Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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What even is art anyway?

The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson

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I haven’t read any Brandon Sanderson, and there were sooooooo many reviews of this one saying that it’s a perfect novella, so I thought this is probably a good place to start. Shai is a Forger, which means she uses magic to make replicas, of a kind – she must know the object and understand what makes its “soul” and then use the Forging magic to copy or create. Forgery is considered heretical. Shai has been arrested and sentenced to death for theft. But it turns […]

“Heroism is often the seemingly spontaneous result of a lifetime of preparation.”

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

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Bingo: I am counting this book for the “Green” square. Tress is a simple window washer who lives on a rock in the middle of an ocean of deadly spores. She is content baking culinary masterpieces, adding to her cup collection and spending time with her best friend Charlie. When Charlie is captured by the Sorceress across the Midnight Sea. In order to rescue the man she loves, Tress must leave her quiet life behind for one of adventure and peril. As she journeys across […]

hot take yes this is an info dump but also I will mainline more cosmere

Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson

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BINGO: Black, it’s all over this cover There is a lot of telling instead of showing in this book, for an author who is already sort of well known (and, in some circles, sneered at) for being very tell-y. To be fair, I think it’s because Sanderson is very keen on his world and excited to tell us about it! And to be even more fair, I am a little Cosmere gremlin who will never be satisfied with details and arcana, no matter how arcane. […]

“Fine,” Grandpa said. “You fetch your evil Librarian mother from the jail. I’ll go warm up the giant penguin!”

The Dark Talent: Alcrataz vs. The Evil Librarians Book Five by Brandon Sanderson

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  After the events of the last book, The Shattered Lens,  Alcatraz Smedry and the ragtag army of relations and allies  must make their way to the heart of Librarian power to find the cure to Bastille’s and the Mokian’s comas: The Library of Congress. Alcatraz also has to stop his father, Attica, from implementing his plan of giving everyone in the world Talents like the Smedrys have, well had; Alcatraz broke them all in the big battle at the end of the previous book. […]

“If there was one thing she had learned on this trip, it was that leadership was more than titles and giving orders. It was an act of becoming something greater than what one had been before; it was doing things for others, things that they could not do themselves. It was a burden, true, but it refined as much as it hurt.”

White Sand Omnibus by Brandon Sanderson

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hot take very worth re-reading, they should just pull the older version off the shelves — book recall, anyone? wonder if it would have made as much sense if I hadn’t already known what Sanderson was trying to do via the author note So yes, this is markedly, substantially different from the individual books. The art still has the abrupt switcheroo halfway through the second (third?) volume, and the fundamental plot is the same, but there’s a real attempt to clarify the narrative thrust via […]

Where is an editor when you need one?

Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson

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I have quite enjoyed the Stormlight Archive series; Wind and Truth is the fifth in a 10 novel series. It is hard to summarize a book that sits right in the middle of a really planned out high fantasy series, but for folks who are not familiar, I will try. The series is set on a word called Roshar, and the background for everything is that the majority of the human population has been at war with another species for eons. Even within the humans, […]



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