Williams offers a mature idealism that understands the difference between naive optimism and hope. One of the great delights of speculative fiction is the chance to experience another's worldview from the inside. I went to double speed for the 63+ hour behemoth To Green Angel Tower, but if I weren't trying to get going on my bingo card, I would have stayed at single speed and savored the chance to spend weeks in Tad's world. His accents added some local flavor to the varied cultures of Osten Ard, and his distinct, consistent voices allow the reader to track Williams' large cast of characters easily in an audio format.

He offers the right mix of gravitas and playfulness to bring the story to life. I loved the audiobooks read by Andrew Wincott. From the first scenes of Simon avoiding his chores to the series' ultimate epic conclusion, Williams is systematic in executing his vision. All the clues were there, hiding in plain sight. The series delivered my favorite type of ending, the kind I didn't guess but, in retrospect, absolutely could have. If you're willing to stick it out, to watch as characters grow up in the two steps forward, one step back pattern of real-life adolescents, to hang in with new points of view that at first seem tangential, to watch as the pieces slowly, slowly move across the board, Williams delivers a story that balances big, timeless themes with intricate, interconnected schemes for a single, coherent picture in which nothing is wasted.

He's the kind of writer who returns after more than two decades to the same world to tell a new story (his new series, The Last King of Osten Ard, is first on my TBR when I finish my bingo card).

Even Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn was published as four paperbacks due to the sheer page count of the third book. Williams is a writer whose struggle is not in planned trilogies that languish unfinished, but in planned trilogies that turn into completed quartets. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is a meticulous masterwork in which every character matters, every detail counts, and everything comes back, even stray cats. It took me two tries and hundreds of hours to finally get through his epic trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. It's a virtue he rewards in readers, too. I believe Tad William's greatest virtue as a writer is patience. Read it if you like classic high fantasy, heroic quests, mythic archetypes, long books, idealism, beautiful imagery, and complex plots with satisfying conclusions, and to find out where George R.R. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williamsīingo Squares: Book Club or Readalong Book for book 1, Cool Weapon (hard mode and grapples with this idea in a really interesting way), Revolutions and Rebellions (book 3 is hard mode), Award Finalist But Not Won for book 1, Shapeshifters (hard mode), Family Matters (book 3 is hard mode)

Tad williams stone of farewell