All right, so let’s talk about Brandon Sanderson. When we left off, I had been annoyed at the Cosmere concept that was now tying all his books together, but then really liked Tress of the Emerald Sea, despite its Cosmere tie-ins. I still had three books coming to me as part of the Kickstarter pledge that got me Tress.

First up, a non-Cosmere book, The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. The core conceit here is that a person from a future-tech world visits Anglo-Saxon England (but with magic). Oh, and he has amnesia, so a big part of the story is figuring out the backstory behind the story we’re reading. It wasn’t bad or anything, but it was basically fine-ish, roughly on par with mid-grade Scalzi — which is to say, extremely readable and also lightly annoying. You shouldn’t bother reading it, but it’ll be pleasant-esque enough if you do.

Continuing with the Kickstarter books, we went back to the Cosmere with Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. This was another really solid standalone in that Tress model. Interesting world-building, enjoyable characters (if perhaps a bit too relatable to the young nerds who make up its presumed audience), and Sanderson’s characteristic readability. Also like Tress, it had an interesting voice, with Hoid narrating it (and thereby, of course, revealing all kinds of Cosmere world-building details for obsessives).

And then the final Kickstarter book was another Cosmere one, The Sunlit Man, which I regretted reading. To be clear, it’s not a bad book. It’s doing the Sanderson thing — setting up an interesting SF-like puzzle story (but fantasy), creating an interesting world and videogame-inflected magic system, propulsive momentum — and it does it well.

But: It’s extremely a Cosmere book, written apparently as quasi-fan service to Cosmere obsessives, to the point where I had no idea what the hell was going on for much of it. It’s using a lot of stuff from the Stormlight series, as well as pulling in things from Warbreaker and Mistborn and some short stories. There was a big reveal at one point in the book that meant nothing to me, because I didn’t have the referents to understand it.

So now I was faced with a choice. It was clear to me that I had to either commit to reading everything Sanderson wrote in the Cosmere or none of it. And having really liked Tress and Yumi, I decided to go all-in. So, despite all my misgivings about unfinished epic fantasy series, it was time to go back and read his Stormlight Archive books.

This is where my Sanderson journey takes an unfortunate turn, because I didn’t really care for this series that much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s Sanderson writing, so you’re guaranteed the baseline Sanderson thing — puzzle story, interesting world with videogame-inflected magic system, propulsive momentum — and people who want that will get those things.

But here, he’s attempting to use those strengths not to write a solid light fantasy, but a giant ten-thousand-page fantasy epic, and he just can’t do it. Tonally, he’s incapable of writing epic fantasy at all. He doesn’t know how to make things seem weighty and deep, it’s not in his toolbox. Tolkien famously created a world in Middle Earth that felt like it had layers and layers of real history, of things barely glimpsed at in the text but still real. Tolkien’s imitators never managed that feat as well, but were doing the same thing.

Sanderson, though, is seemingly incapable of this. He’s going to do a ton of world-building, sure, but then he’s just going to throw it all in the text. Here, have flashbacks to events from thousands of years ago. Here, have a POV from a god, or another one. Whatever it takes to make sure you understand everything in detail completely, Sanderson will do it; he’s incapable of leaving things underneath the narrative, he wants to show his work.

So it’s not an epic fantasy at all in a tonal sense; structurally, it’s also not. The story Sanderson is telling is mostly the same kind of story he tells in his other books, just longer and with more characters. So each of the first few books is basically about a single character, and we get their personal story. How do you fill 1000+ pages with a story like that? You throw in lots and lots and lots of flashbacks to tell backstory. The device that he uses to drive this is giving characters tons of trauma (the central conceit of the Stormlight Archive is that all these characters are processing trauma and need therapy sessions, and I am legitimately not joking or exaggerating at all; this is how non-epic-fantasy the books are), so that they can drip out the reveals slowly.

This is annoying and frustrating, getting lots of “her mind went back to— but no, she shied away from thinking about that” that serves to artificially draw out fake mysteries for thousands of pages before you finally get the shocking reveal. This is true not only for individual histories, but for the history of the world, which he drips out over thousands of pages before finally just spelling it all out in the fifth book.

I kind of hate everything about this series, but then also… it is Sanderson, so it’s incredibly readable, and the world-building is interesting even if it’s dripped out super-slowly. Part of me wants to commit to just being done with Sanderson entirely, because these books aren’t good enough to commit to reading everything he’s writing; but part of me knows I’ll end up getting sucked in at some point anyway, so who am I kidding.

Anyway, before we go, I should also mention Arcanum Unbounded, his short story collection. This had a bunch of standalone short stories, which were mostly fine. But it also had a bunch of little Cosmere-background essays, which annoy me on principle — tell your story in your story, don’t make us read your world-building notes! But the most annoying part was actually the “secret history” of Mistborn, which gives that series a retcon/coda that makes it worse as a story, but sets it up for full inclusion into the larger Cosmere (and is essential to understanding Stormlight and the Cowboy Mistborn books).

Which actually is a segue to the last point here: Would I recommend that you read Sanderson’s Cosmere books? I won’t even pretend to answer that question. There’s a lot of good stuff here, but also a lot of irritating stuff. But just be clear that whichever way you go, you need to be all-in or all-out. Especially at this point in his Stormlight narrative, the integrated Cosmere is front-and-center in his work. Maybe at one point, he was writing individual stories that just happened to all be set in the same setting, but at this point he’s writing one big story that has a lot of different chunks to it. He might pretend that you can still read pieces of the story by themselves, but you can’t — everything is part of the big Cosmere story now, and should be treated like it. So make your call with that in mind.