#34. Read a new book every month, including one that Esther recommends.

By God's grace, I graduated from Southern Seminary on Friday, December 13th. This meant that, in December, I suddenly had an unusual amount of time on my hands for reading, and consequently I read three books: the second and third books of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, and A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens.

I'll just make a few comments about Mistborn. I originally became interested in the series from reading another set of works by the author. When Robert Jordan, author of the epic Wheel of Time series, passed away leaving that saga unfinished, Brandon Sanderson was tapped to gather Jordan's notes and deliver the conclusion fans of that series had been waiting more than twenty years to read. Sanderson did a fine job with The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and the climactic A Memory of Light, and since these books meant I'd never have another Wheel of Time tome to read, I decided to investigate his original works to see how they held up.

Comparisons across the fantasy genre are notoriously difficult; just stop into your local comic book store and wait for the inevitable fanboy disputes over Star Trek vs. Star Wars. Or don't. The point is, such comparisons inevitably reveal as much about the subjective preferences of individual readers as they do about the quality and imaginative force of a given series.

That said, the Mistborn trilogy is a happy medium between the grand, sweeping scale of a Wheel of Time or Lord of the Rings, and the smaller casts and scale of R.A. Salvatore's works, or of Harry Potter. Mistborn focuses on a small cast of characters with a single heroine, Vin, with (initially) modest goals, who are eventually swept up in events with much more at stake.

Sanderson's world is an imaginative one, primarily populated with humans, but with a few other spectacular creatures sprinkled in as well. Notably, each of these creatures has an important creation story, and are thus much more than atmospheric fluff. Perhaps most impressive of all is the magical system of Mistborn; a unique art called Allomancy, which is powered by individual magic users (called Mistings and Mistborn) consuming and then "burning" various metals to give off different effects. These are relatively simple, even unspectacular, but Sanderson has a flair for combat scenes and problem-solving episodes, and the characters of Mistborn never fail to produce some innovative new use of their powers.

Said characters are, admittedly, a mixed bag. There are few cookie-cutter good guys or bad guys, and some of the secondary characters (Marsh, Sazed, and Breeze were all favorites of mine) are satisfyingly complex. Yet Vin, around whom the entire series revolves, never really "did it" for me. Her personal struggles with trust and identity never seem to have any truly damaging consequences, and all resolve neatly at just the right time. Beyond that, Vin comes across as the typical peasant-turned-savior of the fantasy world, conveniently altruistic and self-sacrificial. Yet, despite his failings in crafting his main character, Sanderson manages an impressive, even astonishing, twist in the books final pages, that manage to elevate Mistborn above the cliche pitfalls of its genre.

Mistborn will never be spoken of in the same breath as The Lord of the Rings, but I found it an engrossing read, and I eagerly look forward to reading the rest of the Sanderson corpus as quickly as possible. That is, unless someone digs up a lost Robert Jordan novel for me to read first.