Steelheart

One of the best parts about being on vacation is the opportunity to just take a day to read.  I’ve always been a fast reader, but after I took nearly a month to get through Atlas Shrugged, I was worried that I was losing my touch.  Turns out that, no, Atlas Shrugged was just exceptionally awful.

Brandon Sanderson’s Steelheart is the first book I’ve read within 24 hours for a long time.  If Sanderson has written a bad book, I haven’t read it yet.

The premise is simple: a significant percentage of humanity has been given superpowers, and these supposed superheroes (they’re called Epics) instead become they’re oppressors.  Steelheart is the worst of them.  He now rules the city of Newcago and is seemingly invincible.  But one young man, David, has seen Steelheart bleed and wants to see him bleed again.

Steelheart is a bit of a departure from the Sanderson works I’m familiar with.  Sanderson began his career writing epic fantasy: Elantris, the Mistborn series, Warbreaker, the last three books in The Wheel of Time series, and his planned magnum opus of The Stormlight Archives.  These are books that are grand in scope, are shown from the perspective of several characters, and really take their time to develop.

Steelheart feels like a thriller more than a fantasy.  Scratch that—Steelheart feels like it wants to be a comic book.  Between superpowers and the almost non-stop action and short chapters, I get the feeling that if Sanderson had ever been interested, he could have had a reputation like Michael Crichton.

If anything, though, this shows that he’s versatile.  It’ll be exciting to see where he takes his career from here.

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I spent the first week of my two-week hiatus planning out the next six weeks of blog posts.  I was really excited about this.  I had topics planned for each Sunday through Thursday, and I’d even started writing these blogs ahead of time.

Last week became the roughest week of my year.  While I was able to sort these problems out, it made me reexamine my priorities.  With my church responsibilities, school, my brother’s upcoming wedding, the general holiday preparations, and two other slight personal emergencies that have arisen, keeping up this blog is stretching me too thin.  At least to the extent that I have been.

I intend to keep updating once a week, Mondays.  Hopefully I can go back to the four-a-day before long, but until then, thanks to everybody who has been reading as long as you have.