brandon sanderson

Reading Round-Up: April 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion / Leave a comment

April reading brings May rehash: let’s get right to it, shall we?

  • The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England (Brandon Sanderson)
  • Ramona the Brave (Beverly Cleary)
  • Negotiating with the Dead (Margaret Atwood)
  • The Princess Diarist (Carrie Fisher)
  • Standing in the Rainbow (Fannie Flagg)
  • Lex Operandi, Lex Credendi (Christine Pennylegion)
  • Stranger Planet (Nathan W. Pyle)
  • Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (Fannie Flagg)
  • Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven (Fannie Flagg)
  • The Whole Town’s Talking (Fannie Flagg)
  • These Old Shades (Georgette Heyer)

First this month was BrandoSando’s delightful The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, a slightly bonkers multi-dimensional-travel blank-room novel; by “blank-room” I mean that when the book opens the protagonist has no idea who or where he is, à la Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir) or Memory (Lois McMaster Bujold). John wakes up in what appears to be medieval England — except that magic appears to be real, as are the Norse gods. Mistaken for an aelv, he’s captured by the local lord and things only get crazier from there. It’s funny; I enjoyed it. This was the second release from Sanderson’s four-book kickstarter campaign last year, and so far I’ve been very glad that I bought in!

Ramona the Brave is a bit of an outlier on this list. I’ve been reading through the Ramona series with the kids at bedtime, and normally I don’t keep track of the books I read to the children, because that list would get out of control very quickly. But I enjoyed this one so much that I read ahead about five chapters on my own to finish it, so I think that counts! Cleary’s books hold up very well, and it’s been a pleasure to share Ramona, companion of my childhood imagination, with my own kids.

Negotiating with the Dead is one of Atwood’s nonfiction offerings, a book about writers and writing that was constructed around a series of lectures she gave about twenty years ago. I think I’ll be buying a copy of this one at some point; it’s a retrospective on her own career, but it’s also a fascinating meditation on the writing life and the writer’s social role (or lack thereof). There is also a very interesting discussion of the duality of authorship — of being at the same time the “Margaret Atwood” of literary fame, and the “Peggy Gibson” of her regular life. Fascinating stuff.

Also a memoir, albeit of a very different sort, Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist revolves around the filming of the first Star Wars movie and her long-rumoured love affair with Harrison Ford. It contains excerpts from the diaries she kept at the time, along with a lot of terrible teenage poetry (no shade; I’ve got a few piles of that myself). More interesting to me, however, were her accounts of growing up in the shadow of her parents’ fame, and the ways that celebrity has affected her own life and sense of self, for good and ill.

About midway through the month, I was paging through my book log — or perhaps it just fell open, I’m not sure — and I found my list from April 2019, which included a couple of novels by Fannie Flagg, which reminded me how much I enjoy novels by Fannie Flagg. (My poor working memory is about 80% of the reason that I keep this log.) So I read some! Standing in the Rainbow and Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! were both new to me, and I accidentally read them out of order, which honestly didn’t matter particularly much. Both these and the two others (Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven and The Whole Town’s Talking) are set in the fictional town of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, although a good part of Welcome takes place in NYC. They’re definitely character-driven books — I mean, they have plots, but the plots are certainly not the narrative driver — and I’ve enjoyed seeing how Flagg further opens up the interior and exterior lives of Elmwood Springs’s inhabitants with every sequel. The timelines in each book overlap with the others, and it’s a pretty deft trick to interweave them without too many inconsistencies. (There were several errors in The Whole Town’s Talking, which Flagg’s copyeditor should have caught, but none of them were of narrative-ruining size.)

When I was preparing Lex Operandi, Lex Credendi for publication, I must have skimmed through it half a dozen times getting the formatting and everything set up. But it had been many years since I actually sat down and properly read it straight through, as if someone else had written it. It might not have been since after my thesis defense, in 2016, now that I think on it. Anyway; I read through it and I thought it was pretty good. Ha.

Stranger Planet is Nathan W. Pyle’s second comic collection featuring the “Beings,” a charming race of aliens who live in a world very much like our own — but different. The kids love these comics, especially Anselm, for the way Pyle makes the ordinary stuff of our lives whimsical and unfamiliar through clever renaming. Toast? That’s a twice heatblasted doughslice. Smoke alarm? That’s a hot danger screamer. Coffee? Hot jitter liquid — not to be confused with my beverage of choice, hot leaf liquid. Kissing is mouthpushing. Salad is a leafbucket. It’s all wonderfully silly; here’s the (very relatable) comic that started it all.

