Reading this book took me an extremely long time to finish. Part of that is due to being in grad school but another part made me spend some time thinking about the place of the epic fantasy today. This book is as long as all three Lord of the Rings novels combined which is mind-boggling to me and seems...unnecessary at best. And I still contend that Sanderson could probably trim his books down and we wouldn't be missing anything--his characters do a lot of ruminating over the same things (Kaladin) and it gets tiresome at points.

The bigger picture I want to think about here those is the place of these millions-of-words epic fantasy tomes. Sanderson, I believe, is writing the longest books right now but there are some other authors (not many) who are investing as heavily in these heavily world-built, save-the-universe quest stories. And the dearth of people writing these epic fantasies seems to be a fairly recent thing. In the 90s they seemed to be everywhere (Brooks, Martin, Hobbs, etc.). So my first intuition was that the time of the epic fantasy has come and gone and Sanderson was a step out of time. But that seemed too simplistic and didn't capture what I think is the true essence of this genre and the work he is trying to accomplish with these books.

I think Sanderson is writing a utopia.

But more like "utopia-in-progress."

The characters are so committed to the idea of a better, to their belief in becoming better people, in helping others, in discovering truths, harsh truths that might hurt and cause total disruptions to their senses of self, place, home, identity, community, family. Everything Dalinar and Kaladin believed in has been dismantled repeatedly, Shallan's entire identity is fractured and rebuilt every book, and I could go on. But they stay committed to these values and ideals even as the world is literally ending (maybe, the characters say "end of the world" too much for me to believe this really is the apocalypse). This is the work it takes to make a utopia.

How do I put all the warring and fighting that happens in this text? Well, does it? This is something I realized after finishing the book, despite the fact we have these all-powerful all-wonderful Alethi armies they don't actually kill anyone? Most of the work they are pictured doing is moving rocks around and cleaning things and patrolling cities. The big "battle" is to end bloodlust and the glory of war, Dalinar's entire character arc this book is realizing how bad war is for everyone especially the people who "benefit."

In 2019 (or 2018...I said this took me far too long to finish #phd), I think this book accomplishes a mission of hope, of delineating the kind of work making a better world entails--the politics, the sacrifices, the betrayals, the losses, the suffering--knowing that that better world you might never see or benefit from or, perhaps, it might never come about.

But that doesn't make it work not worth doing.