Poll of the Day > I finished Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

(+) Yeah! (+)

Pretty good book, I like the stories and characters, would probably give it an 8.5/10 but man, Sanderson really likes to shove his magic systems down our throats.

What are your guy's thoughts on Warbreaker or Sanderson in general?

Muscles posted...

man, Sanderson really likes to shove his magic systems down our throats.

This pretty much sums my take on Sanderson. I somewhat enjoyed his Stormlight Archives, but it honestly became a chore to get through and half of the characters were uninteresting.

I'm looking around for something to read, but nothing has caught my eye recently. I might start going through the Raymond E Feist series again. That has like 25+ books, so it should keep me busy for a few months, at least.

Read a bunch of Sanderson stuff in the past few years, warbreaker being one of the least memorable. I like stormlight archive and the mistborn series, but his shorter works do tend to get bogged down trying to explain things. One series of his I liked way more than I expected to was Skyward, book two in particular. It's more science fiction than fantasy, which feels appropriate for so much detailed world building.

I like Sanderson's stories and characters, especially his characters and specific scenes for them, but the magic systems are definitely on the heavy-handed side. Like I get what he's trying to do and why, but there is a line where it gets to be much, and he crosses it at the best of times.

That said, I often feel like Warbreaker is the underrated piece to his whole universe he's been making. As much as I loved the first two Stormlight and liked the third or fourth, I'd have loved a sequel to Warbreaker that didn't end up being ages later as the footnote explanation to where a couple Stormlight characters had come from.

At least we're getting the fourth Wax & Wayne era Mistborn book finally in a few months.

i don't know which book that is, but i enjoyed the mistborn series and the first storm light book, as well as the first two or so books in the reckoners series

but my favorite is probably his legion short stories

11110111011 posted...

Muscles posted...

but man, Sanderson really likes to shove his magic systems down our throats.

This pretty much sums my take on Sanderson.

Same. It's one of the main reasons I steer clear of his books like the plague.

(The semi-related other major reason being that he trips my usual Pronoun Test for fantasy/sci-fi hard. If you're reading the back-cover blurb of a book and you've seen at least a dozen different made-up proper nouns, you're generally looking at a bad writer who has mistaken LOREBUILDING for "actual storytelling".)

It's kind of telling that the best writing he's ever done (IMO) is when he was finishing someone else's series and couldn't indulge in all of his own bad habits.

I like Sanderson, but his writing (ie, the prose itself) doesn't do it for me. If his stuff ever gets adapted (which it should, considering how big he's become over the past few years), I look forward to giving it a try as a tv show or film.

I think in 2020, I asked my brother if he'd ever read any of Sanderson's works and he hadn't even heard of him (despite Sanderson closing out the WoT, which is probably how I first learned about him). A year later, he was a hardcore Sanderson fan