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Re:Earthsea – A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin (2015) by SXX on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @08:25AM (#16222424)
After many years with more serious read I got back to fantasy in September by starting with Wheel of Time, then all of Cosmere books where I finished Oathbringer just weeks ago with some 10 first Discworld books in between. Sanderson isn't perfect, but his writing improved immensely with each new book. I wouldn't really recommend anything other than Stormlight Archive and might be Mistborn era 2 unless person want to be very Cosmere-aware though.

Still his problem with Shallan is pretty much the same as he had with Mat in first of his WoT books and basically with every other witty character in every of his earliest books. He just wasn't good enough for writing some types of characters, but still tried to include them regardless. I think everyone will agree that he actually become better at this since most of people I talked with enjoy Hoid in SA.

I don't try to justify it, but I think it's not that easy to fix character like Shallan since her character was well defined in first book released in 2010. I guess what we can see in Oathbringer it's attempt to do that although not very good one.

Re:Earthsea – A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin (2015) by egjerlow on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @08:59AM (#16222651)
Thanks for the input - though I feel like Shallan is just symptomatic of a larger problem, I could also be wrong and I will give him the benefit of the doubt and keep reading SA.
Re:Earthsea – A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin (2015) by SXX on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @09:25AM (#16222860)
I would certainly recommend finishing SA since I personally got as much of enjoyment out of it as I only had from ASoIaF. Also I would recommend it even more if you're on first book or not yet get to Shallan's back story in second since a lot of things will make more sense once you know it.
Re:Earthsea – A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin (2015) by qu4z-2 on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @06:23PM (#16227294)
I think Shallan also isn't as clever as she thinks she is, in-universe. That makes it somewhat more palatable to me.
Re:Earthsea – A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin (2015) by SXX on Thursday January 25, 2018 @01:29AM (#16229197)
I would want to answer more, but I really want to avoid spoilers. Though I absolutely love her backstory and character development even if I really dislike writing of her in first book.