I don’t remember exactly when I did it, but I read the Mistborn trilogy sometime around my move to my current city back in late 2013. I had enough going on then that I don’t remember the exact date, but I do think it was after my move. I didn’t really have the money for things like books before my move and I didn’t know who Brandon Sanderson was until mid-2013 anyway, since I only encountered his name as part of reading through the whole Wheel of Time series to help a friend out with his Master’s thesis. I really enjoyed the end of the series, the parts handled by Sanderson, which felt remarkable given how much I struggled with Robert Jordan’s portions of that series. I had to force myself to read Jordan’s books and genuinely only finished because the first of Sanderson’s was so much more enjoyable and pleasant to read than any of Jordan’s books. I mean, I’ll give Jordan points for creativity and plenty of respect for the world he brewed up–hell, I’ll event admit that most of the interesting plot work started with him–but I just did not enjoy Jordan’s writing for most of the series once he’d finished his original trilogy of books and started expanding them into a limitless and sprawling monstrosity of a fantasy series. Which is probably why Sanderson’s work stood out to me as much as it did. He was just as long-winded and overly detailed as Jordan was, but I enjoyed it. Sanderson seemed to have a knack for picking the right details and putting his words together in a way that lent to a more pleasant reading experience. So, when time and opportunity allowed, I followed the recommendation of my friend (the same one I go to for editing and pretty much all my book recommendations since she has unimpeachable taste and who might have given me the books as a gift–I unfortunately can’t remember, though, since it has been so long and she’s given me so many great books) and started working my way through the Mistborn trilogy.

Now, as I’m going through the trilogy again as a part of my book club (alternating months with Dragon Age games, currently), I’m enjoying a bit of a strange dual experience. On one hand, I’m reading these books for only the second time ever and getting more out of my second read than my first. On the other hand, I’m being given flashes or insight into my own mind at the time I last read these books, most of which doesn’t help me place when I read them but does starkly highlight how different the two reading experiences are. While I’m seeing just how much my own awareness of social issues and personal politics have changed for the better (as demonstrated by how differently I feel about the events of the first book and how often I’m writing bold exclamations at the narrator in my notes), the only real addition or change I’m getting from the Sanderson side of things is the knowledge of what was really foreshadowing and what was just extraneous detail. Not every book has more to find when you reread it the way many of my favorites do (though I’ve got plenty of other favorites that also have nothing new to add upon reread), but I find myself a bit disappointed to learn that rereading Sanderson’s early works doesn’t give me anything new other than an appreciation for how well structured and plotted this trilogy must have been, for him to do as much foreshadowing as he did.

Not that there’s a lot more to find in his more recent works, either. I don’t really recall seeing much more in any of his Stormlight Archives novels during any of my rereads, though I’ll admit I haven’t reread any of the most recent ones beyond doing a franchise reread in preparation for the release of the fourth book in that chronicle (which might also be the last one I read since I am so tired of multiverses and everything getting tied together such that you have to read every single scrap of everything so you can understand all the little inside jokes that are clearly references to some short story you didn’t know existed until you found a reddit thread explaining who all the unexplained Named Characters were that only appeared in previously unrelated stories). Still, it’s not like I’ve ever regretted rereading any of Sanderson’s books. I just also, notably, chose not to reread some of them. Hell, I’ve thought about rereading the Mistborn trilogy a few times in recent years and constantly talked myself out of it until this book club opportunity came up because I remembered the books so well, a thought that has borne out as I’ve correctly remembered every major detail of the series just as the first bits of foreshadowing are introduced. It isn’t like those details are boring or uninteresting to encounter a second time (and there’s been plenty of minutiae I’d forgotten that stands out now that I know it’s foreshadowing something), it’s just that all of the major and important details stood out the first time so my recollection of the book is complete enough that it feels silly to spend time reading it when I could just remember it.

Aside from the unfortunate lack of new depth in my rereading experience, the book is still quite enjoyable. I’ve got some issues with it now, given how very classist the book can be, but they’d be entirely wiped away if the one character to bring them up and challenge people on them hadn’t then spent a bunch of the next few pages apologizing for disrupting the status quo and the entire book hadn’t then basically dropped every thought of addressing issues of class and power along class lines. Hell, the book even manages to get around some of the thornier issues around having a bunch of highfalutin saviors deign to save the downtrodden lowest class (which has some supposed race lines that are eventually discovered to be a theological belief more than a physical difference, so far as this first book is concerned) by revealing just how thoroughly the boot of the oppressor is on the necks of the oppressed. Which, you know, doesn’t really solve the issues around Sanderson dabbling in a lot of social justice issues he conveniently discards to give his fantasy story the ending he wants for it (the most egregious of which is the unthinking sexism that seems to infest a lot of this work as a whole and the ways he talks about writing a female character in forward and acknowledgments), but he tends to never step too egregiously into anything horrible and, as a person who has spent their life learning to be more aware of and better able to speak about social justice issues, I can recognize someone trying. I’ll fault the work for it, but acknowledge that this book was published seventeen years ago and that Sanderson seems to be doing somewhat better these days (though how much better, I’m not entirely sure since I’ve mostly only read the Mistborn trilogy and then the first four full novels in the Stormlight Archive and they’re both such old or long-running works that it is difficult to really get a sense of how Sanderson’s writing might have changed (since few of the characters or societies in the long-running series seem to have changed much in a way that might suggest an evolution of Sanderson’s views).

I’m not going to write him off based on this alone, mind you, just stay aware of it as I read any of his other works. Which I’m not sure I’m going to, given the whole “multiverse” thing and how abjectly exhausted that makes me feel every time I think about it. I do not have it in me to deal with an interconnected multiverse like this. It’s too much. Still, since the Mistborn trilogy predates the public acknowledgment of Sanderson’s whole “Cosmere” (though I expect he had some of this stuff tucked away in the back of his head the whole time, based on how well the parts I know fit together), I’ll probably finish it and maybe look into the subsequent books. If those wind up just as plausibly distanced from the whole Cosmere thing as the Mistborn trilogy is, then I’ll probably give them a read. They’re all enjoyable enough and Sanderson’s a decent enough writer, regardless of the multiverse, so I might put them on my reading list for the eventual day that I run out of new books to read. Whenever that happens.