Oathbringer

Like the second novel in The Stormlight Archive, took the third one too an enormously long time for me to get through. It didn't help that, unlike with the previous two, there was no 2-volume print of Oathbringer available: just holding a nearly 1300-page hardcover brick is unpleasant every time. It was mainly the content that made the book a struggle to read though.

Brandon Sanderson's storytelling style started feeling quite formulaic in Oathbringer: the same 1000-page journey to the inevitable final showdown (which wasn't that great this time) and characters having to come to terms with something before they can get a literal power upgrade. The latter happens for maybe 10 different characters and they have to do it more than once eventually with how surgebinding works, each order of Knights Radiant having two types of surges associated with them. It got so repetitive.

Shallan was the worst viewpoint character for me. Her faking of different personalities -- and not being great at it -- is a kind of story element I don't enjoy. There's a sense of second-hand embarrassment when she fumbles as Veil.

Dalinar is the most interesting viewpoint, mostly due to the amount of revelations that happen when he's in the spotlight. The known history of Roshar gets shaken up by quite a bit while different nations are driven deeper into the conflict with the Parshendi and the kind of terrible villain behind them, Odium -- he doesn't seem very convincing or interesting.

"The most important step a man can take. It's not the first one, is it?

It's the next one. Always the next step, Dalinar."

I noted Sanderson a couple of times using questionable lexicon for the setting. Particularly bad with it is the annoying Lift character who also makes a joke with the English homophones of but and butt. I feel puns should be avoided in a fantasy setting. There's an implication that the characters are speaking a language in which the same pun works as in the language the novel is written. Or that maybe the joke had been translated. (Puns are problematic for real life translations of the novel too.) Probably Sanderson is just using English and not bothered by the details. But I don't like it; I'm generally averse to things not staying in-universe.

One twist, a possible spoiler (I think it may have been revealed in Words of Radiance already), is how Jasnah Kholin turned out to be alive after all. It was the kind of Sanderson twist that can be deducted beforehand from given information. I guess Sanderson did not immediately kill her off after all.

I'm not particularly excited about reading the rest of the series but I might as well as it's currently only at four published full novels. There's a second novella after this one, titled Dawnshard, which is then followed by the fourth volume, Rhythm of War.

One final note: I thought that unlike with the first two, Oathbringer wasn't named after an in-universe book because there's a shardblade with that name. However, in the end, a book of the same name too made an appearance.