Book Recommendations?

700 quid is too much for swag I probably won't want, so I backed at hardback level. After his haggard update yesterday I was honestly worried he had a terrible health issue or he'd decided to take a long break.

Math wrote:

Brandon Sanderson's got a secret: https://youtu.be/6a-k6eaT-jQ

Spoiler:

I'll probably buy in to the Kickstarter for the hardbacks.

So now he's just throwing down poster dunks on other authors that shall remain unnamed.

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Re: Sanderson

Spoiler:

I don't recall a Kickstarter changing so quickly, ever. Fun to watch. :-)

Re: Sanderson

I still think he is a beneficiary of the cloning machine from Multiplicity.

I just finished The Way of Kings, my first Sanderson book, about two weeks ago...and hopped right into book 2. When I first started reading it, I was so annoyed by all the things I didn't know...but it eventually got its hooks in me.

Spoiler:

And, man, that person really sat home over the pandemic and cranked out 5 books??? Holy crap.

firesloth wrote:

I just finished The Way of Kings, my first Sanderson book, about two weeks ago...and hopped right into book 2. When I first started reading it, I was so annoyed by all the things I didn't know...but it eventually got its hooks in me.

Spoiler:

And, man, that person really sat home over the pandemic and cranked out 5 books??? Holy crap.

Five books...on top of his normally scheduled output of books.

As someone who has never read Sanderson is there a good place to start?

bbk1980 wrote:

As someone who has never read Sanderson is there a good place to start?

Mistborn / The Final Empire is the usual starting recommendation. In a world where the dark lord won 1000 years ago, a thieving crew plan a heist to take him down.

Elantris was his first published book and feels a bit like it. Stormlight Archive is his massive fantasy epic and so has a bit of a learning curve (not anywhere near Malazan levels, but it's there). Warbreaker is sometimes recommended for people who like romance (this is by small degrees, it's not Twilight).

The usual Sanderson features abound: he loves hard magic systems, his prose is functional rather than beautiful, and he's prudish, but his endings rock.

I've only read the original Mistborn trilogy and I was impressed by the magic system and the plotting, but the characterizations were clunky. I've been kind of interested to continue, but haven't prioritized it. It's also not clear to me which, if any, of his ongoing series are actually finished. Stormlight Archives from what I understand has a 20 year plan, so I'm not rushing to start that one anytime soon.

beanman101283 wrote:

I've only read the original Mistborn trilogy and I was impressed by the magic system and the plotting, but the characterizations were clunky. I've been kind of interested to continue, but haven't prioritized it. It's also not clear to me which, if any, of his ongoing series are actually finished. Stormlight Archives from what I understand has a 20 year plan, so I'm not rushing to start that one anytime soon. :lol:

Mistborn will be 4 separate series set hundreds of years apart with technology marching on. The first classic fantasy trilogy is complete, and the second steampunk series will end with the release of The Lost Metal in November. Warbreaker and Elantris are standalone. Stormlight will be 2 sets of 5 books. The first 5 will complete with a book with the initials KOW next November.

I'd say that the original Mistborn trilogy is a good barometer of his style. If it doesn't work for you then he's probably not your thing.

MannishBoy wrote:
SallyNasty wrote:

Big big sale at audible right now. Things like 85% off. Spent 50 bucks and got like 10 books i had wanted, including all of the murderbot books.

Good call out. Got the notice on my phone this morning. Time to look for take my wish list and look for sub $8 books that don't have a cheaper price if you have Kindle Unlimited.

I'm on a discounted annual Audible plan at $100, so those credits are a bit over $8 each. KU books often have a $2 or $7.49 add audiobook option, so you can check out the book on KU then add the book, and even after you stop KU or check the book back in, the audiobook stays with your account. So you can either get a free test KU account and buy a bunch of add on audiobooks, or you can get KU for a month and grab a few.

/cheapskate audible tips

Went through my extensive wishlist last night and have a cart of $3-6 books that totals...$109.32. Lots of series that I can grab a few books on, etc.

Good news, I have a $5 coupon from their last promo!

(Got to purge this list. I already have a huge backlog on Audible and get most of my books from the library in the first place.)

The only thing I'd add about Sanderson is that I think he's actually a better writer now then when Mistborn came out. Mistborn is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but his newer stuff I think reads better character-wise.

His novellas are also pretty fantastic if you don't have a ton of time to commit. I think about Sixth of the Dusk and Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell pretty frequently.

FridgeGremlin wrote:

The only thing I'd add about Sanderson is that I think he's actually a better writer now then when Mistborn came out. Mistborn is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but his newer stuff I think reads better character-wise.

His novellas are also pretty fantastic if you don't have a ton of time to commit. I think about Sixth of the Dusk and Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell pretty frequently.

I'd add Emperor's Soul to that list as well. Really anything in the Arcanum Unbounded collection (avoid the ones in the Mistborn or Stormlight worlds because spoilers) is a good intro.

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Sanderson's kickstarter is at $17.6M with 28 days left. Who needs a traditional publisher once you get to a certain level of fandom? You can hire a lot of people to stand up your own mini-publishing arm for that kind of cash. Don't know what the costs of delivering product he's sold is, but I bet that's a multiple of an advance he'd normally get for this number of books.

Part of this I'm sure is novelty and the shock value of it all, but this was very well done from a marketing perspective.

During the sale I bought fahrenheit 451, Annihilation, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Long Way Down and The Handmaid's tale. Considered getting some books featuring my favorite dark elf but I read them all, probably would listen to them fully.

Just finished Peter Cline's latest The Broken Room. It starts off normal, but then veers into his brand of weird pretty quick. It's also a quick read compared to his other books. Oh i did audio and for like the first time in 5 years or so Ray Porter didn't narrate. Still it was a fun go.

