Mistborn
This discounted ebundle includes: Mistborn: The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, the Mistborn trilogy is a heist story of political intrigue and magical, martial-arts action. For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the "Sliver of Infinity," reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. This saga dares to ask a simple question: What if the hero of prophecy fails? Mistborn: The Final Empire — Kelsier, a brilliant thief has turned his talents to the ultimate caper, with the Lord Ruler as the mark. Kel's plan is the ultimate long shot, until luck brings a ragged girl named Vin into the fold. But she will have to learn to trust if she is to master powers of which she never dreamed. The Well of Ascension — Evil has been defeated; the war has just begun. Vin, the street urchin who has become the most powerful Mistborn in the land, and Elend Venture, the idealistic young nobleman who loves her, must build a healthy new society in the ashes of an empire. The Hero of Ages — The Deepness has returned, along with unusually heavy ashfalls and powerful earthquakes. Humanity appears to be doomed. Vin and Eland investigate the past to save the future, and in the end, sacrifices must be made.
Stats for nerds
94recommend
182mentions
159people
2009–2026years
57% recommend36% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I’m reading The Well of Ascension, the second book of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy
I like how he has the slow, almost clinical way of revealing interesting worlds and systems. It’s not the kind of book that’ll make me cry, but I really like world building with fun enough characters
- I've read the Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson which I loved for sure would recommend if you're into cool magic systems. https://a.co/d/0aVUwsi6
Next I plan on reading In The Shadow Of Lightning by Brian McClellan. https://a.co/d/099vsqs6
- Yeah, the books are formulaic, but it's a good formula. "Act 1: Okay, here's a neat magic system with well defined rules. Act 4: surprise, there was an extra rule you didn't know about! Act 5: we killed God with the surprise, extra rule."
It's hard for me to fault Mistborn. It has the tightest ending to a fantasy trilogy I've ever seen. And then, as an afterthought, Sanderson somehow managed to end the Wheel of Time, which frankly I don't think Robert Jordan could have managed to do.
- > even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey
This is what made early Sanderson so great for me though. I’m constantly inundated by media through which the author demands a soapbox. This can be anything from politics to just the author’s personal preferences.
Mistborn 1-3 was a fairly simple and satisfying plot with likeable (if somewhat predictable) characters and fun world building. Perfect set of books to just pick up and enjoy. Not Shakespeare, but it didn’t have to be.
By the time I got through all the Stormlight books I felt like I had been locked in a room and forced to listen to Sanderson drone on and on in a self-serving tone about his personal power fantasies. The story was more complex, but it also had 100+ pages of fluff nobody except Sanderson cared about. I truly believe that once he got really famous his editors stopped saying “no” to anything, no matter how small.
His short stories are the same way. Yumi and the Nightmare Painter is good because it’s short and sweet. It sticks to a classic formula and focuses on imaginative settings, which is what Sanderson is good at. Tress was boring because it tried to be smart and kind of flopped.
- Mistborn left me breathless at the end. During the last couple of chapters of the third book I uttered many a "holy shit" and "no way" under my breath. Much to my wife's pleasure, who bought the books for me on a whim.
The whole earring thing blew my mind, and it was so obvious from book 3 onwards.
The ending of the Mistborn series is indeed, incredibly tight. The whole series had a roundedness to it that I have not encountered before, every word, theme, event and character has a place in the Bigger Scheme. I think this is because he wrote all 3 books together, so he would regularly go back to book one to make edits based on new things he thought of in book 3.
- For fiction I read a lot of Brandon Sanderson: the second Mistborn series, plus a few of the Secret Projects. I quite liked Tress of the Emerald Sea. Also currently reading R. F. Kuang's Katabasis which I'm really enjoying so far.
For nonfiction, I found Amanda Ripley's High Conflict to be excellent and insightful. I also finally got around to reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins; I expected it to be fine, but it far exceeded my expectations! On top of that, the edition I read also had "end notes" interspersed throughout the book with retrospectives from decades later, which only added to the book's richness.
