I'm a nerd

I am, in my choice of reading material, quite nerdy. Most my favorite books fall under the SciFi Fantasy genre. I make no apology for my tastes that happen to fall in the realm geekiness any more than i do for those that fall closer to trendiness or pop culture (which many consider to be the more serious offense). I should like to think that i can judge a thing to be good or not based on its merits alone. (I will not, however, claim to be indifferent to others' opinions. the very fact that i feel the need here to explain my tastes is evidence to the contrary. but the desire is not for agreement so much as for understanding.) Even so, for reasons i still don't fully understand, there's something disagreeable to me in the general nerdiness of much of the sci fi/fantasy genre, which makes me hesitant to branch out to include as of yet unfamiliar authors in my bookshelf. But in my desperation for something new to read, i came across an author i found myself wanting to like .

So I started on the first book of the Mistborn trilogy, his most recent work. Right from the start i could tell it would be as i feared. Nerdy in the extreme. the names and terms seemed like something forced out of someone's imagination rather than something molded from traditions and history. and it seemed to be a story made to be the background for a computer game, both because of the system of "magic" and the overall plot.

And yet, somehow i was drawn into this fabricated world. After finishing the first book, i couldn't wait to start the second, and after the second, the third. The above things i listed as flaws were present throughout the trilogy, but I loved it nonetheless. I'm not sure, but i think what made this story irresistable to me was action and suspense. Somehow Sanderson is able to describe action sequences in enough detail that i could picture the events vividly, but not so much detail that the scene gets bogged down with it. As far as suspense goes, i'm not enough of a literary critic, nor did i pay enough attention at the time to suggest what devices he used to achieve it, but i do know that the plot completely and relentlessly sucked me in.

So, if you need a book to read and have a decently high tolerance for nerdiness, i say give Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson a try.

just as an illustration of the nerdiness of the author, i've included the following video: