Dawnshard

I know I said last time that the next audiobook that I'd be talking about was Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher. I had reservations in even putting that in the post, because I'd done that before and then things didn't work out and I felt stupid. I guess I should have listened to that instinct, because that's what happened this time too.

When the hurricane came to town, my cell service got so bad that I couldn't listen to my book for a whole week. By the time it finally came back, it was too late to finish the book. I only got halfway through it. Now I'm back in the hold line for it, and it say I'm number 63 in line for the 10 copies they have to loan out. Whoops.

So, I grabbed something else in its place. This time, it was another Brandon Sanderson book. It's called Dawnshard, and it is one of the mini side books from the Stormlight Archives series.

I checked it out a while ago, but just wasn't feeling it at the time, so I only listened to a chapter or so, before letting the loan lapse.

This time around, I didn't have the same malaise, and I managed to listen to the whole book in a friggin day. The book is pretty short, much smaller than a normal Stormlight Archive book. Those are usually a thousand pages long. This one was only 304 pages...but also they were smaller pages, because the book is the size of one of those old school paperback books, not the big trade paperback ones, but the little ones that people used to buy at the airport to read on a plane before their phones rotted their brains out and they couldn't engage their brains enough to read anymore. The whole audiobook is only seven hours and five minutes long.

I think I really liked that. What it felt like was a single story lifted out of one of the big Stormlight Archives books. In those books, Sanderson tends to write a story about this long about seven or eight characters, switching back and forth through the stories as we progress through the book. In this case, it was just the one character, and we got their one story. 

I think I really prefer that. I think I might like the Stormlight Archive series more if each book was just the story of one character. If they went through and divided up the stories into smaller solo books, it might appeal more. The only problem is that the finales tend to all merge into one chaotic intertwined superbattle, so it probably wouldn't work, but I think I'd prefer that.

This book wasn't amazing, but it wasn't bad either. It had some fun stuff in it, and I had a good time with it, so I guess I'd recommend it. Don't expect to have your socks knocked off, but you won't wish that you had your time back afterward, I don't think.

Up next...do I dare? Well, I'm pretty sure that up next will be Excalibur by Bernard Cornwell. It's the final book in the King Arthur series, and I've been waiting for quite a while for it to become available, so I'm pretty stoked to get to it. I should have plenty of time to listen to it too...at least, I hope I do. We'll see.