After seeing the praise here I bought Jade City and I am about halfway through it, and... I just don't care about finishing it. I don't particularly like any of the characters or care much about what happens to them. Does it get better? I have never much liked books that focus on political machinations and relationship plots and such, which I feel is pretty much what this book is about so far. There isn't much action and the little action there is the writer needs to take some lessons from good action writers, like Abercrombie, as it doesn't feel very impactful.

Does it open up more or is this pretty much how the trilogy is? You know when you start a book but it doesn't grab you but you don't want to give up on it so you just stop reading for a couple of days until you force yourself to pick it back up again because you want to read something? That is what I have been doing for the past few week with Jade City. I'm not saying it is bad, just not my cup of tea.

LeapingGnome, it definitely grows in scope, but it is always about the jade bone clans and their relationships and vendettas.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges is brilliant from beginning to end. Borges is one of the truly great writers of the twentieth century.

Yuuuup. I accidentally read Bertrand Russell's books right before Ficciones. Holy crap what a serendipitous combination. I swear months later my brain will finally explode open a new room where abstractions work better. I don't get it.

I think this short video decently gets the feel across.

And I'll be damned if the Baader-Meinhof Effect doesn't kick in real hard. He's everywhere now. I keep getting pretty recentish non fiction books, and inevitably the author will start to describe a concept by summarizing a Borges story in a paragraph. I don't really think that's an effective way to convey ideas, the summarizing, but I get why they try.

And not just nerdy books for nerds. There's also nerdy video game video people. Take video game tragedy Tim Rogers. Is his Funes the Memorious-ness / hyperthymesiac a put on or a (Trigger Warning) curse? He's infected.

Borges' persistent recommendations plus the two or three from this thread have sent me to Cervantes. I'm only two chapters in and already have laughed out loud. Guess it makes sense that the people who eat libraries can recommend all right.

In other news, if you'd like to feel even worse about America's medical insurance industry, Insurance Era has got you. Did you know they didn't just f us in our doctor's office, but also our inner cities! (The surprising part is that it was an accident.) No Borges references in this one, but Baldwin instead. I think he ate a library, too.

Ilan Stavans made a video about Borges? Fanastic!

firesloth wrote:

I just finished The Way of Kings, my first Sanderson book, about two weeks ago...and hopped right into book 2. When I first started reading it, I was so annoyed by all the things I didn't know...but it eventually got its hooks in me.

Same, actually. Blew through Way of Kings in February and I'm knee deep in Words of Radiance (part the first) right now and enjoying it - definite shades of Malazan - but I'm going to have to pace myself.

As someone said, its like the opposite problem of George RR Martin. I'm not sure I can keep up with Sanderson.

I recently finished Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning and started the second, Seven Surrenders. They're fascinating books; her gift is to show off the worldbuilding of a very different society in layers, without either massive infodumps or throwing you into the deep end to figure out what all these strange words mean. It's our world, in the middle-future, but with vastly different institutions of politics, gender, and religion.

Looks like we have a new Abercrombie trilogy coming:

A Deal For The Devils: Tor Books To Publish New Epic Fantasy From Joe Abercrombie

The Devils begins a series which fuses the best of fantasy with the most gripping elements of heist, spy and thriller fiction. In a magic-riddled Europe under constant threat of elf invasion, the ten year old Pope occasionally needs services that cannot be performed by the righteous. And so, sealed deep beneath the catacombs, cathedrals and relic stalls of the Sacred City lies the secret Chapel of the Holy Expediency. For its highly disposable congregation—including a self-serving magician, a self-satisfied vampire, an oversexed werewolf, and a knight cursed with immortality—there is no mission that cannot be turned into a calamitous bloodbath…
NathanialG wrote:

Looks like we have a new Abercrombie trilogy coming:

A Deal For The Devils: Tor Books To Publish New Epic Fantasy From Joe Abercrombie

The Devils begins a series which fuses the best of fantasy with the most gripping elements of heist, spy and thriller fiction. In a magic-riddled Europe under constant threat of elf invasion, the ten year old Pope occasionally needs services that cannot be performed by the righteous. And so, sealed deep beneath the catacombs, cathedrals and relic stalls of the Sacred City lies the secret Chapel of the Holy Expediency. For its highly disposable congregation—including a self-serving magician, a self-satisfied vampire, an oversexed werewolf, and a knight cursed with immortality—there is no mission that cannot be turned into a calamitous bloodbath…

IMAGE(https://c.tenor.com/0-e7d7ct3G0AAAAC/shut-up-and-take-my-money-futurama.gif)

What, no centaur sex? Couldn't find room for that in there? 1 star.

Also,

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haha! so true... Blake's series are a guilty pleasure of mine.

Amongst Our Weapons: my love for the Peter Grant books is deep and pure.

Spoiler:

False Value felt like a bit of an odd departure with the "going undercover" aspect. This is Grant El Classico: an odd murder in a forgotten but interesting London locale, and a thorny case with historical roots for the gang to get their teeth into.

It's always great to see more Seawoll, though he seems to be disconcertingly nice during this book and not in angry "I hate DC Grant and his stupid magical bollocks" mode.

I'm still waiting for Tobias Winter and Vanessa Sommer to intersect with Peter's stories though - or maybe they're meant to be more parallel.

In case you want more to add to your reading list

The 2022 Hugo Award Nominations Are Here

Best Novel

A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine (Tor)
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager / Hodder & Stoughton)
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki (Tor / St Martin’s Press)
A Master of Djinn, by P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom / Orbit UK)
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir (Ballantine / Del Rey)
She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan (Tor / Mantle)