I can’t quite remember exactly how I picked up Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. At the time, I was a young high school (or junior high) girl who loved to go to the library, put down a grocery bin on a seat, and run around with her older sister to madly put YA novels into the bin. For some reason, Elantris found its way to my bookshelf as a purchase, not a library loan.
I still remember the feeling I had when I finished it. It was a roller coaster of a book, with such rich, innovative worldbuilding that it immediately pulled me in. I felt for the characters. I felt a sense of urgency in the writing, especially as it crested the top of the parabola and threatened to rush down at any moment. I liked that it was self-contained, and it didn’t have ten other books in the series to frustrate and disappoint me.
It’s not very often that a book really resonates with me for years and years. I look back at my Goodreads “read” shelf, and there are some books that I scratch my head over thinking about what happened in them.
Imagine my surprise when I was looking for a good spring read a few months ago, and I stumbled across some recommendations for the best fantasy author around. Overwhelmingly, the results always pointed toward Brandon Sanderson, but I didn’t know who he was. I scrolled through his past works, and I realized that his first published book as himself (not writing to complete Robert Jordan’s series) was Elantris.
Suddenly, the whole world, characters, and story all came back to me. I scrolled up to see his new works. How could someone be such a prolific writer having written twenty plus books in the matter of ten years? All the books couldn’t possibly be any good – could they? Continue reading
Pudding and Cake 