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'...

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...

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...

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...

Brandon Sanderson's first publish novel, Elantris , starts out a little slow. It was enjoyable, it just took me a while to really get into it and become invested in the characters. But it picks up speed admirably. I hit a point where I didn't want to continue reading so much as instantly ingest the final 150 pages so I wouldn't have to live in suspense anymore. I started carrying the book with me everywhere, sneaking extra paragraphs on my way to the kitchen or while I was waiting for data to load.  Elantris was the city of the gods until suddenly it wasn't. Ten years before the book starts, the city becomes cursed and the god-like beings who inhabit it go from all-powerful to destitute essentially overnight. The city used to provide food, clothing, medicine, etc for all the people in the country of Arelon, and once the power disappears, the country is forced to figure out how to support and defend itself. The book focuses on three characters. Raoden i...

Brandon Sanderson is doing something special with his Mistborn universe. Something I didn't really grasp until I dove into this book and started looking at some of the reviews and supplemental material on line. There's this tendency in high fantasy to force the world into a medieval setting and then keep it there for thousands of years. One of my friends complained about this back in high school when we were all really in to the Sword of Truth series. Humanity just isn't that stagnant. We innovate. We revolt. We change the world. And we do it on increasingly shorter time scales, because we're able to stand on the shoulders of the people who came before. Sanderson wanted to do something different. He wanted to create a world with a unique magic system and then track that magic through the evolution of the society. Mistborn was conceived as a trilogy of trilogies, with one taking place in the medieval feudal society fantasy lovers all recognize, one tak...

The third Mistborn novel, The Hero of Ages , is a mostly fantastic book with one glaring error that I can't really get over. I'll start with my complaint so I can end this on a positive note. The world in Mistborn is ruled by two opposing god-like forces, Preservation and Ruin. The choices of these two gods makes thematic sense in the first two books. The evil emperor, the Lord Ruler, took his power from Preservation and then ruled over a society that was largely stagnant for a millenium. There were virtually no advancements made in technology, architecture, government, even fashion. And this was done largely to quench though and allow the Lord Ruler to maintain control. All in all, it makes sense that his power is a product of Preservation. But in the third book Sanderson digs into these gods a bit more and things start to fall apart. Mostly because, at least as far as I'm concerned, Ruin and Preservation don't actually balance each other out. If you ...

I probably should have written this before I finished the third book. At this point, the trilogy is all kind of blurring together, and the second book was definitely upstaged by the third one. It's a little hard to talk about The Well of Ascension without leaking into The Hero of Ages , but I'll try. The Well of Ascension definitely started out a lot slower than the first book. It took nearly 150 pages for me to really become engaged with the story. Sanderson has spent a lot of time fleshing out his world at this point, so mostly we're meeting new characters. But since everyone spends the majority of the book besieged inside a city while I was (mistakenly) waiting for them to escape and head north, it was hard for me to keep going. It certainly didn't help that the cover depicts a scene from the third book. Mostly this book suffers from the same things as almost every second installment in a trilogy. The pacing is a bit off and most of the book exist...

All of those people who were telling me to check out The Name of the Wind a few years ago spent the last year telling me I needed to pick up Mistborn . I knew I'd get around to this series eventually, especially after the last novel won a Hugo. What I didn't realize was how entirely the book would manage to take over my life. I accidentally stayed up until one in the morning reading, which is something I very rarely do. Mistborn is excellently paced with a lot of really cool action scenes and some interesting characters. But the best part is the system of magic, which is unlike anything I've ever seen. The main character, Vin, is an allomancer, someone who can extract special powers by swallowing and "burning" different metals. I really like how much thought Sanderson put into allomancy, from pairing pure metals with alloys to create similar powers to placing realistic restrictions on those powers. The book also operates a bit like a puzzle. The ...