I am Robert Jordan’s bitch. There is nothing else to be said. I’ll read everything that comes out, regardless of whether it’s good or not, and I’ll even buy it the day it comes out. In fact, I’ll probably get to the bookstore before the employees do. I don’t know if that makes me dedicated or pathetic.
Every time a new book is announced, I slog through everything that came before. Because in just about every book, there is that one moment that makes it all worth it. I’ll think Well, maybe I’ll skip Dragon Reborn this time… and then I remember that if I don’t read it, I won’t get to relive Mat trouncing the Princes of Andor with a quarterstaff. To make an incredibly bad joke, you can’t beat that with a stick.
Like Stonebow (Hi! waves), I’ve spent a lot of my internet career at WoT BBs, and have made a lot of wonderful friends, so I have Jordan to thank for that, at least. We argue theory, we nitpick in the most ridiculous ways, and we try to figure out how it all will end. And occasionally we realize that we’re spending way too much time thinking about it.
I’ll keep reading, because I’m one of those people that believes more story is always a good thing. (And George Lucas has been testing me on that, let me tell you.) Someday, I’m confident it will end. Before I really lose interest. sigh
Perrin gets to where he was going and finds out he can’t do anything. Extended recount of miserable life in Stone Dog camp. Somebody peripheral to the plot gets stabbed in an alley. An important noble character whose name escapes me gets stabbed in the 100 page introductory chapter and then healed in short order. It’s Egwene’s turn to get kidnapped (“climax” of the book). Rand twiddles his thumbs. I also recall interminable sequences of Elayne being pregnant. That’s it. I’m not joking.
For what it’s worth, I liked it. Well, at least as much as I’ve liked the rest of the series. I don’t want to slam Jordan or those who thought his early books were great, but I finally started the series around the time book 9 was published, and my overall reaction to it is that it’s a mediocre, relatively standard fantasy series (though stretched farther, and with more detail, than most). It’s on the same level as something like J.V. Jones’ Book of Words or David Farland’s Runelords. I agree that the later books in WOT are different (much less focused on Rand, etc.) than the early ones, but they aren’t any worse to me. So, with that in mind, I enjoyed it on that level.
If there was a problem with book 10, it was that it’s all build up and no pay off. The other books tend to have a more conventional story arc, even though the sub-plots usually didn’t relate to it. So in the books prior to 10 (starting someplace in the middle books), Rand would get some goal in mind (e.g. take some city that’s ruled by a forsaken, drive back the Seanchan or however it’s spelled, cleanse the source, whatever) and then his chapters would build up to that, with the event happening as the climax. So each book sort of stands on its own as a story, at least with what Rand is doing. The sub-plots concerning the various other characters don’t stand on their own, and may not really build to anything in that particular book, but they’re incidentental to Rand’s central action. Book 10, of course, has no central action, no real story arc, it just continues a bunch of sub-plots that don’t get resolved. So, if you don’t find those sub-plots interesting, I can see why you wouldn’t like the book. But I mostly did like them (the Perrin-Faile storyline being a semi-exception), so I liked the book.
I got to the point where they start searching for that bowl-shaped water sa’angreal (?), but I don’t think I ever finished that one. I’ve been meaning to re-read the series for a while now (ooh, say five years?), since I’m a sucker for a well-developed world, but I just can’t face going through everything again. There’s too many damn characters wandering about doing stuff I don’t care about (barring Perrin, whose growing affiliation with the wolves was both interesting and completely out of left field). The ‘world of the Wheel of Time’ books are more interesting to me (oddly enough, I’ve found this with Tolkien as well), but I think I could hack the first two or three books in the series.
The question is, would it be worth my time?
To be honest, I find his prose to be a little turgid (I’m a fan of Mervyn Peake’s ‘cram as much as you can into a sentence until it groans under its own weight’ style), but the monsters and NPCs (no idea why that term just popped into my head…) keep me reading. And the balefire. Jordan’s interpretaiton of balefire is the most wonderfully destructive I’ve ever seen. ‘Burning threads from the pattern’ is a turn of phrase/ metaphor that just seems to appeal to me.
If he would have wrapped it up at book 5 I would have said without a doubt.
At book 7 I’d say give it a shot
At book 9 I would have said maybe.
But book ten was the most boring thing I’ve ever read. I once read for ten pages about a character who I had NO idea who they were. New character? Old character? I had no clue. I went back and reread it and still had no idea. I couldn’t even figure out what she was doing.
Then it just kind of stops. The only climax is an emotional one and I think it was undeserved. It could have been a truly heart wrenching scene instead he didn’t build it up correctly so it was kind of “huh well that was odd”
Oh, well if that’s the case, I’ll have to get at least that far.
Now all I have to do is set sensors to ‘Jordan’. That’s the tricky part, I think-- getting used to Jordan’s easy-going (or turgid. Take yer pick) prose.
Book 10 bit! I’d been wavering ever since about book 7, but the events at the end of 9 seemed to signal that Jordan had gotten his groove back, and things might proceed apace.
Was I wrong! The only thing I found mildly interesting in the bloody thing was the page and a half where Perrin extracted info from the captured Shaido Aiel.
Will I read the next book? I suppose. I’m too damned doggedly determined to let it drop now. I think.
After the book 9 I was back into “OMG! Cliffhanger! How is this going to affect everything and what’s gonna happen now!” mode. I was actually really looking forward to book 10 before it came out because there were so many possibilities.
I can honestly say I’ve never been so disappointed by a book in my life. It’s also one of the only books I own that I wish I hadn’t bought, and I own a LOT of books, not all of them particularly good.
To be fair, it did have “crossroads” and “twilight” in the title. That should have tipped us off. The title of the next one is “The Knife of Dreams” so at least we know that there will be some hot, dreamy knife action.
