What're ya readin'?

Worth reading The Testaments after The Handmaid’s Tale - it’s really good, and oddly functions as a sequel to both the book and the TV adaptation, which I wasn’t expecting.

Ready Player One is one of the worst books I’ve ever read.

There was talk of The Handmaid's Tale being the next club we read for book club, I already have a copy too. We meet on Wednesday to discuss the second A Storm of Swords book.

I finished Chernobyl Prayer yesterday, it's a book of the "voices of Chernobyl" so people involved in the actual clean up or who's lives were affected by it both in the Ukraine and Belarus. It's a difficult read, partially because of it being translated but mostly because these are all real people telling their own stories, with their own feelings, they ramble, they go off on tangents, they show how ill informed the populace was (still is?), It's less than 300 pages long but it's taken me since the beginning of November to get through it (admitedly in that time I also read I Am Legend and the second part of A Storm of Swords too).

Immediately after finishing that I started That Near-Death feeling which follows Guy Martin, John McGuinness, Michael Dunlop, Connor Cummins and Ian Hutchinson at the 2010 Isle of Man TT, which I think is also the one they filmed for TT3D: Closer to the Edge which I'd also recommend even if you don't like motorcycle racing (I was at the hospital with Charly whilst she had some immunotherapy treatment, she only has two more to go now, then it's all about getting her in a position where they can safely do reconstruction surgery)

Lies of Locke Lamora is on Kindles Daily Deal for 99p, if you haven't read it yet then I really recommend it

That was the book that got me into fantasy novels. I then spent a good ten years reading more fantasy, trying to find one as good. Turns out most fantasy is a bit shit.

Yep. Locke Lamora is lightweight but very entertaining. Haven’t found any other decent fantasy novel in years, unless you count Pratchett.

I'm reading Children of Bone and Blood by Tomi Adeyemi. It's an African fantasy novel about a world where magic has died, leaving its former "maji" powerless in the face of a brutal royal dictatorship. It's stunning.

The characters and plot remind me of Avatar: The Last Airbender's highest points, and it's written with a relaxed approach to throwing terminology at you, like Binti or Neuromancer, and expecting you to work it out from context. I am devouring this book, and when I'm not reading it I'm thinking about it.

"The characters and plot remind me of Avatar: The Last Airbender's highest points…"

A sentence for the ages.

It's a three-season, 91-episode, 36-hour story about redemption, sacrifice and honour, but since it's a cartoon I guess that means it's worthless trash – my mistake! 🙄

Just finished The Pillars of the Earth, which is a trashy, switch-your-brain-off, 1000-page soap opera about someone building a church. But despite all that I enjoyed it immensely.

Erebus next, which I don't know much about beyond it being 'Michael Palin talks about a ship'. I'm hoping it captures a little of the magic of This Thing of Darkness, which is probably my favourite novel.

I've got Erebus on my to read pile too

I'm reading Children of Bone and Blood by Tomi Adeyemi. It's an African fantasy novel about a world where magic has died, leaving its former "maji" powerless in the face of a brutal royal dictatorship. It's stunning.

I’m about a third of the way into this and I can’t get into it at all. Three POV characters all with the exact same voice, an absolute onslaught of bullshit made-up words and a plot based around visions (i.e. “we need the characters to do this thing for plot reasons but have no good reason why they would want to… VISION TIME!”) It feels like a kids’ book and I’m not sure I’ll see the end of it. Sorry 😐

I'm hoping it captures a little of the magic of This Thing of Darkness, which is probably my favourite novel.

You've mentioned this more than once so I took a chance on it. It's brilliant. Can't thank you enough for this recommendation.

Ah lovely. :)

I enjoyed it so much I almost went on a pilgrimage to Fitzroy's grave, but it's a bit out of the way. Brompton, I think.

Finished The Labyrinth of the Spirits yesterday, the final novel from the 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books'. I loved Shadow of the Wind but never quite clicked with the next two. This one is much closer in quality to the first book, in my opinion. It's a huge, genre-crossing, gothic-mystery-crime-thriller, which manages to tie everything up in a largely satisfactory way. I did find myself having to Google a few of the characters as a refresher though - Angel's Game in particular becomes much more important here.