To finish off April, I read Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades, which takes place somewhat earlier than most of her novels, in this case, in Paris and England during the reign of King Louis XV. Lord Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon and notorious for his debauchery, is quite literally run into in the street by a peasant urchin fleeing a difficult family situation. Instantly captivated by Léon’s distinct colouring, Alastair buys the youth into his service — setting off an insane chain of events involving mistaken identity, kidnapping, unrequited love, and all sorts of nefarious plots. It’s quite the romp. These Old Shades is the first in a series of four; the next book, Devil’s Cub, takes place about twenty years later and features Alastair’s son. I didn’t realize it was a series, and in fact I read the third book, Regency Buck, many years ago. Perhaps it’s time to revisit it.

Reading Round-Up: January 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

2023 already! Preposterous. I suppose I should be getting used to it given that we’re now into February, but there’s a certain part of me that perpetually expects it to still be 2002, and yet another part that’s sure it’s March 1,129th 2020. Time is, as they say, out of joint… but at least there have been things to read in the meantime. Here’s what I got through last month:

  • Tress of the Emerald Sea (Brandon Sanderson)
  • The Dutch House (Ann Patchett)
  • The Running-Shaped Hole (Robert Earl Stewart)
  • Playing Under the Piano (Hugh Bonneville)
  • Rattle no. 78 — Poetry Prize Finalists
  • Smashwords Style Guide (Mark Coker)
  • Persepolis Rising (James S A Corey)
  • Tiamat’s Wrath (James S A Corey)
  • Leviathan Falls (James S A Corey)
  • Miss Ex-Yugoslavia (Sofija Stefanovic)
  • Art Matters (Neil Gaiman)
  • Boys and Girls Together (William Goldman)
  • The Trouble with Goats and Sheep (Joanna Cannon)

I was delighted to start the year with Tress of the Emerald Sea. In early March 2021, Brandon Sanderson announced that over the shutdowns in 2020 he had written a full four novels in secret, in addition to his scheduled output on previously-announced projects. He launched them in a record-setting kickstarter campaign, and I bought in at the ebook tier; Tress was the first of the quarterly book releases. It ties in with his Cosmere novels in a small way, and was also thoroughly delightful as its own thing.

Early in January — or possibly late in December — I listened to an interview with Ann Patchett on the Spark & Fire podcast about writing The Dutch House and I immediately put a library hold on it. It was beautiful and sad and completely engrossing, and I spent a large part of a Saturday morning reading it on the couch. Lovely.

And speaking of engrossing, I finally finished the last three full-length installments of Corey’s “The Expanse” series, which… wow. It wrapped up in a really satisfying way that dealt with some of the big questions raised all the way back at the beginning of the series and felt true to established characterization. These three books took over my life for about a week, as this screenshot from my phone’s screentime report testifies:

On the other end of the enjoyment scale, we find Boys and Girls Together, which was an absolute stinker. The blurb billed it as a coming-of-age story about five friends putting on a play in NYC. It turned out to be 600+ pages of thoroughly unlikeable people behaving incredibly nastily to one another, and the only one worth rooting for (spoiler alert) kills himself in the penultimate chapter. I honestly don’t know why I finished it; I think I was waiting for it to get better, only it never did.

I did get one good thing out of Boys and Girls Together, though — well, sort of. It’s this little excerpt from Goldman’s foreword to the novel:

Anyway, the day I was done I was alone in the house and stared at “the end” when I wrote those blessed words, got up, went outside to the backyard, where we had a child’s swing set up for our daughter Jenny, then all of a year. I sat in it, smoking, and suddenly I had this realization:

I had told all my stories.

Every one.

I sat there thinking it couldn’t be true, because that would mean the end for me as a writer, then luckily I remembered the story of the mother who dressed her son in her clothes …

No, I’d put that in the novel, given it to Branch.

I went through them all and I’d given them all away. That’s my chief memory of that afternoon, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life. (I did not realize at the time that two years down the line, in that same university town, over Christmas vacation, these two outlaws named Butch and Sundance would ride up from South America to save me.)

William Goldman, foreword to Boys and Girls Together

It’s a good reminder not to hoard our best ideas, and to trust the creative process in the hope/knowledge that once they’re spent, there will be new best ideas in their place.

The creative process brings us to Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters, which is a pocket-sized collection of four or five of his most popular essays, charmingly illustrated by Chris Riddell. It took less than ten minutes to read in its entirety, and if I had paid the suggested Canadian list price for such skimpy content — $24.99 as I recall — I would have been pretty annoyed. As it was a library copy, it was fine, but I will note that all of its contents are available separately elsewhere.

I love a good memoir, and last month’s reading featured three: The Running-Shaped Hole, Playing Under the Piano, and Miss Ex-Yugoslavia — all very different and all enjoyable in their own ways. The Running-Shaped Hole had the extra excitement of taking place in a city I know, which always brings out my inner Pointing Rick Dalton:

The Smashwords Style Guide is exactly what it says on the tin: if you want to format a Word file for Smashwords’ automatic conversion to epub format, this will tell you how. I learned some new tricks with MS Word, which is good I guess? Not much to say about this one, or about the latest issue of Rattle, except that it remains one of the best poetry magazines going.

