Which Stormlight Archive book is best?

[coolsnow7]

My wife has - finally! - started reading the Cosmere, and is now in the middle of Oathbringer. She is not so into it (apparently her favorite aspect of these books is the Shallan love triangle, which is not so prominent in the beginning of Oathbringer). I realized that before I make big claims like “Oathbringer is considered by the Cosmerenauts to be the best of the series”, I should actually check if it’s true. So please vote away!

[Soccorro]

Way of Kings > Words of Radiance > Oathbringer > Rhythm of War > Wind and Truth

[Treamayne]

2 hours ago, coolsnow7 said:

Oathbringer is considered by the Cosmerenauts to be the best of the series

Oathbringer is the worst of the First arc, to me.
   (One significant reason discussed here)

2 hours ago, Soccorro said:

Way of Kings > Words of Radiance > Oathbringer > Rhythm of War > Wind and Truth

Pending re-read, my preference:

• WoK
• RoW
• WoR
• WaT
• OB

Edited March 26, 2025 by Treamayne
SPAG

[Qianweilian He/him]

3 hours ago, coolsnow7 said:

her favorite aspect of these books is the Shallan love triangle

Wait, really? I really didn't like that.

[Trusk'our he/him]

3 hours ago, coolsnow7 said:

My wife has - finally! - started reading the Cosmere, and is now in the middle of Oathbringer. She is not so into it (apparently her favorite aspect of these books is the Shallan love triangle, which is not so prominent in the beginning of Oathbringer). I realized that before I make big claims like “Oathbringer is considered by the Cosmerenauts to be the best of the series”, I should actually check if it’s true. So please vote away!

OB was my personal favorite. 

I loved how WoK let us feel Kaladin's desperation and struggle, and how the bridgemen had to be clever, grow together, and become something awesome after being the lowest of the low.

WoR built on this, leading to new and exciting character interactions, particularly with Kaladin and Dalinar working together directly. Shallan really picked up the pace here too, mostly because of the Ghostblood arc.

OB built on this momentum in an almost perfect fashion for me- I cared about the world of Roshar, its worldbuilding and people, and then an actual apocalypse happens!? It was very exciting to me.

RoW then felt jarring, with a drop off of the momentum. I didn't actually like it at first, but came to enjoy it well enough with time.

I feel like WaT has the most trouble, as it tries to ride the waves of the previous installments, but is too rushed and ping-pongy to fully invest a reader like myself. 

 

[Hexagonal He/Him]

3 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

I loved how WoK let us feel Kaladin's desperation and struggle, and how the bridgemen had to be clever, grow together, and become something awesome after being the lowest of the low.

WoR built on this, leading to new and exciting character interactions, particularly with Kaladin and Dalinar working together directly. Shallan really picked up the pace here too, mostly because of the Ghostblood arc.

 

I Really agree with you on this, WoK and WoR were so character driven that they really made you feel. Part of why I prefer RoW over OB(OB isn't bad, but it b=puts a lot into the war)

[AlmightyGir]

Words of Radiance, it was hype from start to finish.

[EdgedancerJacob he/him]

Each book delivers on something difference for me:

Way of Kings is hard to beat for me, since it's the introduction to the world and characters. Words of Radiance has some of the best action. Oathbringer finally delivers on some answers and larger worldbuilding. Rhythm of War goes back to a smaller scale and focuses on secondary characters well. Wind and Truth delivers on even more answers - while setting up an awesome second arc. 

[sonoskay]

WoR is my personal favorite. It has a nice ballance of scope  and character development.

 

I have issues with oath bringer.

 It has some heavy gut punches  and some neat revelations, but I feel like parts get bogged down. It's a bit of a trudge about half way through. And is probably  my least favorite.

 Way of kings  and  rhythm  are about equal to me but for very different reasons.

 

 I really like rhythms  main antagonist in paticular.

 

Wind and truth is hard for me to fit.

 It didn't  do almost any of the things I wanted.  But I can't fault the book for not catering to my tastes exactly.   It ended on a bummer note. But sanderson does that a lot. 

Props for really really making me hate taravangian. I was a real fence sitter on his character for a long time i had a lot of hope for him, was disappointed  he utterly  failed to be the main he pretended he was. And then did a good job  about showing me why I was  wrong to like him in the first place.

 

 It's honestly a really good arch for a hate-able villian.

 

Edited March 28, 2025 by sonoskay

[AlmightyGir]

On 3/26/2025 at 7:12 PM, AlmightyGir said:

Words of Radiance, it was hype from start to finish.

