vineyarddawg

(Sidenote: Man, I LOVE this MultiQuote feature.) I can definitely appreciate that. It's a good thing to see your favorite author get more publicity, no matter how it comes about. I can also appreciate a good reason to gain some solid hipster cred. Game of Thrones is an extreme example of sticking to the books, it's true... but even then, some major things were changed that had fans of the books (myself included) all hot and bothered when it came about. Spoilers below for those that haven't read GoT the books and have only watched the show:

Ha! Good point! As another good analogy to that point, I quote Niles Crane: "What is the one thing better than an exquisite meal? An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night!"

I don't mean for the title of this post to come across too strongly, but I just don't get all the excitement about Sanderson's books being potentially made into movies. Far more often than not, I hate it when great books get made into movies. You've all heard the phrase, "Yeah, but the book was waaaay better," after watching a movie, right? Well, how much moreso will that be the case for some of the best books around? Off the top of my head, I can think of the following list of movies which were, in my opinion, better than their corresponding books: - The Shawshank Redemption That's it. That's the list. People who make big-budget movies don't "do" story-telling anymore, and certainly not epic tales. They make movies where people blow things up, stitched together with a superficial plot structure. And if there's one thing that Brandon Sanderson is an expert at, it's telling an epic story. Even a story that he admittedly wrote with a movie in mind, Steelheart, wouldn't be the same on the big screen. Some of the best laughs I got from that book were from David's horribawful metaphors, and I just don't think that would translate well on-screen. They'd go over about as well as gasoline on a waffle. The only way to do "epic" story-telling nowadays is with a TV series, but would you trust any company with, for example, the Mistborn epic story? I generally consider HBO the best at telling stories on TV currently, but they'd have to "HBO it up" by giving Kelsier some love scenes with some noble he actually ended up brutally murdering in Luthadel and by having things like one of Vin's crews stealing from a few dozen naked men & women in a brothel. And let's not even get into where they would put certain hemalurgic spikes. I mean, heck, they somehow made the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire series even more graphically violent and sex-filled than the books, and I wouldn't have thought that was possible. I guess I'm just jaded on the whole movie and TV industry. The most recent prime example of this phenomenon came with the Ender's Game movie. OSC fans had waited 30 years for a movie version of that book to get made, and Card even (eventually) got a deal where he could have some measure of editorial control over the product. And even though they bent over backwards to try to keep the movie relatively close to the book, it still ended pretty badly. I mean, the movie wasn't horrible, but so much of the nuance and soul of the two books (Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow) were lost. Even if they wanted to make a sequel after the movie flopped at the box office, they had changed so much about the Enderverse world that the sequels would practically be impossible to pull off with a straight face. Don't clamor for a movie about your favorite Brandon Sanderson book to get made. Enjoy the visuals and the world that you create in your imagination based on the vivid descriptions Brandon gives us in the books! That's the best possible movie (to me, at least).

I do recall seeing that the "old songs" (or something like that) spoke of hundreds of forms. One would think it would be some multiple of 16, right?

Just joined the group, too. I mostly play Civ V and CK2.

I agree... I really lucked into that sequencing, in retrospect. Though, my second book was Way of Kings, so I didn't keep that trend going. Knowing what I know now, I probably would have gone Elantris, then Mistborn Trilogy, then Warbreaker, then SA, then clean up the rest of the assorted and sundry Cosmere stories. Just my opinion, though. And I've been warned off of snack items from sharders, but thanks!

Thanks!

Hi, 17th Shard. I've been lurking for about 6 months, and decided to join up so I could upvote people and occasionally participate in discussions, too. I didn't discover Brandon Sanderson's writing until almost exactly 11 months ago when I first purchased Elantris on a friend's recommendation, but since that time I've voraciously devoured every bit of Sanderson's non-WoT writing I could get my hands on. (Virtually, that is... I do all my reading on my Kindle.) I've read pretty much every book and novella he's published except for the Alcatraz series and his WoT books, mostly because I didn't want to start WoT until I got "caught up" on all of Brandon's "original" works. Sanderson has quickly become my favorite fiction author, even though I had usually thought of myself more as a sci-fi fan up 'til now. I guess a lot of the fantasy I'd previously been exposed to was drenched in cliché, and as you all certainly know, Sanderson is about as anti-cliché as they come. I have to admit that all of the analyses and theories on the site sometimes make my head spin with all the research and thought that have gone into every minor detail of the books, but I like being able to read different opinions on those issues, because it helps me realize things I might have missed when I read the book! Anyway, thanks for reading this, and see y'all around...