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...

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...