Finally, I closed out January with Joanna Cannon’s wonderful The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. Set during the great UK heatwave of 1976, the residents of a council estate gradually give up their secrets as ten-year-old friends Grace and Tillie try to find out why Mrs Creasy has disappeared, and also, if they can manage it, where God has gotten to. Cannon’s prose is beautiful, if occasionally a little hard to believe in Grace’s first-person chapters, and the whole thing wraps up on an ambiguous note that still has me thinking it over a week later. Excellent stuff.

Reading Roundup: March 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

March books! As you can see, I’m still on my Brandon Sanderson kick, albeit not so overwhelmingly this month. Here’s the full list:

  • The Flight (Dan Hampton)
  • Warbreaker (Brandon Sanderson)
  • And It Was Good (Madeleine L’Engle)
  • Jayber Crow (Wendell Berry)
  • Twelve Angry Men (Richard Rose)
  • Elantris (Brandon Sanderson)

The Flight was a library discard book I picked up at my local branch, and it chronicles Charles Lindbergh’s world-changing solo flight across the Atlantic. Although there is some necessary biography mixed in, the book’s focus really is an hourly play-by-play of his 33.5-hour flight. Dan Hampton is also an aviator, which made his narrative rich in technical details, although I found his prose somewhat clunky. It was a slow read, but I now know a bunch of facts about aviation in the 1920s, which is not the worst thing in the world.

Warbreaker is an early standalone novel in Brandon Sanderson’s cosmere, set on a planet that uses a magic system based around Breath (with a capital B) and colour. A tense peace exists between neighbouring nations Idris and Hallandren, and Idrian Princess Vivenna has been training her whole life for a treaty-negotiated marriage to Suseron, the Hallandren God-King. At the last moment, however, her sister Siri is sent in her place. Vivenna is determined to rescue her hapless sister, but soon enough both women find out that nothing they’ve assumed about Hallandren is as it seems. (Fun fact: Warbreaker was written two years before Apple’s virtual assistant was released, so the name “Siri” is purely coincidental — but if you read the book with Google’s ebook reader, it changes her name throughout to “Google Assistant,” with predictably hilarious results.)

And It Was Good is one of L’Engle’s nonfiction offerings, this one a long meditation on the first chapters of Genesis, from creation to Abraham. It’s a bit of a meandering text, sprinkled throughout with both memoir and short fiction as she works to relate these Biblical stories to her own life, and to imagine some of the stories that scripture doesn’t give us (what did Eve feel when she birthed Cain?). L’Engle is ultimately building a universalist case for salvation, which I don’t think is true and correct, but I appreciate her willingness to engage with the texts and to challenge some of my own assumptions.

And It Was Good actually sent me to Jayber Crow. I’ve read some of Berry’s poetry, but this was the first time I’d read any of his fiction. The novel is written in the form of a memoir by the eponymous Jayber Crow, the barber in Berry’s fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. It’s much more than Jayber’s life story, really, making up a long elegy for a way of small town American life that began to pass away in the 1950s-70s with the advent of large-scale commercial farming and the construction of the highways and superhighways that suddenly connected small enclaves like Port William to the outside world, for both good and ill. The prose is beautiful (no surprise) and, as with this passage that L’Engle quoted, often indicting:

One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, the subject was started and Troy said — it was about the third thing said — “They ought to round up every one of them sons of bitches and put them right in front of the damned communists, and then whoever killed who, it would be all to the good.”

There was a little pause after that. Nobody wanted to try to top it. I thought of Athey’s reply to Hiram Hench.

It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?”

I said, “Jesus Christ.”

And Troy said, “Oh.”

It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

I’ve heard many times that the 1957 film 12 Angry Men was an incredible movie about a jury trial, but I wanted to read the stage play before I watched it. So I did. It’s a quick read, and a great play. The movie is also available for free on vimeo — at least until whoever owns MGM these days notices and takes it down.

Elantris was my other BrandoSando book in March, also concerning a treaty wedding — except when Princess Sarene arrives in Arelon to marry Prince Raoden, she finds out that he has died. Except Raoden hasn’t died — he’s been hidden, cast into the lost city of Elantris, after being taken by the shaod… which is sort of like being turned into a zombie? Except living. Mostly. While Raoden works to survive in Elantris and figure out what has happened to the shaod — which, until ten years ago, deified instead of zombified — Sarene must figure out how to prevent a holy war against her adopted nation, led by the grim Derethi priest Hrathen. This was Sanderson’s first published novel, and it shows. It’s not a bad book, I enjoyed it, but it’s full of bewildering fantasy names, many of which sound nearly the same as each other, and doesn’t have the tight plotting or polished prose of later books. Still worth a read, but if you’re starting Sanderson, I wouldn’t start with this one.

