Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians (Alcatraz, #1)

by Brandon Sanderson

Hushlanders, I’d like to take this opportunity to commend you for reading this book. I realize the difficulty you must have gone through to obtain it—after all, no Librarian is likely to recommend it, considering the secrets it exposes about their kind. Actually, my experience has been that people generally don’t recommend this kind of book at all. It is far too interesting. Perhaps you have had other kinds of books recommended to you. Perhaps, even, you have been given books by friends, parents, or teachers, then told that these books are the type you “have to read.” Those books are invariably described as “important”—which, in my experience, pretty much means that they’re boring. (Words like meaningful and thoughtful are other good clues.) If there is a boy in these kinds of books, he will not go on an adventure to fight against Librarians, paper monsters, and one-eyed Dark Oculators. In fact, the lad will not go on an adventure or fight against anything at all. Instead, his dog will die. Or, in some cases, his mother will die. If it’s a really meaningful book, both his dog and his mother will die. (Apparently, most writers have something against dogs and mothers.) Neither my mother nor my dog dies in this book. I’m rather tired of those types of stories. In my opinion, such fantastical, unrealistic books—books in which boys live on mountains, families work on farms, or anyone has anything to do with the Great Depression—have a tendency to rot the brain. To combat such s...