Holy shit. Not only does it sound bad but it sure as hell seems like the novel was written by someone packing some serious ADD.
Personally, I’m someone who enjoyed the Wheel of Time all the way up until I read Crossroads of Twilight. After reading nearly 700 pages of absolutely nothing happening I kind of soured.
But this…this gives me the feeling that CoT will actually look like a fricking masterpiece.
blurbs advertising books are often written by the clueless, so i wouldn’t give up hope yet. As a Wotmaniac, I will be buying this book regardless. Whilst the series has gone downhill in recent offerings, it had reached such heights with me that downhill is still ok. He’s just not my favourite anymore - that’s between George R R Martin and Robin Hobb
I always love more story, even if it’s more bad story. But wow, this looks like it’s going to be about a page and a half of each character … at least fifty percent of which will certainly be about what they’re wearing or how someone else is better with women.
But I kid myself–I’m going to do exactly what I’ve done with every new book since A Crown of Swords–I’ll take the day off, be at the bookstore the moment they open, and hole up to spend the day reading.
I dunno, Joe.
Maybe, with all these characters to whom he must attend, Jordan won’t be able to waste fifty pages having each one stand around doing absofreakinglutely NOTHING.
Maybe, by including all the characters in the book, he will be forced to, oh, I don’t know… DEVELOP THE FREAKING PLOT?
GOD. I hate him. I hate him, I hate him. But I’ve already spent so much money on this fat jackass that I have to see it through to the end.
At least Terry Goodkind immediately plunged into suckitude and was easy to cut off. Jordan, that crack dealer, knows when you’re about to turn him loose and gives you just enough to change your mind.
GOD. Did I mention I hate him?
I sense an LJ rant coming up this weekend.
I skipped the last one, IIRC it was ~1,000 pp. and the timeline was a day or so.
Maybe he can go to a “24” format and write a thousand pages on an hour, I’m sure people will line up to buy it
I got hooked on WoT late so I remember taking the first 7-8 books on a camping trip and reading all of them in a week. At the end I had something like 12,000 pages read and not a god damned thing had happened, made me want to tug on my braid it did!
“… So, the last couple books haven’t been all that great, and I’m starting to get annoyed and Rand’s a frickin’ tool and Elayne needs to shut the hell up and Egwene needs to just storm the Tower and call it good and Perrin needs to reclaim his testicles and I don’t know if I even want to contin … Holy shit!! Yeah! Yeah, you cleanse that Source! I’m never giving up on this now!!”
“… Man, this sucks. I don’t even know if I want to finish the book at all, even to find out why the dead are wal … Did Perrin just whack that guy’s hand off? Okay, I’ll keep reading.”
I might as well camp out on the man’s front porch. sigh
I don’t even remember reading Crossroads, though I know I must have at some point. The last few books have had so much frantic back-and-forth between character viewpoints, all eleventy million of them, interspersed with so much fluff that I find it difficult to remember anything about them.
But like everyone else, I refuse to give up on the series after investing so much time in them, no matter if the series reaches the bottom of the hill and picks up a shovel to keep going.
I maintain Jordan did an absolutely wonderful job of creating a fantasy world. The setting is excellent. His plot and characters leave much to be desired, though.
The first book, Eye of the World, is a very solidly written fantasy novel (IMO, anyway). The series doesn’t get much worse for the next few books, but after about volume 5 it begins to dramatically drop in quality. Eye can suitably be read by itself, however, as it’s more or less a closed plot with a definite end.
I think I am done with Robert Jordan and WoT. I started the blasted series in early 1991. At first I couldn’t get enough but near 15 years is just too damn long and STILL nothing is close to being resolved. More than that, the series has gotten flat out boring. I agree with what others have said more eloquently than I can about the drivel we are now being fed. I’m all for character development but with a zillion characters to track and endless women’s fashion statements to make there is no room left for anything else. It might not be so bad if he put out a book more than once every two years as at this rate my ancestors will have to pray over my grave to let me know how it all turns out.
I have been a sucker who has felt I have come this far I have to see it through but frankly I doubt I can anymore. Given the past few books it is not as if I will miss much more than some grumbling about the opposite sex and what that season’s fashion is in WoT. Rand is beginning to remind me of Thomas Covenant with all his belly aching (which I found troublesome to get through sometimes in Donaldson’s series). Even the payoff of cleansing the souce wasn’t enough to wade through all the rest of the dreck on its way to it.
I’ll wait till the very last book comes out, go to the bookstore and read the last chapter or two there. Jordan gets no more of my time or money.
[sub]Caveat: If The Hound gets some serious play I just might fall off the wagon and go back to the story.[/sub]
I’m fairly convinced that The Hound is nothing more than a wild card (in the WoT world, of course he is) that Jordan just uses when he can’t come up with anything else to use to propel the story forward.
I expect Slayer to slip into the same role with regards to Perrin.
I had been under the impression that (spoiler box, better safe than sorry) the doorways in the Stone of Tear and Rhuidean led to the Aelfinn and Eelfinn lands, so they’ve already been introduced.
Bayle i think he is referring to the much anticipated campaign to free Moiraine, though this is mainly conjecture based upon several Min viewings and Egwene dreams.
I don’t know…up till now whenever a new book was a month or two from release, I went back and read all the other books in the series to help remind me about all the various pieces and parts that were going on. I did notice in this last book that the clothing descriptions were really bothering me more than they had before. Now I tend to skim more and just skip down to where someone is saying something rather than read about all the clothing. That being said, I’ll almost certainly buy the next book as soon as it’s out. It’s a good story, I just wish he’d finish the damn thing already.
And the X-hundredth description of Elayne’s shawl is a better tool for propelling the story forward?
I’m with Draelin as going for Padan Fain chasing Faile with an axe as far more interesting than pretty much anything else Jordan has come up with in the last few thousand pages.
