While on vacation in Florida for the holidays, I finished reading Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth, book 5 in the Stormlight Archive series and the end of the first “arc” of the series. It was a fun read and a worthy conclusion to the “arc.” It was also a long read—over 1,300 pages—so it took me longer than usual to finish it. I am amazed at Sanderson’s ability to write action and emotion and weave a complex tale that is both original and avoids clichés and tropes. It is why I continue to read the series. I’ve been hesitant to read other Sanderson books, although I hear good things about them. I’m sure I’d like them, but I mostly read nonfiction these days, and when I turn to fiction, it has to be really high caliber and reliably entertaining to make it worthwhile for me. Fortunately, the Stormlight Archive books fit those criteria.

I finished the book just a few days ago, on January 8, so it is the first book I’ve completed in 2025. Had I finished it in 2024, it probably would have made #9 on my best reads of the year. The story runs the gamut of emotions, and I especially appreciate the humor scattered throughout. I also appreciated a line from the 6th interlude about books and their relationship with culture and civilization:

Books, a weight of information gathered meticulously by his ancestors, each a work of art. This was humankind at its best, standing against the tide of darkness with ink and pen.

Sanderson writes an end-of-year assessment of his work, the state of Sanderson. In this year’s assessment, he noted that, given the various writing projects he’s got going, he doesn’t expect book 6 of the Stormlight Archive to appear until 2031, nearly seven years hence. Having given up waiting for George R. R. Martin’s 6th volume of his magnum opus and having waited patiently for the 3rd volume of Patrick Rothfuss’s series, seven years doesn’t really seem too bad. One thing Sanderson has going for him that Martin and Rothfuss don’t seem to have is consistency and reliability in their scheduling. Sanderson’s output seems remarkable, but he also seems highly regimented in his work and planning. So when he says seven years, I feel like I can count on this as a reliable estimate.

Meanwhile, having gotten my fill of fiction (and with another piece of fiction coming up soon for my book club), I’ve returned to nonfiction but have stayed with the recent trend of reading long books. I’m currently engaged in a little experiment. I am simultaneously reading Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom by Conrad Black, a nearly 1,300-page biography of the 32nd President. At the same time, I am listening to the audiobook version of Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot.

The Roosevelt book is the 6th biography of FDR that I have read, but for some reason, I never get tired of reading about him. I find the different approaches to FDR interesting, and they help paint a more balanced picture than any one book alone. FDR was a hero of Reagan’s, and when I saw the Max Boot biography, I thought it might be interesting to read their lives in parallel. So far, I’m enjoying it. The Reagan biography is only the 2nd Reagan biography I’ve read, the first being H. W. Brands’ Reagan: The Life. I tried reading Edmund Morris’s official biography of Reagan, Dutch, but was turned off by its semi-fictional style. That was disappointing because I’ve twice read Morris’s 3-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, as well as a marvelous collection of his essays, The Living Hand.

Max Boot, by the way, attended the same high school and humanities program that I attended in Reseda, California. We overlapped for a single year, 1987, although I am not aware we ever interacted during that time. There have been other Max Boot books I’ve wanted to read, for instance, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam. From what I’ve read of the Reagan biography so far, I’ll look forward to reading others.