Bookish Thoughts

I'd been putting off Rhythm of War for a while, because it's such a big, intimidating book. I knew it would take me weeks to read, weeks when I wouldn't be able to read other books. But I'm trying to get away from the mindset that I have to keep reading more and more books. So I decided to finally commit to this one.  Almost as soon as I picked it up, I stopped being intimidated. I fell right into this story, and I remembered how wonderful it can be to spend an extended amount of time in a well-crafted world with interesting characters. The length allows for this story to be both epic and intimate. Huge, world-changing things are happening right alongside more personal struggles, and they all get equal weight in the narrative. I think I felt nearly every emotion over the course of reading this book. Sanderson is really a master of his craft, and I'm so excited to continue to read his work for years to come. The wider Cosmere starts to creep into this book more than ...

 Now this is what I want from a Sanderson story. An interesting and sympathetic protagonist, a bit of a mystery and a problem to solve, a fascinating magical system with new applications around every corner, and hints of a much larger world around the edges of this self-contained story.  Sanderson has taken to writing these novellas between the much larger Stormlight novels, and it's a great way to dip back into the world and get reacquainted with it before committing to one of the massive tomes in the series proper. These stories follow side characters and side quests, making the world feel even more fleshed out and immense. This one in particular follows Rysn, first introduced as a minor character in The Way of Kings as she leads a mission to explore a forgotten island. Rock's daughter, Cord, and Bridge Four alum, Lopen, are included in the mission, and each has their own secondary goal that complicates things. But this isn't about people at odds with each other. It'...

This story was fine. It was quick and entertaining, and it's definitely an interesting concept. I know Sanderson struggled for years to figure out how to tell this story, and I'm honestly not sure he really figured it out. It almost feels like he just wanted to publish this to publish it, and it didn't get the care some of his other work does. It feels incomplete or flat compared to what I expect from him. The part that really confused me was whether this was part of the Cosmere or not. I've seen conflicting information, and I honestly hope it's not part of the Cosmere. The main fantasy planet in this story, Mirandus, is directly connected to Earth. And I just don't want Earth to have anything to do with the Cosmere. It's hard to explain, but I want the Cosmere to be pure second-world fantasy, with no connection to our world at all. This is only the first book in what I believe is a planned trilogy. And there's every possibility that the story will becom...

Sometimes you manage to pick up a book exactly when you need to read it, and everything clicks in to place for a little bit. I started with the acknowledgements, conveniently located at the beginning of the book. Sanderson ends his multi-page thank you letter with a mantra from the book: "Journey before destination." It was just what I needed to read at that moment. As heavy as this book is, I felt lighter while I was reading it. Like it was carrying some of my burden for me. This series is all about deeply flawed people dealing imperfectly with impossible situations. This book focuses on Dalinar, who has done a number of unspeakably horrible things. As we enter his flashbacks and learn more about his life, his relationship with his first wife, and what finally pushed him to try and become a better person, he's taking that exact same journey. He'd had several of his memories removed, which allowed him to leave in something like peace for several years. But now he...

The Rithmatist  is one of Sanderson's young adult novels. As such it has his patented world-building and magical system, but is a bit more bite-sized than most of his adult works (which tend to be long and complicated). It takes place in a world similar to ours, but where the US is an archipelago with some sort of evil lurking at the center. Warriors called Rithmatists are identified at a young age and then trained and ultimately sent to hold the line so this evil doesn't spread to the rest of the country. Only now it seems like something's escaped and a teenager who's obsessed with Rithmancy but has no powers of his own is determined to get to the bottom of it all. The magical system in this book is geometry-based, which I appreciated. But it's also not quite as cut and dried as the more mathematically inclined would hope for. Sure, things that are more geometrically perfect are stronger, but artwork and intent count for something, too. And the balance between th...

Calamity  was an excellent conclusion to Sanderson's Reckoners trilogy. It's just as exciting and fast-paced as the previous two installments, with tons of new powers and exciting twists. The city it's set in this time, a wandering Atlanta, seems even more implausible than a drowned Manhattan or metallic Chicago. This one is made of salt and crawls across the country, completely rebuilding itself every week. But Sanderson is less concerned about the logistics than the opportunities they present. And he takes full advantage of a half-built city that can never be completely wrecked to create some really thrilling scenes. Sanderson continues to play with the ideas of trust and redemption, while arguing that it's important to face your fears and that most humans are basically good but easily corrupted. Which I can't really say I disagree with. And the trilogy as a whole serves as a nice coming-of-age tale for the main character, who even gets a happier ending than ...

