The Joy of Erudition > Recent Status Updates

After that last unnecessary filler book, this was a good ending to the series. Though arguably, Book 1 is a perfectly good ending on its own.

Looks like the Sanderlanche is approaching.

Very awkward (and of course aborted) romantic scene.

"“Look,” I said to him, “you get your way to do things from your books. I get my way from mine.”
“I’ve tried to find those books,” he said. “Read a good chunk of a Conan novel while you were gone.”"

If we're talking about works by the original author Robert E. Howard, there was only ever *one* full-length Conan novel: The Hour of the Dragon.

"Maybe that was what Conan the Cimmerian had always been about. Perhaps all the lines about the lamentations of women and drinking blood from skulls were meant to persuade people to go home and not try to assault the two-meter-tall fellow with cannonballs for pectorals."

That was only from the movie, and the line was stolen from Ghengis Khan. Conan never said that in the original stories that Spensa supposedly read.

As often as Sanderson has stressed the fact that there are many other story structures besides the Hero's Journey, it's a surprise to see Spensa brooding over how she expects *this* story to end.

"At the end of the story, the hero came home, and found herself transformed…into someone who didn’t belong, and could never belong, with the people she’d left behind. It was the same in almost every story I’d read."

Nancy spoke up. “Let’s do some shopping in Phoenix. I’d like to find something special to wear tomorrow.”
“I know,” exclaimed Bess. “Let’s all buy Indian costumes!”

A bit of a different time...

I'm having a hard time suspending my disbelief for a lot of these.

"Imagine the challenge of writing out a clear explanation of the meaning of the contemporary term 'soap digest rack' in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit."

This is interesting, because "soap digest rack" is NOT a contemporary term anymore, and I had no idea at first that he wasn't just stringing together three random words. But now I know what he was talking about.