Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The first book I started in 2019! I started reading it yesterday while working on photos (sometimes writing metadata to the files takes a little bit so I wanted to have some reading to do while waiting). That evolved into me just reading and forgetting about my photos and, therefore, finishing in one day. (Well, I had read a lot of the novellas earlier because I’d received them separately via the Sanderson humble bundle) Why? So many reasons.

First of all, it was so neat reading Kriss’ annotations about the various planets in the Cosmere, seeing how Sanderson intends to fit them together. Also it explained some of the magic behind various things that happened in other books that wasn’t made clear to us because the characters didn’t know.

But mostly it was because it was so awesome to be reading about Kelsier again in Mistborn: Secret History. I think because of when it was finally written (to accompany Bands of Mourning) it has the most Cosmere-connected story of any of the stories I’d read. I was able to identify Kriss when Kelsier found her and when she mentioned she was from Taldain, I took a detour back to White Sands Vol 1 to see who she was in that story. (Based on that story and what she mentions in this book about Taldain, White Sands definitely takes place early in the Cosmere timeline) Secret history also mentions The Beyond and in Shadows for Silence they call their god the God of the Great Beyond. Later Threnody and Shadows are explicitly mentioned. Also, if you’ve already read Stormlight 1-3 you’ll have a much greater appreciation of what’s happening to Kelsier in this story. But he’s just so much fun (was one of my favorite parts of Mistborn 1) and so it was great to see him again. Also, the way Preservation was acting reminds me a lot of the way Honor was acting in Stormlight.

When I got to the Threnody section and it mentioned Odium (along with what we learned in Stormlight) it was so exciting.

I’m sad Nalthis didn’t get an entry from Kriss, though!

PS: The Hoid v Kelsier face-off was so great

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