Most of Brandon Sanderson's books are really long, which helps disguise just how quickly I read his work. Even from myself. I was surprised when I read this 400+ page book in less than two days. But between Sanderson's fast-paced plots and straight-forward language, it makes sense that I would basically inhale this book. The second Reckoners book continues the story from the first one. By killing Steelheart, David and the other Reckoners have changed the world order. And now they have to keep going, lest it all fall apart. They've more or less declared war, and if they don't follow through now things will be worse than they were before. Unfortunately, there's another Epic who knows them too well and is one step ahead of them, which lets her lead them all straight into a trap. Sanderson does a great job of expanding the world here, leaking out enough information to keep me happy and hooked and asking more questions. I'm glad that there is some reasoning behin...

Someday I will have read everything that Brandon Sanderson has published. Steelheart  brings me one step closer to that goal. While most of Sanderson's writing takes place in his epic fantasy Cosmere-universe, he also has a scattering of novels that aren't connected to that massive series. The Reckoners trilogy, of which Steelheart  is the first novel, takes place on our world, more or less. It's a post-apocalyptic version of our world, where a bunch of people were granted superhero powers. Rather than becoming benevolent guardians of society, they quickly too over the world, transforming it into a collection of city-nations, each with its own tyrannical ruler. David lives in what used to be Chiago, which is ruled by the eponymous Steelheart. He's able to transform nearly anything into steel, which he did to half the city. He's impervious to bullets or any other attempt to kill him. Plus he can fly and shoot energy and he kills at random to maintain his control....

After slogging my way through a few denser books, it was nice to take a break with a collection of Sanderson's shorter fiction. I'd forgotten how readable he is, and I was surprised by how quickly these stories went by. So surprised that I ended up dragging the book out over a few more weeks just so I could keep reading it. Luckily that's easier to do with short fiction. There were a couple of stories in here ( The Emperor's Soul  and Mistborn: Secret History ) that I'd been wanting to read for a while, but never quite enough to pay $15 for a novella. So I was glad that Sanderson decided to release all his Cosmere short fiction (of which there is a surprising amount) in a single collection. In addition to the stories, there's some background information about the Cosmere that stitches everything together. As Sanderson promises, there are answers about the background story in this collection - just enough to start raising some really interesting questions. Th...

Before I dive into the content of this book, I need to talk about the book itself. Because I have this whole complicated relationship with it outside of the stories it contains. And it's worth bringing up in light of recent political shenanigans. Once upon a time a man got cancer. Treatment worked and he went into remission and went on with his life. But a few years later he got cancer again. A different kind of cancer this time. However, since he'd already had cancer once before, health insurance wouldn't cover him this time around. Pre-existing conditions and all that. So he reached out to his writer friends and asked if they'd be willing to donate stories that he could put together into a book that he could sell to pay for his treatment. His friends came through, the book sold well, the man beat cancer again and didn't have to declare bankruptcy. As plans go it's a better solution than selling meth. Of course, the best solution would be health care that act...

I had wanted to get this review written before I went into labor. But that didn't quite happen. So now I'm here, over a month later, trying to remember what I did and didn't like about this book so I can write about it. At least I managed to finish reading it before I had my kid. Words of Radiance is the second in Sanderson's epic Stormlight Archive, which is supposed to be ten books long. As such, it's a bit hard to judge on it's own. More stuff happens than in the first book, and in some ways the plot advances a lot farther than I expected it to. But it's still mostly about setting things up. This book focuses on Shallan for it's flashbacks, which made me really happy. She's probably my favorite character, at least of the main characters, and her flashbacks do a lot to make her more complex and to explain why she is that way. Although Sanderson holds back his big reveal, which is actually the very beginning of her arc, forever, which had me wo...

I had been planning to hold off on Brandon Sanderson's epic Stormlight Archive. It's supposed to be 10 books long, and only two of them are published so far. I didn't want this to turn into the sort of situation where I wait so long for the next book that I end up giving up on the series altogether. Waiting until The Wheel of Time was completed worked well for me, and I had planned to apply the same principle here. But in reading Sanderson's other works and blog, I eventually started to realize that the Cosmere isn't really something to be read series by series. It's large and intricate and he's building it as he goes. It makes more sense to read all of his book in publication order to pick up on the clues (and then go read some more on the internet because other people do a better job of spotting and explaining those clues). Besides which, I needed something long to get me through the move so I wouldn't be tempted to go buy more books while we were s...

This book was fantastic. I shouldn't have expected anything less from Sanderson, of course. He always does an amazing job of creating intricate world, captivating magic systems, and complex characters with conflicting motives and goals. Even though he writes incredibly long books, I always get sucked in and finish them much faster than I expect to (which is saying something for me). Warbreaker is a bit of an anomaly. At least, I expected it to be. While you can buy a physical copy, the entire book is available for free, online. Indeed, every draft from the roughest first draft through the first printed edition is available in full, as part of an attempt by Sanderson to connect with his fans. As such, I sort of expected a less-than-stellar book. Why else would it still be free five years after it was published? It also doesn't help that the cover is truly awful. I've come around on it a little bit, but I still can't figure out whether it's supposed to be depicti...