And I've just started Washington Black, which was on the Booker shortlist a couple of years ago. I'm about a hundred pages in and it's a great read so far. It's from the POV of a young slave on a plantation in Barbados. His master is (unsurprisingly) a horrid shit, but the master's brother seems to have more about himself, an interest in science and flying machines.

I've had the pleasure of rediscovering Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence, which I loved as a kid and am now reading together with my son. They're absolutely superb and I don't know why they often seem to be overlooked these days when Harry Potter is an absolute juggernaut. These weave in loads of aspects of English and Welsh folklore and mythology, have an engaging cast of characters with multiple viewpoints, and really know how to string out a mystery. It's nice when you revisit something you previously enjoyed as a kid and find even more to appreciate as an adult.

I read a book. Girl on a Train, the Hawkins novel. Think it's a film too. Was quite interesting for the first half, less so for the second. But you know. A decent beach book I guess. If we're ever allowed back to the beach.

I've just read Where the Crawdads Sing.

Don't read Where the Crawdads Sing.

I've decided to re-attempt Dune.

I've owned it for years, but never got more than about 30 pages in; guess I just bounced off the writing style, or something. Anyway, I'm still right at the start - they haven't even got to Arrakis yet - but I'm finding it less challenging than I remember, so hopefully I'll manage it, assuming I can find the time around everything else.

It's one I've always meant to read but when I tried I bounced off it pretty instantly too.

I've finished it, and one (?) of the sequels, but I really can't remember much of anything that happened.

I've owned a copy of Dune since I was 13, I think I've read about 5 pages of it.

Comments on a recent movie blog article about the future of the Superman franchise led me to buy and read – nay, devour – a novel by Tom Dr Haven, It's Superman.

Set in the 1930s, it follows Clark Kent from his teenage years in Kansas to his first days at the Daily Planet (relocated to New York in this version), simultaneously following Lois Lane's early career and the political and criminal rise of Alderman Lex Luthor.

Its tone and pace make me think of the Netflix Marvel series'; generally very grounded and maybe more graphic than strictly necessary, with a strong beginning and satisfying ending but sagging slightly in the middle. It's also reinforced by an interpretation of Lex Luthor that bears a striking resemblance to elements of Vincent D'Onofrio's Wilson Fisk, though the novel came out ten years before Netflix's Daredevil premiered.

The writing is peppered with (I assume) authentic slang and cultural references, particularly music, from the era it's set, and is mostly in an omnipotent present-tense that I found really captivating.

Most of all, though, it made me care about Clark Kent and therefore Superman in a way I wasn't entirely expecting to. He spends most of the book getting to grips with his powers and his emotions, feeling indefinably alone without knowing why. He's also very insecure about his intelligence - there are several points where his reporting for the local Smallville paper is criticised or corrected for both factual and grammatical errors, and he laments that his brain isn't as supercharged as his body. Honestly, this is probably going to be my head-canon Superman from now on.

It's not without fault; the soap opera relationships that tie most of the main cast together are both overly complicated and bizarrely coincidental. It mentions but never really engages with the public and officially promoted racism that was still rampant in the Jim Crow era (especially disappointing since a racist slur is actually the inciting incident for the narrative). The book goes out of its way to make both Clark and Luthor remarkably progressive in this regard (other characters literally remark about it), but neither of them really does anything beyond reprimanding offensive language.

I'd still really recommend it, though. It's a great interpretation of the characters but doesn't require any knowledge beyond the general cultural background noise.

Dune update: guys, this book might actually be real good.

I'm still only ~150 pages in, but we're finally on Arrakis, learning who everyone is, and intrigue abounds. For all the politicking and trade talk, the dialogue is fairly zippy, the characters are all compelling, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Has anyone else's reading dropped off during lockdown / working from home?

I used to do most of my reading on commutes and at lunch; I've gone from a book a week to… I can't remember the last time I finished one. I really need to get back on it.

I pretty much stopped reading when I stopped working. Ten years ago. And most of my free time these days is taken up with reading or playing RPGs.

I have been reading a bunch of 2000AD comics over the last few weeks if that counts.

Mine had skyrocketed for a while, but I've found it tough to focus on books for the last week or so. Haven't stopped buying 'em, though.

