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Brandon Sanderson / Re: Favourite book
« on: September 05, 2009, 04:55:49 AM »
The single vote for Elantris is from me, unless I've gone crazy. I've read all of Brandons books apart from the Alcatraz ones, and Elantris is still my favourite.
It's not really because of the characters or the plot. And Brandons writing is far better in his later books (Warbreaker, mmm delicious Warbreaker). I love Elantris because of it's setting, and the magic. I especially love the little touches, like with the Elantrians getting wounds that don't heal and slowly drive them insane. Brandon is always coming up with concepts I've never heard of or imagined before, and sometimes I find myself wondering whether he is insane.
It's funny, really. I tried explaining Mistborn to a friend at work. "Yeah there's these dudes who basically swallow flakes of metal and it lets them fight like ninjas. Honestly. It's so great I bought a signed first edition.. What? Why are you looking at me like that? They fight like ninjas. Yeah I said they swallow metal. They burn it in their stomachs. Ninjas. Ninjas!!"
Thank god I didn't have to try and explain Warbreaker. "Uh, well, these dudes get these things called breaths, which are kinda like peoples souls but not really and everyone starts with one, and they can put them in objects and tell them to do things. Like throwing a rope and telling it to 'strangle things'. Honestly it's really cool."
Maybe he just puts a bunch of words in a hat and draws them out. Huh, let's try it. *rummages in a hat*
Flowers, sniffing, reality. Okay... So Sniffers (the magic users) snort the distilled scent of different flowers and use it to warp the fabric of reality. *rummages again*
God Emperor, Gardener, Dragon, Twilight. So in a world set in constant twilight (where it's hard to find the good flowers, like Daffodils which let you warp time) there is an evil God Emperor (The Gardener) who is really a dragon and he sucked out all the sunlight for his own personal garden.
So now we need the Brandon twist. *looks in the hat* Good, evil, flowers. So it turns out that the Gardener is actually good, since without the perpetual twilight Sniffers would destroy the world by rampantly warping reality, but in another twist he's actually evil because he eats everyone who enters his lair, and plans to return the sunlight (which he thinks is good but is evil because the Sniffers will blow up the planet). So he's good and evil. And in a final twist, this is all taking place on a giant flower, which another Sniffer sniffs on another world, which is also a giant flower, and the image repeats for all eternity until one of them sneezes and ruins it. This also all takes place in 60 pages after 800 of buildup.
Damn. This is why Brandon writes the books huh. Oh well.
It's not really because of the characters or the plot. And Brandons writing is far better in his later books (Warbreaker, mmm delicious Warbreaker). I love Elantris because of it's setting, and the magic. I especially love the little touches, like with the Elantrians getting wounds that don't heal and slowly drive them insane. Brandon is always coming up with concepts I've never heard of or imagined before, and sometimes I find myself wondering whether he is insane.
It's funny, really. I tried explaining Mistborn to a friend at work. "Yeah there's these dudes who basically swallow flakes of metal and it lets them fight like ninjas. Honestly. It's so great I bought a signed first edition.. What? Why are you looking at me like that? They fight like ninjas. Yeah I said they swallow metal. They burn it in their stomachs. Ninjas. Ninjas!!"
Thank god I didn't have to try and explain Warbreaker. "Uh, well, these dudes get these things called breaths, which are kinda like peoples souls but not really and everyone starts with one, and they can put them in objects and tell them to do things. Like throwing a rope and telling it to 'strangle things'. Honestly it's really cool."
Maybe he just puts a bunch of words in a hat and draws them out. Huh, let's try it. *rummages in a hat*
Flowers, sniffing, reality. Okay... So Sniffers (the magic users) snort the distilled scent of different flowers and use it to warp the fabric of reality. *rummages again*
God Emperor, Gardener, Dragon, Twilight. So in a world set in constant twilight (where it's hard to find the good flowers, like Daffodils which let you warp time) there is an evil God Emperor (The Gardener) who is really a dragon and he sucked out all the sunlight for his own personal garden.
So now we need the Brandon twist. *looks in the hat* Good, evil, flowers. So it turns out that the Gardener is actually good, since without the perpetual twilight Sniffers would destroy the world by rampantly warping reality, but in another twist he's actually evil because he eats everyone who enters his lair, and plans to return the sunlight (which he thinks is good but is evil because the Sniffers will blow up the planet). So he's good and evil. And in a final twist, this is all taking place on a giant flower, which another Sniffer sniffs on another world, which is also a giant flower, and the image repeats for all eternity until one of them sneezes and ruins it. This also all takes place in 60 pages after 800 of buildup.
Damn. This is why Brandon writes the books huh. Oh well.