Bookish Thoughts

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...

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 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 ...