Good stuff I've read in the last six weeks or so includes:

• The Space Between Worlds (Miciah Johnson), which follows a woman able to travel between parallel universes because she's dead in so many of them already;
• An Unkindness of Ghosts (Solomon Rivers), a novel about class stratification on a generation ship ruled by a religious dictatorship;
• Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson), a fairly difficult read at times due to both subject matter and the creole spoken by the characters, following a young girl kidnapped by her father and taken to a parallel-reality prison planet;
• A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine), which follows a new ambassador from a remote mining station as she attempts to navigate the political minefield surrounding her predecessor's maybe-murder; and
• Illuminae (Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff), which is as close to found footage as I've seen in a novel format, presenting itself as a series of transcripts, chat logs and memos passed between the people and ships of a flotilla which is being chased by a military enemy.

I've also finished Scythe and Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman, which are young adult pseudo-dystopian novels about a post-scarcity, post-mortality society lent to me by a librarian friend; they're pretty fluffy but given the heaviness of some of the above, a couple of books that were easy to read (and easy to follow) were great palate cleansers. Jeanette Ng's Under the Pendulum Sun is a very weird fantasy novel written in archaic, almost Victorian prose that I'm glad I read but don't know that I enjoyed.

On the non-fiction front, I enjoyed the start of The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's book about the selection of the Mercury astronauts, more than I did the second half; by comparison Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet was shorter but managed to sustain my interest much more.

I've just started The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin (apparently the sixth in a series I've not read any of the others in), but as I'm literally only about a dozen pages in I don't have a whole lot to say about it. However, I will admit that it opens with the most arresting two-page description of a dry-stone wall I've ever read.

I burned through a hell of a lot of words of Game of Thrones book 2….in Japan, both plane trips gave me all the time in world in a situation where I couldn't do much else. Hate to say it but after the series ended the way it did I think I've lost interest in finishing it. :(

So has George RR Martin.

Yeah, the fact that the book series isn't even finished doesn't help. (same reason I dunno if I'll ever start a manga called Berserk, same type of limbo).

I've just started The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin (apparently the sixth in a series I've not read any of the others in), but as I'm literally only about a dozen pages in I don't have a whole lot to say about it. However, I will admit that it opens with the most arresting two-page description of a dry-stone wall I've ever read.

Good choice! I've got all the Hainish Cycle books sitting beside my bed because I've been meaning to re-read them for years. The other books you've listed all make me wish I was reading actual books more.

I just finished The Traitor by Seth Dickinson, an extremely low-fantasy tale of empire, colonialism, politics, treachery, and accounting. I can't remember the last book I read that had the energy of this.

I didn't always find it the easiest thing to follow - lots of names with too many consonants, and references back and forth to things I wasn't sure had actually been mentioned - but it's a hell of a thing. Highly recommended.

Having finished a complete (or, as complete as it can be until the final book comes out) reread of The Expanse novels on Kindle, I'm planning on getting back to reading new, dead-tree stuff.

I got off to a pretty strong start tonight by starting and finishing Gemina, a young adult sci-fi book presented in a similar "found footage" style to its predecessor Illuminae. Most of its typographical and presentational tricks were just versions of what Illuminae had done before, and the twists were kind of easy to see coming, but it zips along at a cracking pace and does a pretty solid job of giving its characters distinct voices (even if they're all far too witty all the time).

I devoured the two existing sequels to The Traitor in a fortnight (which isn't bad going for me these days).

The series takes a hard, unexpected swerve into borderline body horror about halfway through book 2 (The Monster), which means I'm not entirely sure how enthusiastically I'd still recommend it. But I almost immediately restarted book 1, and it's amazing me how well everything is layered in and foreshadowed.

The story's not done yet - book 4 is on pause, according to the afterword of The Tyrant, though the author does say it's all planned out - and given how well he's done so far at fitting everything together, I'm inclined to believe him.

I've also been slowly working my way through Axiom's End, the debut novel by one of my favorite YouTube media crit people Lindsay Ellis. Unfortunately, it's…. not great. The plot is fine (if a bit of a mash-up of existing movies, in particular, the first Transformers and Bumblebee), but the writing is often clunky, with oddly stilted dialogue and clumsily specific cultural references, lest you forget it's set in the early 2000s. It's not as egregious on that front as Nerd Twilight Ready Player One, but it's still distracting.