Reading Round-Up: February 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion

You may notice a theme here. Last month I read the following books, most of them door stopper-sized and every one of them by Brandon Sanderson:

  • The Way of Kings
  • Words of Radiance
  • Edgedancer
  • Oathbringer
  • Dawnshard
  • Rhythm of War

Only six books… but those books together held over 1.7 million words, so by that measure it was still a pretty heavy reading month!

These are the books that currently make up Sanderson’s “Stormlight Archive” series, which is part of his overarching fictional universe, the Cosmere, which is a little hard to explain without ending up looking like this guy:

In my (admittedly still limited) understanding, the Cosmere is a universe in which a group of ~15 persons conspired to and managed to kill their god/the universe’s creative force, Adonalsium, who/which shattered into a bunch of pieces that flew off into different planetary systems. Those sixteen “shards” of godhood/creative force, each carry one aspect of Adonalsium’s divinity (or whatever) and ended up picked up various individuals in each system, who took on each specific aspect/power and functionally became gods of their planetary systems. Each planetary system has its own distinct magic system, and one of the Cosmere’s overarching themes is what happens when fallen humans end up with divine powers. The books in the Cosmere span thousands of years in time, and although each one is set on a particular world, there are characters who appear in different books/worlds, known as “world-hoppers”. With 18 Cosmere books currently in print and something like a total of 40 planned, there is a lot to explore.

Anyway. The six books I read last month take place on the planet Roshar, part of the Rosharan system. Edgedancer and Dawnshard are novellas that fill out the stories of some minor characters. The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Oathbringer, and Rhythm of War are all novels, part of Sanderson’s planned series of 10, and provide the meat of the story. Point of view rotates between a large cast of characters that gradually expands as the series progresses, detailing the war between the Alethi princedoms and the not-quite-human Parshendi peoples on the enormous battlefield known as the Shattered Plains. In The Way of Kings we begin with the stories of Dalinar Kholin, brother of the Alethi king whose assassination opens the book; Kaladin, a darkeyed slave sent to fight on the plains; Prince Adolin, Dalinar’s son; and Shallan Davar, a young woman sent to steal an important piece of technology from one of the preeminent scholars of the day, in hopes of saving her family’s fortune. From there, things get… considerably more complicated.

One of the things that I absolutely love about Brandon Sanderson’s work is his worldbuilding. Roshar is unlike Earth; it’s also unlike other planets in the Cosmere. It’s a watery world, and its people live on one huge continent (there are many more kingdoms/peoples than the Alethi and Parshendi). Roshar is subject to terrible recurring storms, highstorms, that sweep across the continent from East to West before circling the globe and passing over again. You don’t want to be caught out in a highstorm — but you do want to set out your gems, set in glass spheres, so that they can be refreshed with stormlight. Stormlight is the basis of Roshar’s magic system; captured in gemstones, it functions as currency, provides illumination, and is used to power the “fabrials” of Rosharan technology as well as provide the energy needed by Soulcasters, who can transform materials (people into stone, stone into grain, that sort of thing). Also the animals are mostly crabs which is… surprisingly charming. And unlike in this paragraph, Sanderson doesn’t info-dump his worldbuilding; he just plops you right in the action and you piece it together as you go. I love that.

Sanderson also does some interesting things with Rosharan societies. In the Vorin religion, followed by a large swath of the continent, gender roles are highly stratified: for example, only women are literate. This means that a man who wishes to read a book needs a female scribe to read it to him, which in turn means things like noble Alethis going to war as married couples — the husband to fight and lead troops, and his wife to manage the scouts and any reports that need to be read or sent. In Vorinism, a woman’s most private and erotic body part is her left hand, so Vorin women keep it covered at all times — the poor with a simple glove, and the right with a full encapsulating sleeve. And speaking of rich and poor, Alethi society is a caste system. This one isn’t based on skin colour (they uniformly have tan skin and black hair) but on the lightness or darkness of one’s eyes. The dark-eyed masses make up the lower classes, and the light-eyed rule. Members of the ruling caste are therefore addressed as Brightlord or Brightlady.

This was my second time reading through these books; I first encountered the Stormlight Archive about a year ago, as briefly touched on in last year’s round-up post. It had been long enough that I remembered most of the outlines but had forgotten most of the details, which to my mind is just about the perfect condition for a reread. This month I’ve branched out into further reaches of the Cosmere, which you will hear about (though probably not at this length!) later 🙂 I’m so happy to have discovered Brandon Sanderson’s fiction, and I’m sure that I will be reading him for years to come.