I came very close to DNFing The Way of Kings at page 300. The Kaladin chapters were landing but the Shallan chapters weren't working for me yet, and the Interludes were disorienting in a way I couldn't make productive. I set it down for two weeks.

When I returned to it, something had shifted. I don't know whether it was the two-week gap that did it or whether I simply reached the section where Shallan's storyline becomes interesting, but I stopped fighting the book. The Interludes resolved from noise to signal — I understood they were showing me the breadth of Roshar, not just padding the page count.

The books I'm most glad I persisted with are always the ones that required the most trust up front. That patience isn't universally worth it — some slow burns just burn — but The Way of Kings paid every debt it incurred in those first three hundred pages.