’t have the next book out until 2013-ish. But the writing load he’s laid out is just incredible. What would be an extremely prolific lifetime career for nearly any writer, and he seems to imply it’ll just be the next decade or so.

My favourite Brandon Sanderson work though would still have to be the Mistborn Trilogy, which I reviewed the first instalment of earlier, but linked here to the complete boxed set (which has been available for some time). I guess I should briefly mention the other two books: they were quite good, but I fell in love with the world he created most of all. I really don’t want to spoil it, but at the same time, can’t help but mention that this isn’t your typical fantasy epic. The first novel starts off halfway towards a heist movie — except instead of the charmer, computer guy, demolitions expert, and thug, we have different classes of magical allomancers working together. The whole series takes a big twist in the middle, and goes in a new and unexpected direction. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

I do not have time to follow his blog on a daily basis, but he does have some interesting material up there. For example, the deleted scenes offer some insight into the process of revisions a real author goes through. I hope I can find that useful myself: I’m a terrible one-and-done author, and I always struggle whenever revisions are needed.

A final note: some of the links above are affiliate links to Amazon. If you use those links then buy the books, I’ll get a small kickback from Amazon, so if you’re going to buy them, might I suggest doing it that way? That said, I of course don’t allow that fact to influence my reviews.

PS: Have you heard of Claritin eye drops? Magic! I’m thinking of writing a fantasy trilogy of my own, based on the wizardly use of their magical essence.