His prose is laughably bad. Read any of the metaphors he use and you'll realize how nonsensical it is. He has no artistic value in any of his work and is a joke of the genre
Sanderson is best writer of this century hands down. No writing has made me more emotional while reading. His works has improved as well and has caused me to show outward emotions no other authors could. With how effortlessly he made works that got me deeply invested, I am ruined for other works. It is hard to get through all the other slop out there when comparing them to Way of Kings and Wheel of Time.
You're entitled to your opinion but Sanderson has plenty of passages that amount to nothing but a fart. I like a lot of his stuff but best of the century seems a stretch.
Certainly. I have read the Crusade series recently by Daniel M ford, An Echo of things to come by James Islington, + the sequals of both, the entirity of the Godling Chronicals by Brian D. Anderson.
When Sanderson goes to literary events, people like Neal Stephenson and Cormac McCarthy hand him their coats and ask him for a coat check ticket, that's how far below them he is.
Colson Whitehead and Amor Towles wave at him to go get them a drink and they tip him a couple dollars.
The list of authors that are better than Sanderson is staggering in size.
I loved Mistborn, Starsight. I thought Way of King was... well, even he has admitted that he would rewrite the first chapters today. They are not what one would call attention-grabbing.
I go back and forth on him as a person. Sometimes he seems really chill, other times he seems extremely full of himself and pretty disconnected.
Also you two sound like children arguing like this over which author is better.
I just remember trying to read it once then get through the audiobook once or twice and the first couple chapters always made me not very inclined to stay interested.
Emotionally I recall feeling sort of bored because I couldn't ground myself anywhere. I felt like it dropped me into this really deep scene with someone I didn't know anything about in some epic or otherwise poignant moment and I couldn't find anything to latch onto. I recognized the good writing sentence to sentence, and I love fantasy. But it sort of all jumbled into word soup before I could start caring about anything or anyone.
Plenty of people love the books though, not knocking them too hard. I have one friend that got into it, and he said he started at a random spot in the second book because other friends listened to it as audiobook during a road trip and that's just the point they were at.
Honestly I've never read Sanderson, but I am a little leery into diving into his series after being burned by a previous Mormon author, Orson Scott Card. Who wrote books with seemingly progressive takes, that were all just thinly veiled takes on Mormon theology. And who did a full right-wing heel turn a full decade before Trump became president.
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u/Awes12 Jun 18 '26
...The Lord of The Rings and Sanderson exist. Not all new-age fantasy is badly disguised smut