When This Is Going to Hurt made me understand the NHS in a way news never could
I want to recommend reading Stormlight Archive alongside something quieter — a slim novel or a short story collection — because the experience of contrast sharpens both. I was reading Sanderson and Alice Munro at the same time last year, which is an unlikely pairing, and I found that each made me more aware of what the other was doing.
Munro's sentences, in contrast to Sanderson's, are doing several things simultaneously — establishing scene, characterizing the narrator's relationship to what they're describing, advancing the emotional argument of the story. Sanderson's sentences are doing one thing clearly. Neither approach is superior. But knowing both makes you aware of the choice involved.
The sandwich approach to reading — alternating scale, genre, and register — is how I learn most about what individual books are doing.
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