When Robert Jordan died a few years ago, I'd read all 11 volumes of The Wheel of Time series at that point. And I'd really been reading everything since about volume 8 mostly on inertia. I'd read that much already, I might as well keep reading them, I thought. Even though the series was obviously being strung along just for the sake of stringing it along, and the bloated descriptions were getting annoyingly bad. It's kinda like Jordan ran out of descriptive phrases around book 4, and just recycled them over and over and over again. But, I was working as a public school teacher in Japan, and had plenty of free time on my hands.
And then Jordan died. And I thought, "I'm done with WoT." I just didn't care anymore to finish the series, especially when I found out that Sanderson would not be writing one final book, but three.
But then this past summer, Steve was giving away books before he left for Singapore, and one of them was a copy of The Gathering Storm, WoT book 12. And I said, "What the hell, it's free."
I finally started reading it this weekend. After two days of reading, I'm 200 pages into it and finding I'm liking Sanderson's prose more than Jordan's later prose. It's that bit of freshness that the series needed. It's still long, and bloated, and I'm looking at having to trudge through another 3000 or so pages, but I may just finish the series after all.
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I crashed at book 7. Too many names and plot lines. Some of the characters were becoming pale shades of themselves too.
ReplyDeleteThank you for calling my attention to this turn for the better. Maybe I will revisit these books. I am curious to see how this beast of a story wraps up.
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It took my a two years to finally get into Game of Thrones, and I have tried for 6 years to read the first Wheel book, it just isn't happening for me. It's the overly wordy descriptions that detract frm what may be a good series. With GoT I have learned to speed read over Martin's overly ponderous details.
ReplyDeleteSanderson has really done a great job with his last two Wheel of Time books. He's really been able to give it a clarity and focus that Jordan had lost since about Book 7.
ReplyDeleteI go back and forth on this series in a major way. I really really want to read it sometimes, but when I start reading it I feel like it is so mired in useless detail. I've made it through the first three books, but am stalled on book 4. It's bad enough that my favorite series, A Song of Ice and Fire, is starting to linger a bit too long. Perhaps it's time to phase out these mammoth epics? Or, if they have to continue to exist, the books should come out at the pace of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
ReplyDeleteWord verification: dafork
Remember! Friends don't let friends read Wheel of Time!
ReplyDeletehttp://caffeinesymposium.blogspot.com/2010/08/robert-jordan-and-brain-damage.html
Dave -- Honestly, if a friend were considering reading it, I'd give them a fair warning. But since I've already gotten this far into it, I might as well get it over with. ;)
ReplyDeleteDRANCE -- it gets a lot worse before it gets better. Just so you know...