Normally in my WOT reviews I list things that actually happened (things of significance) in these books so as to illustrate how much space was taken up by non-essential real estate. How much Jordan veered from the idea of ‘the narrative’ as a concept. Quite literally, as of this book, Jordan lost the plot entirely. Nothing. Happens. In. This. Book. And my copy has 822 pages of text, not including the glossary and maps. There is infinitesimal movement on all fronts. Mostly the characters just […]
Only two more (and a side-novel) until Sanderson!
How many more ways can I find to say the same things about this series? A series whose problems I identified as early as book three, and which has continued to embrace those problems rather than fix them. Presumably because Jordan didn’t see them as problems but rather as features. Which is one of the problems. It’s a whole problematical circle of problems, and ouroboroses eating their tails and such (a fitting image since the Wheel of Time is basically an ouroboros sailing some sort […]
How many more books until Brandon Sanderson? Ohhhh, it’s four. That’s so many.
My crawl through this series continues. To be honest, I’d optimistically hoped that I’d be able to finish it by the end of 2017. I was in a good position to, having already read the first five books. Nine books in twelve months? Easy peasy. Except . . . each book has gotten progressively harder to get through. Less and less happens. The flaws stand out more as the plot thins. I’ve gotten through three of these books in ten months. Even if I manage […]
The story creep is here.
Twenty-one days to read this. This effer. That’s not a great sign. I will admit to being vastly distracted by real life happenings right now, but if a book is good, I will make time to read it, and I never did for this. The opposite, in fact. I had to make myself sit down and work on this, and until about the last 250 pages, it did feel like work. And I’m not just talking about the by now normal Robert Jordan writing quirks […]
A quick sojourn in the world of The Wheel of Time
A few caveats before I begin: I read this novella in the collection Legends, edited by Robert Silverberg (thus the confusing author/title data provided above.) It’s also where I first read The Hedge Knight (George RR Martin). Even though it’s a novella, I’m counting it as a book–partly because I don’t really want to read most of the other entries in the collection. Maybe the Le Guin one someday, if I read more of the Earthsea novels, and likewise King’s if I read the Dark Tower novels, but I […]
Not so much with the chaos. Mostly they just meander.
I can already tell that this series is going to eat my brain, and not in the super special fun way, but like in the way where some things about it annoy the hoobedy-boobedy out of me, but other parts of it compel me to persevere. I will spend the next five books (before Brandon Sanderson takes over) being yo-yoed back and forth between moments of “yes, give me more of that!” and “NO MAKE IT STOP.” I know this because that was what started […]