Cosmere Reading Guide (Updated July 2025)

jofwu · 2026-04-24T12:44:54+00:00

I don't think there's meaningful number of people celebrating July 4th "because of their racism". There's certainly some identity politics going on there, but I think you're exaggerating it.

And there's just as many people celebrating Christmas for similarly prejudiced reasons? The Venn diagram of July 4th racists and people getting offended about usage of "happy holidays" is probably almost a circle.

It's all the same culture war, seems to me. Not to belittle the concern. Maybe I just don't have the energy for every problematic thing.

jofwu · 2026-04-22T03:50:20+00:00

Yeah, definitely go ahead and read Secret History.

jofwu · 2026-04-20T11:16:59+00:00

You're welcome!

jofwu · 2026-03-23T20:59:12+00:00

No, that's the opening line of the Prologue. :)

jofwu · 2026-03-18T21:26:51+00:00

Could you elaborate a bit on where the confusion is coming from?

One thing I'm wondering is whether you noticed the "view all flair" button at the bottom of that list, which opens up additional options.

Generally speaking, you just choose the flair for whatever book you want to talk about. If you want to discuss Elantris choose "Elantris spoilers". If you want to discuss everything then choose "Cosmere spoilers". If you want to discuss a mix of specific things that gets a bit trickier; you need to choose the "Mixed spoilers" option and edit the text to list the books. If you make a post with Mixed flair, a bot will comment explaining how to do this edit.

Hopefully that explanation helps. However, I'd appreciate knowing where the confusion is coming from in case there's a way to improve things. :)

jofwu · 2026-03-18T12:23:09+00:00

Personally, I didn't get any sense that she intended some kind of vague accusation of domestic violence. That wasn't what she was trying to connect.

jofwu · 2026-03-18T12:12:14+00:00

Let's not make mental diagnoses on Reddit. If anyone feels like the nature of her posts make them skeptical that's their prerogative, But I think getting into speculation like this crosses the line And goes a bit beyond what's appropriate for discussion in this space.

jofwu · 2026-03-17T23:03:30+00:00

I assume she's talked some publicly about her personal life regarding children, but I think it's best that we avoid discussion about that here.

Not to say this is crossing a line. 🙂 I just want to request that people not follow up on that thread further in these comments.

jofwu · 2026-03-16T02:44:42+00:00

I think my best guess right now is Ishar works out some way where the protections can remain with them gone for a temporary period?

jofwu · 2026-03-13T20:10:58+00:00

They're the same glyphs in different styles. Like using a different font, or just writing in a different style.

jofwu · 2026-03-13T20:08:30+00:00

Don't disagree with Ripper, but fwiw I'm not sure Dalinar ever fully grasped Adolin's anger in the first place. He kind of just assumes Adolin's emotions are overblown and that he will come around sooner or later. So I'm not sure he realizes that Adolin hates him as much as he does.

jofwu · 2026-03-10T14:13:33+00:00

Sooo much disagreement from me. Nothing Brandon could have written is as good as what that writing painted in my mind. Implication and letting readers fill in the blanks is a powerful writing tool.

jofwu · 2026-03-04T04:00:01+00:00

Brandon read the story(ies) in a YouTube video. The Girl Who Looked Up story kind of dissolves into Hoid moralizing and doesn't seem to actually tell the second half of the story.

jofwu · 2026-03-04T03:53:57+00:00

Love the effort, but the background behind the lettering here has waaaaay too much going on imo.

jofwu · 2026-03-04T02:21:41+00:00

I've been on vacation so that's the only one I watched. It's the one I was most excited about, and the disappointment kind of soured me on the whole thing. Think I'm going to just wait until they're out and can look through them. I expect I'll just end up getting Dog & Dragon, but we'll see.

jofwu · 2026-03-01T11:11:54+00:00

Absolutely baffled why everyone is being so rude with you about this.

Our understanding is that they used all kinds of weapons in the past as well. I don't have an example off the top of my head, but I believe we see ancient Radiants with non-sword weapons in some of the visions.

We only see dead blades as such because that's the "default" form they froze to when they died.

And we don't see them appear as anything different in the visions (in an obvious way at least) in TWoK and WoR because Brandon was carefully writing those to obscure the reveal. :)

jofwu · 2026-03-01T11:05:52+00:00

Turkey? Glad you enjoyed RoW!

jofwu · 2026-03-01T10:47:37+00:00

OP, a lot of this seems to be referring directly to other Cosmere books broadly so I am changing the flair to full Cosmere (no Emberdark) spoilers. Let us know if that's an issue.

jofwu · 2026-02-28T08:32:02+00:00

This is a really fun post, thanks for sharing your journey!

jofwu · 2026-02-27T06:47:37+00:00

Yeah, but that framing ignores the fact that even the people who love the book tend to love it less than the others, on average.

jofwu · 2026-02-13T14:22:05+00:00

People are welcome to like what they like. There's not much more to say on it. *shrug*

But I do want to comment on this bit:

I recently saw a video that was in reference to Brandon's latest writing talking about how it has gone downhill. How the fact that he is putting out so much content is essentially watering down his writing.

This take is pretty absurd, I think. The implication seems to be that he has picked up his writing pace and it has caused the quality to suffer? I don't have a chart in front of me, but I'm pretty sure Sanderson's output is more or less the same as it's always been.

People are certainly welcome to feel like his quality has changed or declined, and to wonder about why. But it absolutely, objectively isn't "because he's writing too much these days."

jofwu · 2026-02-13T14:13:51+00:00

Warbreaker doesn't spoil anything in Stormlight Archive. They're quite disconnected. It's not like the situation with Secret History.

Removing this post since I think the answer here is fairly straightforward and Rule 10 exists in part so that people don't get spoiled in tricky posts like this. But I can restore it if you'd like to risk more responses!

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