Words of Radiance is like Barney Stinson's playlist:

Quote

Now, people often think a good mix should rise and fall, but people are *wrong*. It should be all rise, baby. Now, prepare yourselves for an audio journey into the white-hot center of adrenaline. Bam.

 

[Aeshdan he/him]

Hmm... of all the books, I think Oathbringer was my favorite. It had a very strong moral lesson in the principle of taking the next step, both for Dalinar and conversely for Moash. That was something that I think I had always believed, but had never quite been able to articulate. It had very strong character arcs: Watching Dalinar change from the Blackthorn to the man we met at the beginning of WoK and simultaneously watching him struggle through the revelations in the "present", watching Kaladin struggle with divided loyalties and the horror of war making good people die on both sides, Venli realizing the inexcusability of what she has done and starting to walk the path towards repentance and forgiveness, Moash and his gradual descent into darkness, even Shallan struggling with her divided mind, those were all very good character arcs to me. And it had strong worldbuilding and action scenes and solid magic system revelations, and I liked the romance between Shallan and Adolin.

After that I would be hard-pressed to decide between Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. They both had strong moral principles woven into the text (the Ideals in WoK, Kaladin learning when to kill and when to protect in Words of Radiance), they both had beautiful worldbuilding, exciting action scenes, and good character arcs.

Rhythm of War would be close behind those two. On the one hand, this was the book where it felt like Sanderson started to shift his focus from morality to therapy, abandoned the focus on Honor and virtue that was one of my favorite things about this series to instead focus on mental health. That being said, I did think that the therapy scenes themselves were quite well done. I loved the scenes of Kaladin reaching out and counseling the soldiers suffering from depression and battle shock, and I really enjoyed the whole arc with Shallan, Formless, and the eventual reintegration of Veil. I also really enjoyed the whole sequence of Navani experimenting with fabrials and discovering anti-light and Warlight. I deeply love strong, detailed worldbuilding like this, it's part of what drew me to Sanderson's work in the first place.

And then Wind and Truth was my least favorite book of the bunch, for a lot of reasons. There were some things I liked: I felt like Szeth's arc was actually quite good, and I enjoyed the alien-ness of the Spiritual Realm (slight tangent, but the fact that people could physically enter the Cognitive Realm and need food and water and all the rest while there was one of my first great disappointments with this series), and I mostly enjoyed the Azimir and Shattered Plains battle sequences. On the other side, this was the book where Sanderson really seemed to double down on his focus on mental health, as opposed to the focus on Honor and morality that was what got me so invested in this series. And the mental health scenes themselves felt a lot less convincing: it felt a little too easy for Kaladin to help out Szeth and (especially) to talk the Heralds around. The Unoathed also felt like a bit too much of a deus ex machina for me: I don't mind Adolin being able to bond Maya because we see him putting in the time and effort to establish a Connection, but all these random people being able to get Blade and Plate without properly bonding spren and swearing the Oaths felt cheap. The romance between Renarin and Rlain also felt very forced and uncomfortable to me, very much unlike Dalinar and Navani, or Siri and Susebron, or Adolin and Shallan. And then the ending... I guess Sanderson failed to convince me that Dalinar did the right thing in abandoning Honor like that. I can't help but feel that there were a lot of other things Dalinar could have tried after ascending that didn't hand Roshar and cosmic freedom to Taravangian, and I'm not even convinced that killing Gavinor would have been unjustifiable under those circumstances. More than that, the ending basically took everything that I'd spent four books and ten years getting invested in, all that worldbuilding and characterization and everything, and completely smashed it. Makes it very hard to care about the second arc, when everything I liked about the first arc got destroyed.

[Nitpicking]

On 4/3/2025 at 5:49 PM, Aeshdan said:

... And the mental health scenes themselves felt a lot less convincing: it felt a little too easy for Kaladin to help out Szeth and (especially) to talk the Heralds around ...

In my personal headcanon, Kaladin has a Spiritual or Cognitive healing power he isn't consciously aware of. Otherwise, yeah, helping someone that fast with just talk therapy is totally implausible.

[Jult]

For me, currently:
Oathbringer > Words of Radiance > Wind and Truth > The Way of Kings > Rhythm of War 

I strongly suspect this order will change when I re-read though. I predict that Rhythm of War will rise a lot. At the time, I was just so interested in the plot that all the talk of rhythms and tones and fabrial engineering felt distracting. But now I wish I had paid more attention to all of those topics.