I'll probably see it through to the end (though there's apparently a sequel on the way, so we'll see how much of an ending it even has), but in contrast to the Masquerade novels, it's a jarring shift.

Given the way life is, most of my reading these days is actually listening on audible when driving, walking, getting the children to sleep, etc with a few paper pages grabbed here and there when time allows. I was never one for audiobooks before, but I’ve found that they help me to maintain interest when perhaps I would have been more impatient with a print version. I have, for example, made it through some of the hefty 19th Century classics that I’d tried to read-read previously and lost interest (including Middlemarch and Bleak House (the Miriam Margoles version is superbly read, if you're interested)). I’m really glad that I did, as I ended up really enjoying them overall. I think it’s a momentum thing – in Dickens particularly, I find the relentlessness nature of the audio really helpful in getting me through the bits where the characters become caricatures, which is always where I have lost interest previously, and back to more interesting things like plot, politics, or the still-frighteningly-topical commentary on the way that humans treat other humans.

Anyway, all of this means I’m probably “reading” more now than I have done in ages, so thought I’d drop some recommendations for some of the series I’ve been enjoying that I've not seen mentioned here. First sci fi/fantasy, which has always been my default genre:

Ada Palmer – the Terra Ignota series.
At a basic level – this is political sci fi, but what makes it interesting its use of (and frequent digression into discussions about) enlightenment/18th Century philosophy and the voice of its unreliable narrator, who is one of the more compelling characters I’ve come across in any genre. Set in the 25th century, the books explore a time when gender and religion have effectively been outlawed, and nations have ceased to exist (people instead choose to belong to a “hive” that suits their philosophy instead of belonging to a geography). This has resulted in an unprecedented 250 years without war, but then a child with strange powers is discovered and the onion layers are peeled back to reveal the secrets and lies that are needed to maintain the peace… A little slow to get going plot-wise (necessarily as there are a lot of characters and plenty of world to establish), but the narrative voice ensures it is engaging throughout and I find the frequent digressions into philosophy, literary criticism, world building, etc hugely entertaining and thought-provoking. It’s a bit like Neal Stephenson in that sense I suppose, but much more entertainingly done. Plus when the plot kicks in, it really does get going… It might be a bit too clever-clever for some, but I’m on book 3 of 4 and am constantly thinking about it. Highly recommended if you fancy something intellectually sprawling.

NK Jemison – Broken Earth trilogy
Multi award winning fantasy/sci-fi, with unearthing of ancient civilisations, strange magics, and nicely observed characters. The first is a brilliant book, satisfying in all sorts of ways - character, world, structure, plot, everything. Two and three don’t hit the same heights but do exactly what they need to do to take the plot and the characters to their respective ends, which are is all very satisfyingly done.

I’d not read much crime stuff before, bar a few Agatha Christies, but thought I’d give some a go and have found I’ve really enjoyed a lot of it. I’ve read a few PD James (solid plotting but a little slow and dated in places), a few Val McDermids (a bit too focused on the serial killer/gore angles for my liking, but I'm sure are good if you like that sort of thing), and some Ian Rankins (very entertaining with a great sense of place – Edinburgh really comes across as a real city), but the ones I’ve really enjoyed have been:

Mick Herron – the Slow Horses series.
More spy thrillers than crime I suppose, based in a department of MI6 where people who have “failed” in some major way are sent to do menial tasks that keep them out of trouble until they get worn down and quit. The main “team” are all believably flawed characters and he has a developed a very winning way of developing narrative through the sorts of stupid decisions people make in their jobs all the time. Very entertaining. There are seven novels all of which are great, plus a couple of novellas that are really only worth it for some more insight into the characters they feature.

Tana French – Dublin Murder Squad series
Good quality, character focused, well plotted procedurals - each of which takes a minor character from a previous book and lets them become the first-person narrator for another case. All bar one have been very engaging in terms of character and plot (Broken Harbour being the exception, which was just a bit flat in all senses compared to the others). She has a knack of revealing key pieces of information at exactly the right time to keep you on your toes (both plot and character wise), and a good understanding of the compromises that everyone makes when personal and work lives overlap.

