Brandon Sanderson

I've started reading Yumi. I love the descriptions of just how alien Yumi's world is, and I kind of wish that tree rustles could have been an actual part of the plot.

So the campaign for the Words of Radiance leatherbound is live and furthermore Sanderson has written another Secret Project, with more details coming on the 21st including the title and the first chapter. The leatherbound is currently outside my budget, but i am somewhat tempted to get the premium edition of the Secret Project. The previous four looked pretty great and i´m a bit worried about another Yumi situation, where i hate the mass market cover so much i refuse to get the book for my Sandershelf (currently waiting for how the german version will look like, but if that one disappoints i might not get it at all, or get it in a language i don´t speak just so the shelf is complete)

The Words of Radiance leatherbound backerkit can be found here. And it's also the backerkit for Secret Project 5, which will come with a free copy of Dragonsteel Prime (the book Brando wrote for his Master's Thesis, elements of which were cannibalized for Way of Kings) regardless of which version you get, and you can also get a second-edition physical copy Way of Kings Prime as an add-on (it can be gotten for free as an ebook elsewhere).

Other add-ons include standalone copies of the Radiant kits and spren plushies.

Edited by Anura on Mar 5th 2024 at 9:28:26 AM

Another interesting thing Brandon dropped. Apparently his not putting the Secret Projects on Audible has had an effect and some of Audibles higher ups visited him with an outline to increase the royalties paid to all authors for audiobook sales (not to where Brandon thinks they should be, but a step in the right direction). The new outline is said to come into effect within 2024. How this will affect consumers remains to be seen, as i somehow doubt Amazon would be willing to make less money, but i´d be fine with a somewhat increased subscription price if it means new and/or independent authors have an easier time making a living wage. But on the plus side this means the Secret Projects will come to audible, which i find nice, since i like having all my audiobooks in the same place.

Original blog post here: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/regarding-audible/

Edited by Samaldin on Mar 5th 2024 at 10:34:02 AM

I take back everything bad I ever said about the man.

I'm planning to start Sanderson? Any recommends for what?

I went by publication order, which starts with Elantris. But that was written before he really got into the swing of things as an author; most people will recommend you start with Mistborn: The Original Trilogy instead. More recently, Tress of the Emerald Sea has gotten some traction as a good starting point for being both one of his best novels, being standalone, and giving some glimpses into the rest of The Cosmere (though if you read it after the earlier books you'll recognize a lot of weird stuff as being from other books; that tends to happen more often as the Cosmere goes on). There's also Warbreaker, which is available as a free ebook, if you want a free sample of his work.

Edited by Anura on Mar 5th 2024 at 10:24:18 AM

Sanderson has recently put out his own recomended reading order.

It goes Mistborn Era 1 (starting with The Final Empire) > Warbreaker > Tress of the Emerald Sea > Stormlight Archive (starting with Way of Kings; but he suggested taking breaks between the books with Elantris, Yumi and the Nightmare painter and Mistborn Era 2 (starting with Alloy of Law)) > The Sunlit Man

Personally i´d say that reading orders are overrated, you won´t get all easter eggs anyway on a first read. Just read the individual series in order. However note the series-relevant Novellas: Edgedancer is Stormlight 2,5 and Dawnshard is Stormlight 3,5. For Mistborn it´s a bit of a divisive topice when to read Secret History (either immediatly after Era 1 or after book3 of Era 2), but honestly it doesn´t really matter. The other shortstories you can pretty much read whenever you want.

I would recommend against Tress as an entry point, despite it being one of my favourites and great with information on the Cosmere at large, while stil being very accesible without foreknowledge. Sanderson was testing a different narrative voice in this and Yumi, so they are not representative of his usual style.

I think Mistborn is likely the least controversial option, Warbreaker if you want to go for a free sample from his website, The Emperors Soul (Novella) if you don´t want to immediatly commit to a full length novel, and Stormlight if you want to immediatly go for his current magnum opus.

Edited by Samaldin on Mar 6th 2024 at 7:24:38 PM

I started with Stormlight Archive and it’s what made me want to read the rest.

I started with Elantris not even knowing it plugged into a broader cosmos, then to Mistborn, then bounced off Way of Kings and came back after The Emperor's Soul and Warbreaker.

That starting action scene is kinda rough.

To this day I've been trying to figure out what it is about Szeth's battle scenes in Way of Kings that bother me so much.

Because I get the intent from Sanderson. They're supposed to be like, a demonstration of what other characters will eventually be capable of with those same powers. It's like we're watching a level 99 character and what they can do with Surgebinding.

I think that might be the thing though. The prose is just so... nerdy? It's like, the minute detail that Sanderson goes into makes it sound like I'm reading a Dn D game or something. Like, "Oh, I used a subtle Basic Lashing to make myself weigh one tenth of my original body weight. I then Half Lashed the stone to the ceiling to make it weigh nothing, and finally I used my reduced weight to ride the weightless stone down to the ground like a feather"

It have being lore argue, hatedumb and meme that sanderson prose is the weakest part of him and having read mistborn trilogy yeah I can see why, is ether dry or way to nerdy which he admit as well.

