“I was a boy who just didn’t like books,” Sanderson says at this month’s JordanCon, an annual convention in Atlanta celebrating the works of fantasy author Robert Jordan. “I had tried reading Tolkien, but if you’re not a good reader, Tolkien is really hard—he’s fantastic, but he’s dense.”
For a fantasy writer known for penning doorstopper-length novels, this admission sounds almost blasphemous. Yet Sanderson, who has authored nearly 20 novels and hit #1 on The New York Times bestseller list last month with his latest, Words of Radiance , spent his youth avoiding books (especially ones with “shiny award stickers”).
It wasn’t until an eighth grade teacher handed him a copy of a Barbara Hambly novel that he fell in love with fantasy.
“After discovering [ Dragonsbane ], I said, ‘I have to learn how to do this. There’s something about this that is me,’” Sanderson says.
Beginning with books that simply had “Dragon” in the title, including Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight and Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince , he began to voraciously read.
“When I think of those days—those first early books that I read—there’s an emotion I feel which is solely reserved for those early books discovering the fantasy genre,” he says. “It’s part elation, part an awakening sense of wonder, part a coming to an understanding of something in the world that I love, but not really knowing what it is or why.”
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