Russ Thomas – Firewatching
Very good police procedural series (there are two so far, more to come) from a guy who used to work with my wife at Waterstones but who is now a full time author (she has other friends who have become authors too, but frankly I've found a lot of their books are ok at best. Russ is the best of them by some distance…). Set in Sheffield, and captures the feel of the city brilliantly - I hope it would also come across that way to those that don't know the place as well as I do. Good characters, great plotting, very engagingly written and a knack for judging the acceleration into the final showdowns/revelations just about perfectly. Page turners in the best sense.

I have been listening to Robin Hobb's fantasy epics on Audible. Between driving, dog walking and doing housework I have a lot of time to listen to books but not much time to actually read them. I am loving going back to this series, I read the first nine about 15 years ago when I was working nightshift. The series is now finished at 16 books, and I want to know how it ends but I couldn't remember much of the first nine and there was no way I was going to actually read them again. Anyway, they are great. The narrator is fantastic and the stories are every bit as good as I remember. Still quite an undertaking though as each book is over 30 hours long. That does get me excellent value for my audible credits.

I just finished David Keenan's For the Good Times and cannot recommend it at all. His other novel This Is Memorial Device is worth a look if you have a strong stomach for Irvine Welsh-esque flights of violence/sex and are able to suspend disbelief that a post rock scene could ever spring up in Airdrie without the major protagonists being run put of town before being allowed to make any cultural impact.
This other book about an IRA footsoldier literally went on the fire.

The Priory of the Orange Tree is a tricky one. Everything it does well, with its characterisation, magic system and sociopolitical worldbuilding, is offset by a plot that is both more complicated and less clever than it thinks it is.

It's broadly well written, but far, far too long. The opening chapters seem to take forever to get going, weighed down by references to people, places, legends and stories that are given little context. There are way too many, regularly-spaced, setbacks faced by the protagonists dropped in like episode-ending cliffhangers, handily recovered from in short order with minimal sacrifice or diversion required. None of them ever threatens to be a permanent change, so they're all just mildly frustrating to read through.

It's probably worth a look if you like big epic dragon fantasy, but it could definitely use another round of editing.

The Priory of the Orange Tree is a tricky one. Everything it does well, with its characterisation, magic system and sociopolitical worldbuilding, is offset by a plot that is both more complicated and less clever than it thinks it is.

It's broadly well written, but far, far too long. The opening chapters seen to take forever to get going, weighed down by references to people, places, legends and stories that saree given little context. There are way too many, regularly-spaced, setbacks faced by the protagonists dropped in like episode-ending cliffhangers, handily recovered from in short order with minimal sacrifice or diversion required. None of them ever threatens to be a permanent change, so they're all just mildly frustrating to read through.

It's probably worth a look if you like big epic dragon fantasy, but it could definitely use another round of editing.

Agree with all of this, some good ideas but faaaaaaaaar too long and the cliffhangers are more Dan Brown than anything else… I quite liked the first couple of Bone Season books she did, some good ideas/world in a sort of post-hunger-games kind of way and nice victorian-influenced slang, but that series lost focus and pacing too.

I've been on a bit of non-fiction run lately, have thoroughly enjoyed The Prime Ministers by Steve Richards (a kind of revisionist take on the run from Wilson through to May), Britain Alone by Philip Stephens (which covers the same period, but focused on our international relations, particuarly with the US and Europe), Bad Blood (the astounding story of Theranos, a blood testing company in silicon valley that grew to huge levels on a basically non-existent technology through lies and lawyers), and Range by David Epstein (which looks at the credibility of the claim you can become an expert in anything in 10,000 hours - you can, but only in some fields. Really interesting on learning approaches for different types of knowledge/competence)

NK Jemison – Broken Earth trilogy
Multi award winning fantasy/sci-fi, with unearthing of ancient civilisations, strange magics, and nicely observed characters. The first is a brilliant book, satisfying in all sorts of ways - character, world, structure, plot, everything. Two and three don’t hit the same heights but do exactly what they need to do to take the plot and the characters to their respective ends, which are is all very satisfyingly done.

You're the first person I've seen to say this, and I completely agree - the first book is superb but I thought the quality really dropped off in the second and third book, to the point where I don't even think I finished it. The whole thing suffered really badly from "small world syndrome", everything just boiled down to the same three or four people every single time and I just got fed up with it chasing its own tail.

