u/Alex_Werner

I've read and loved the first few Stormlight books (although I kind of ran out of gas), at least 5 or so Mistborn books, Elantris, Warbreaker, the entire Steelheart series, and the first Skyward. I'm looking for recommendations among his recent standalone books. In particular, I remember him writing a bunch of stuff during the pandemic that I never really followed up on.

What should I read? What are his best recent standalone books, or maybe short digestible series?

thanks!

Lots of long-running series (books, tv, movies, whatever) have what is referred to as "early episode weirdness", where if you go back to the first few installments much later, it's clear that the creators haven't quite figured out what works yet, and some of the characters/details/worldbuilding start out very different from where they end up settling.

What are some examples from The Wandering Inn?

I have not gone back and reread the early chapters (and in fact, that seems exhausting and intimidating), but the main thing I remember is that Erin's first impressions of the world had a feel of weird semi-empty artificiality that was more or less abandoned later on. I remember the blue fruit trees being described in a way that made me think of fake-cell-phone-tower-trees. And there was this business with distances feeling visually wrong and Liscor being invisible even though it wasn't far away, etc. I got the impression that Pirateba was leaning into "make this feel like a not-fully-fleshed-out video game world", which was later on more-or-less abandoned.

What else?