Monday again, so it’s time for Fantasy with Friends! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about the work of Brandon Sanderson:

Are you a Brandon Sanderson fan? Some readers online have called his books the “fast food of fantasy?” Do you think that’s a valid criticism?

I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Brandon Sanderson; I’ve only read a couple of his books, and broadly speaking I enjoyed them, but he’s not a must-read author for me and I haven’t even touched his most popular series. I did recently read The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, and didn’t like it much at all — Sanderson’s idea of humour doesn’t match well with mine, for sure.

I don’t know what I think of the epithet “the fast food of fantasy”, though. I remember finding the worldbuilding of Warbreaker really interesting, and was pretty interested in Elantris (though I stalled out on actually reading it for mood reasons and never came back to it)… it does seem to me like Sanderson is perfectly capable of coming up with his own ideas, even if his prose isn’t on the level of, say, Ursula Le Guin. I’d be more inclined to call the stuff churned out by the likes of David Eddings the fast food of fantasy, given that a couple of his series were essentially copy/pastes of one another.

(Obligatory note that I definitely don’t endorse Eddings’ work, given his conviction as a child abuser.)

Even so, I don’t like the term or any other (like “pap” or “trash” or “guilty pleasures”) that put value judgements on books other people enjoy and connect with, even though sometimes I think the substance and beauty comes from the reader of certain works, not the writer. I think valid criticisms of Sanderson’s work include the heavy influence of his Mormonism on his work, or critiques of how long and unnecessarily sprawling some of his works can be, or of his fairly plain writing — none of which necessarily preclude enjoyment — but calling it the “fast food of fantasy” seems like a way of dodging doing difficult work to actually write a decent critique.

That said, as a flippant one-off remark by a blogger or something, it just comes across as an unserious critique of a disliked book/series/author, which is fair enough.