Wyrdysm Games

Recently, I finally got my hand on the Mistborn trilogy that Anna talked about a while back, and feel deeply in love with it. Couldn't put it down.
But I wasn't satisfied there, I looked up more stuff by Brandon Sanderson (the author), and discovered his multitude of fantasy novels. I've read almost all of them now, and I am still craving more.

You see, Sanderson created a universe, which he calls the "cosmere," that contains the many different planets where each of his fantasy novels takes place on. The "gods" of each planet are actually shards of some prior, unknown force, and each magic system is tied to that God. There are also characters that are found in more than one of his series (despite them otherwise being unrelated), and there is even one who appears in EVERY SINGLE BOOK, who has this ability to "worldhop," which is exactly what it sounds like.

Regardless, I love these books so much. I just finished Warbreaker, and found myself having completely caught up on his cosmere books. It makes me sad.

So, books!

Is it a general book topic or about the books set in Sanderson's multiverse?

Does it truly matter?

Well, yeah, because in a general literature topic we wouldn't be reszricted to Sanderson.

I've been putting off Mistborn since I'm not overly fond of genre fiction in general, but anyways I'm busy with another doorstopper. Over the past few weeks I managed to forge a quarter way through DFW's Infinite Jest.

It's ostensibly about the life of a junior tennis prodigy named Hal Incandenza and his crazy asshole experimental filmmaker dad and womanizing older brother, plus a whole host of pretty likeable side characters, including a wheelchair-bound Quebecois political assassin, a girl who reads depressing books really slowly on MIT's college radio, and Hal's grandad who wasn't as insane as Hal's dad but still fairly loopy. Summarily, I'd say it's mostly about tennis and soft drugs and batshit madmen.

The book is set against the backdrop of a bizarro future North America, which is now a part of the "Organization of North American Nations" which includes Canada and I think Brazil. There's a huge crater in present-day North America called the Great Concavity-- Far as I can tell, it now belongs to Canada, and America has the right to fling trash and blow toxic yellow smog into it using giant catapults+dropships and massive blower fans respectively. Also, in the interests of "enhancing revenue", the ONAN allows corporations to name entire years, and thus the story is set mostly during the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment". Pretty neat.

Overall, this is an interesting form of literary masochism. DFW is honestly very funny, but I need coffee to parse his prose for any significant period of time, so progress has been slow. I'm probably going to finish it anyway.