Is the trade off of his well thought magic system I guess.

I tried starting SA first, and I've owned a copy of Wo K for many years, but I've never been able to get into it, and I've tried starting it twice. The beginning is really dense and kind of disorienting, though I've heard a lot of people say the series is Sanderson's best, though.

I'm currently re-listening to Hero of Ages, and oddly enough it's for me motivated to check out Sanderson's other books. Maybe I'll try again when I'm done with Hero. And Yumi, I still need to finish that one.

I honestly think that if you can get passed the prologue then Wo K is mostly fine. They only other scene that really made me roll my eyes was Szeth's other big set piece fight scene. So it really seems to be a thing with him.

Recency bias aside, I think I did like Wo K a lot. I'm 120 pages in Words of Radiance now.

Edited by GNinja on Mar 9th 2024 at 5:15:23 PM

Yeah, once I got through the prologue, I was propelled through pretty nicely. There were other things that bothered me, but I chalked them up to deliberate values dissonance.

I did raise my eyebrow a bit at Dalinar's revelation at the end of the book being that he needs to FORCE everyone to be good, starting by scaring his nephew into thinking he was genuinely going to kill him.. But Kaladin is side eyeing him in Wo R about it, so at least it seems they're going to examine that a little

Edited by GNinja on Mar 9th 2024 at 3:04:07 PM

And for me, there was the fact that our protagonists were still treating the Listeners as orcs even though we readers had gotten indications that they weren't, right up to the bone armor getting awed responses even though it's an utterly grotesque thing to do even if the Listener's culture didn't care about leaving the dead where they lay. It seems to me like some of the stuff in later books is Sanderson realizing that he went astray a bit and correcting course.

In the second book, we had Dalinar's honor manifesting as "Look, if we're going to fight this war, then let's just do it," when I wasn't sure what the endgame for the Listeners was supposed to look like - conquest, wiping them out, what? Probably conquest, given the way the Alethi work, but still.

I don't think there was a specific end goal they were working to with the Parshendi.

The war was launched as a punitive campaign, meant to punish the Parshendi for assassinating Gavilar. How much punishment is enough is something they don't seem to have pinned down. Which is probably a smart idea when the end of the war isn't in sight - you don't want to publicly commit yourself to exacting a certain punishment, only for circumstances to make fulfilling that pledge impractical.

Of course, that same lack of clearly defined goals is what allowed the "war" to devolve into competitive gem hunting - as long as they're fighting the Parshendi, they're still technically on mission, even if their strategy is built entirely on maximizing profits.

The impression I got was that the soldiers mostly signed up for a relatively short campaign. They'd go, bloody the parshendi noses a bit, best case kill the parshendi leaders as punishment. This was the parshendi plan: To make fighting them annoying enough that they just gave up. Which is basically the goal of the defender in a siege, if there's no reinforcements coming.

But then they found the gemhearts, and the Shattered Plains turned from "far-flung corner of the kingdom that requires huge expense to make mildly livable" to "most important place in the world." Dalinar complains about it several times, that the gemhearts changed everything.

Yeah! That's how they ended up in a protracted campaign. At the end, when Dalinar was planning the assault on the Listener city, I just wasn't sure what he was going for. I knew he wanted the war to end, but I didn't know how far he wanted to go.

That one was explained too: He wanted to either capture the parshendi leaders and demand answers/recompense, or eliminate their ability to wage war by killing enough soldiers. Of course, by the time he was actually in sight of the city everything had gone pear shaped.

Guess I'll chalk it up to faulty memory!

Brandon does a reading of parts of SP5, with the working title Isles of the Emberdark, though it might be just Emberdark by the time it goes to publication.

He reads the Prologue, Chapter 3, and Chapter 11, with commentary after each one. I've only listened to the former thus far, so I'm not sure the significance of those particular chapters (probably the least spoilery), but the prologue alone gives us some lore about dragons that had previously been WoB only, as well as the first onscreen appearance of Frost.

...I heard the first sentence of Chapter 3, and it seems that this project is actually the Sixth of the Dusk sequel he's been working on; Chapter 3 is ̶p̶r̶o̶b̶a̶b̶l̶y̶ a rewrite of the excerpt we got from that ages ago.

Edited by Anura on Mar 21st 2024 at 9:09:14 AM

That world has a great concept, so I’m interested in seeing this!

Having now watched the whole video, Brandon says that this is basically Sixth of the Dusk turned into a full novel, with the original short story embedded in it as flashback sequences, and with the addition of Starling as the second main character.

This is looking to be the most Cosmere-heavy book so far; Brandon promises that the book can stand alone and will explain everything necessary to understand the plot, but there will be more easter eggs for experienced Cosmere readers and they'll be much more obvious. It's also the furthest along in the timeline so far, being the first full-length novel to really explore the space-age Cosmere.