The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

[wolfbrother]

The prologue for the final book, A Memory of Light has been released. Great read. Can't wait for the full book to be available. Its been soooo long.

[Morning_Star]

I don't want to read the prologue until I have the whole book in my hands, but I just started a reread of the series in preparation for its release. I'm very excited - and a bit nervous - to see how it all ends.

[Wimsey]

I recently read the first 2/3rds of the last story, and I'm actually interested in how it ends again!

This series is one of the most frustrating I've ever read. The first 3-4 stories were really good. However, it then got bogged down into this endlessly stretched out set of plots, many of which led to nothing in the end. Several of the books in the middle need never have been written at all.

Part of this was Jordan's horrible writing: he began OK, but his writing degenerated badly as he tried to nurse the series along for every book he could. Indeed, I barely remember anything from the last books he wrote alone (other than saidin being cleansed), in part because I never knew who anybody was (he never reintroduced characters) and also because, well, nothing really happened.

Learning that Brandon Sanderson was taking over the final story did give me a slight pause for hope: I've read a few Sanderson stories, and he's a pretty tight writer. And he did a lot to clean things up! Indeed, it was basically foreshadowed by the opening chapters of the first volume, where he arbitrarily kills off a useless character who was still around for some reason.

That written, I found The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight to be well-written and actually (gasp!) telling a story for the first time since, I dunno, Fires of Heaven or so. In a lot of ways, it's a return to the stories Jordan used to tell about self-realization and self-acceptance. It seems well setup for a dramatic conclusion: and I'm curious to see how this aspect of self-realization/acceptance is the lynchpin for the climax.


This did cause me to go back and re-read the older books. I got about as far as Lord of Chaos before I realized that nothing more was going to happen until Gathering, and that's the real tragedy. Basically, one can see that Jordan did set up nearly everything in the first 3-4 books: and a lot of the foreshadowing, prophecies, and unaddressed questions from those stories are covered in Gathering/Midnight.

So, I am hopeful that Memory will be the satisfying conclusion that we should have gotten in, I dunno, 1998 or so!

[Midnightsfire]

I sincerely hope someone gets to write other stories about this world. It's too good to let fade away.

The cover for Memory of Light
click to enlarge

A cool pic unrelated:


Click to enlarge.

I won't be happy to see this end.

[wolfbrother]

Originally Posted by Wimsey

This did cause me to go back and re-read the older books. I got about as far as Lord of Chaos before I realized that nothing more was going to happen until Gathering, and that's the real tragedy. Basically, one can see that Jordan did set up nearly everything in the first 3-4 books: and a lot of the foreshadowing, prophecies, and unaddressed questions from those stories are covered in Gathering/Midnight.

The Knife of Dreams is a good book that starts everything moving again. After LoC till KoD, I pretty much read only the Mat scenes. I got really bored of the Perrin, Egwene and Elayne story lines. They dragged on for too long. Rand has some good scenes with the cleansing, fight with Sammael, battle against the Seanchan.

[Wimsey]

Originally Posted by wolfbrother

The Knife of Dreams is a good book that starts everything moving again. After LoC till KoD, I pretty much read only the Mat scenes. I got really bored of the Perrin, Egwene and Elayne story lines. They dragged on for too long. Rand has some good scenes with the cleansing, fight with Sammael, battle against the Seanchan.

The problem was that it was all plot and no story. The first 3-4 books did tell their own (albeit related) stories on different aspects of self-realization. After that, it seemed like plot for the sake of plot.

That said, the last 2 books seem to be back to story-telling. Whether that's Sanderson or Jordan finally getting it together, I don't know, but it did make it worthwhile to read.