February 2013

Review of The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. Reviewed on Febuary 22nd, 2013. 

As a couple other reviewers on Amazon have said, if I were reviewing just the first of the three books, I'd probably give it a four or a five rating. But I just bought and read the trilogy on the Kindle, and although I did finish all three, I don't think I'll recommend them to others. Or I'll recommend the first book and suggest one ignore the other two.

I'm not going to try to justify this in a literary sense. In my recent reading, I've come down to a much more personal, fundamental judgement . . .did I enjoy the experience. More and more with recent fiction, I have to say 'Nope'. I suppose it started with The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Why does modern fiction feel like it must bludgeon the reader into senselessness in order to get us to understand that there are 'stakes'. Yes, I get it . . . life can be terribly hard. More and more of the 'quality' writing, films, and television seems to want to dwell (for a long, LOOOONG time) on the absolute worst aspects of existence . . pain, suffering, betrayal, torture, loss, heartbreak, greed, stupidity, and all the other weaknesses of human nature. There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men were a recent pairing of films that epitomize the trend.