It's a little hard to judge White Sand , because it's very obviously the first third of a novel. There are a lot of introductions and a good amount of setup. Then just when things are really starting to get interesting, the book ends. On the bright side, I'm really looking forward to the second installment. Unfortunately, there isn't a release date for it yet. But let's focus on the first volume, which introduces a new world, a new system of magic, and a shocking number of characters. The story opens with the sand mages, and I really though we'd be spending the bulk of the story with them and their desert-society and intricate magic. But it doesn't take long for the story to veer off in a completely different direction. The world quickly expands, new characters and societies are introduced, and by the end we've got a suitably complicated world. There are warring factions. People who disapprove of each other. People who've never even heard of each...

Sanderson said that this book was a lot easier to write than Shadows of Self . He actually wrote it first, before backing up and writing the previous one. And it shows. Not that Shadows of Self  was bad, but this one was a lot more exciting. There was a lot more going on. It flowed better, and I read it faster, even though it was longer. It also helped that Sanderson refrained from killing off any more female characters, including Wax's sister, who I was really worried about up until the end. This book also started to connect more with the greater Cosmere than any of the other books I've read in that universe so far. To be fair, I wasn't aware of the Cosmere when I read the first Mistborn trilogy, so it's likely that I missed some hints in those books. But it was nice to start to see some of those wider connections. The downside of this is all the things I'm missing, or that I've already missed, or that I just forgot. I already feel like I need to go back a...

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...

It's been two years since I first read The Alloy of Law . With two new Mistborn  books out, I figured it was worth revisiting to refresh my memory. It helps that this is a pretty quick read. The Alloy of Law  is a mash-up of fantasy and conventional western tropes. There are fights on trains with masked bandits right alongside the magic and mythology of the first trilogy. It's fast-paced and a whole lot of fun ad did a good job of living up to my memory of it. The first few chapters are a bit rougher than I was expecting. But as soon as the action kicks in that doesn't matter at all. This book is just flat-out fun, and there's not much to detract from that. I do wish Lessie had survived beyond the prologue. The fridged girlfriend is a trope I'm beyond tired of. But Marasi and Ranette are fantastic, and even Steris is more interesting than I remember her being. I'm looking forward to the next two books in this series. I've been needing to dive back in t...

Even though the final book in Jordan's (and later Sanderson's) epic Wheel of Time series took me almost a month to read, I still finished the whole series in less than a year. Which I'm pretty proud of. I hardly know how to begin talking about this book, because I really want to talk about the entire series. And it's hard to talk about the last book without talking about the whole series, because it's such a fabulous culmination of so many different plot lines and character threads. The series really is epic, and Sanderson sticks the landing. Then again, I struggled with this book. From the beginning this story has been building to The Last Battle, so it was no surprise that the finale was essentially an 1100-page battle scene. Well, that's not the entirely fair. The book comprised several battles, which built into a very short war. The Last Battle itself occurred in a 250-page chapter, which took me three days to read. Battle scenes bore me. I tend to skip...

I know I just said that The Gathering Storm was likely going to be my favorite book in this series. I have to immediately retract that statement, because Towers of Midnight knocked it out of the park. I had so much fun reading this book that, even though it's the longest book I've ever read (clocking in at 1220 pages) (and barring Bone , a 1300 page comic), I almost wish it had been longer. At least there's one more book after this (followed by everything the amazingly prolific Sanderson has written). The thing that makes this book so great is the sense of hope that permeates it. Unlike the last book, which focused on moving Rand and Egwene into the positions they needed to be in for the last battle, this book widens to include every other character. And it's amazing. Character arcs are finished off as person after person embraces their strengths and sheds their last doubts. Side plots are tied off as everyone heads to the Final Battle. Reunions bring ch...

I have finally arrived at the end of the series - almost. Three books left, and they're the ones Sanderson wrote after Robert Jordan died. This book begins with a note from Sanderson, explaining his process and that he wasn't trying to imitate Jordan's style so much as do right by the characters and story. And I think he did a pretty excellent job of doing just that. This book was a big step up from the last two. It flowed a lot better. A lot of the subplots I was tired of were left behind. More importantly, Sanderson did a better job of integrating the various stories. Jordan had gotten in the habit of dividing his books by different characters, essentially writing 3 or 4 books focused on different characters and then just stapling them together. Sanderson switches between everyone more often, which makes everything feel more connected. The best part of this book, though, was the focus on Egwene. She and Rand have the two most important story-lines in thi...