I first heard about the Whitney Awards four years ago, but that year I did not read all the finalists like I have done in the years since then. I particularly avoided the Speculative category because it would have required reading The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, and I just could not imagine myself reading a thousand-page-long high fantasy novel. Then, this year, the follow-up to that novel, Words of Radiance was picked as a finalist for both a Whitney Award and the Association for Mormon Letters novel award. After years of avoiding Sanderson’s work, I decided it was finally time to dive in.  A few weeks ago I went to the library, grabbed a copy of Words of Radiance, and furtively checked it out—even though it’s hard to be sneaky when you are carrying around a book that has a thousand pages and weighs several pounds. I brought the book home and stared at it for about a week before reluctantly cracking the cover. Although I’ve long been an avid reader, I’ve also secretly looked down a bit on people who read epic fantasy. I worried that my decision to start reading Sanderson would be the first step on a slippery slope that would end with me making my own chain mail. Thankfully, I have been proven wrong and I now repent of my previous snobbishness.

As a child I never read any fantasy or science fiction books. My mother loves historical fiction, so the books we read aloud as a family were things like the Little House series and Marguerite Henry’s horse stories. The public library I frequented had a small selection of young adult fiction, most of which was historical or contemporary in nature, reflecting the very different landscape of children’s and young adult books in the 1980s and early 1990s. I went through phases of reading Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High, and read nearly everything written by Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, and Cynthia Voigt, but steered clear of anything that was too hard to wrap my brain around, like wizards or elves. When I went off to college, I mostly left reading “for fun” behind. I decided to study English and immersed myself in classes about Shakespeare, early America, Victorian literature, and other canonical literary time periods.

Then, during my senior year, I decided to take a class on young adult literature. I had just gotten married and my new husband was also an English major, so we decided to take the class together for fun. This class was the first step in dismantling my literary snobbishness—we were required to read a variety of books across numerous genres, including many books that I would have shunned in the past. I was surprised to find that I loved most of them, and learned that many kinds of books could be valuable. Shortly after that class ended, I discovered Mormon literature and widened my horizons even further. During this time period, the film versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy were being released, and Harry Potter was growing in popularity. Popular culture was shifting around me, and I was finally become more receptive to the idea that fantasy novels might actually be interesting.

I committed the cardinal literary sin of watching the Lord of the Rings movies before reading the books. Despite the fact that I wasn’t always sure about what was going on, I loved the movies. I still wasn’t quite ready to read a fantasy novel, so I warmed up with a scholarly text about Tolkien’s use of languages and his background as a scholar. Finally, I talked myself into trying the first book (The Fellowship of the Ring), and couldn’t believe how much I liked it. It had all the things that I had disdained for years—magic, weird names, an epic plot—and yet I loved it. I think that Tolkien was a good starting point for me because I had spent years studying epic poetry from Spain and England, as well as linguistics and poetry. See, I can still be a literary snob about fantasy books too.

During the last decade I have expanded my reading horizons far beyond anything I would have thought possible as an insecure teenage reader. I used to try to define myself by reading the “right” things, with a very narrow definition of what that meant. Now I’ve come to find good, quality writing in many genres and have a wide-ranging literary palate. Despite my love for Tolkien, however, fantasy and science fiction are still not my first choice when it comes to choosing reading material. Over past few years I’ve had many different friends urge me to try Brandon Sanderson’s books and I have always resisted for various reasons. Then, a week ago I started reading Words of Radiance and found that I just couldn’t put it down. Now I’ve become the worst kind of late-adopter who obnoxiously proselytes the virtues of a new discovery that everyone else has known about for years. More than one friend has heard my “this is the most amazing book!” speech during the last week and I know they are all sick of it. My daughter was running a fever on Wednesday and while I was grateful for paid sick time, I was even more grateful for the chance to take the day off work in order to read a few hundred more pages. I’ve already put The Way of Kings on hold at the library. Just stage an intervention if I start making my own armor—I don’t think I need to go that far down this path.

What types of books do you like to read? What kinds of books do you avoid? When was the last time you tried something new and discovered that you liked it?


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