I think I'm kind of done with multi-part fantasy sagas to be honest. I recently tried re-reading the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a series I'd loved as a teenager, and found it incredibly tedious as all the characters endlessly walked from one side of the map to the other and then back again, in every single book. Brian mentions the Robin Hobb books above, another series where I loved the first entry but was thoroughly fed up with by the time she'd rehashed it twice more. I mean there must be great, stand-alone, inventive fantasy novels out there but honestly I don't think I've found one for years.

I have been listening to Robin Hobb's fantasy epics on Audible. Between driving, dog walking and doing housework I have a lot of time to listen to books but not much time to actually read them. I am loving going back to this series, I read the first nine about 15 years ago when I was working nightshift. The series is now finished at 16 books, and I want to know how it ends but I couldn't remember much of the first nine and there was no way I was going to actually read them again. Anyway, they are great. The narrator is fantastic and the stories are every bit as good as I remember. Still quite an undertaking though as each book is over 30 hours long. That does get me excellent value for my audible credits.

I started (re)reading Assassin's Apprentice before Christmas and I'm really, really enjoying it. It's one of the few fantasy books that realises you need to care about the characters before anything else - Tolkien knew this too of course but so many of his imitators just chuck a load of placenames and a thousand years of history into the first few pages of their "epics" and wonder why readers bounce off them so fast. So this starts off really low-key, just the story of a small boy really, and by the time you realise it's skilfully layered in the backstory, you're hooked.

Mind you, I remember enjoying this first time around, then the next two books progressively less so - I think it introduced a lot of talking animals or something equally silly, and it put me off a bit. I didn't get past the first trilogy. Hoping it sticks better this time. I certainly don't remember much about it, so I'm enjoying it as much as any new book.

The second trilogy, Liveship Traders, is just as good as the first Fitz trilogy. If not better.

Plus it has pirates.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to The Liveship Traders this year. I'm about to sign up to audible again so that I can move on to the third trilogy.

There's a very odd article from Wired doing the rounds at the moment where the writer interviews the successful fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, decides he doesn't like him, his books, the genre he writes in or the people who enjoy that genre, and just sneers about all of it for a couple of thousand words. I won't even link to it but it's made me quite cross.

I've not read any of his books, but my son is halfway through his second massive Sanderson tome in a row and won't stop enthusing about it, so it's something I should probably get around to checking out.

I believe Brandon is a bit of a dick, although I forget why. I haven’t read any of his books but I have some friends who like them and some who hate them.

I enjoyed the first Mistborn book, and the first couple of his Stormlight Saga. After that they sort of disappeared up their own worldbuilding and magic systems.

He's not a great writer, but those three I mentioned are light, easy reads. Give the first Mistborn book a go, if you don't like that you won't like the rest.

Unsure why people hate him though, he seems harmless to me.

I'm pretty sure it's the Stormlight books that have got my son so engrossed - The Way of Kings? I'm just glad to see him getting stuck into a book, I think maybe 13 is peak "epic fantasy" age (not in that way you pervs) and it doesn't necessarily matter whether the books are brilliantly written or not. At that age I was devouring stuff like the Belgariad and Thomas Covenant and you'd never claim they're great literature either but I definitely loved them at the time.

Yeah Way of Kings is the first one.

It's perfect YA fantasy, and the second one is even better. It's got an interesting magic system and a thumping plot with lots of Holy Shit moments. It's quite simple language, and the characters are paper thin, but it's a brilliant page turner. The third one turns into an overwritten mess, but lots of people still loved it.

He's got an MCU-style Sandersonverse, set across a fictional galaxy. All of his novels are connected, with one mysterious, all-powerful character that appears across the lot.

Definitely tell your son to read the original Mistborn trilogy if he likes Way of Kings. The premise is what grabbed me initially - it starts a hundred years after the bad guy won.

On the fantasy theme, I've recently read the third Locke Lamora book, which is good, but drove home just how crap most modern fantasy is. I can count on two hands the genuinely great 21st century fantasy I've read.

I've tried to read the first Mistborn book but I just couldn't get on with it. I don't even know why; Lord knows I've read much denser, less interesting fantasy books in the last couple years.

I think this might be part of the reason why some people don't like Brandon:

"sanderson being a mormon is bad because he gives millions (10% of his earnings) to an organisation that lobbies against LGBTQ+ rights"