I just finished book #10 of Robert Jordan's stupid series.

I just turned 40 last week and I've been reading these damned things since I was in my teens...

Wait was the first WoT book written in the 80s? That can't be--

First book was published in 1990.

xpost

A quick check shows the first 2 were in 1990... so I was only just out of my teens...

Yo peeps also how awesome was the verin plot reveal.

That kind of shit is where RJ is pretty unique - he laid the groundwork for that back in book 2, and the moneyshot had to wait almost two decades.

Read up to the end of Winter's Heart back in 8th grade, and by the time the most recent two came out, didn't bother refreshing my memory because Crossroads of Twilight was such a slog, and the series seemed to be perpetually treading water, despite the cleansing of Said'in, etc. Is the new one good enough/resolves enough that it's worth rededicating myself to the effort?

lol well i mean...

Crosswords was probably the most diffuse in the entire series. Knife of Dreams was the most focused since about book 5 and the new one is probably the most focused in the entire series. Basically from Knife of Dreams onwards it became structurally necessary to reverse the trend of setting up two new sub-plots for every one resolved.

crossroads (lol) is the worst book in the series by a long way - nothing happens to the lamest characters for like 700 pages - but they all seem a little less of a trial if u read the series from book 1 on steadily. thats how i recommend reading b4 jumping into the newest couple

convergence and revelation sing more sweetly if u can remember who tf every1 is imo

Yeah, the main problem with that stretch of the series IMHO is that getting the books every couple of years meant you're sitting there going, "wait, I'm supposed to even remember toveine or yukiri or etc, let alone care about them?"

If nothing else the way in which the new one in particular starts to stitch things up (e.g. for the White Tower tangle of plots alone you get unification of Egwene-in-tower, elaida, black-ajah-hunters, what's-verin-up-to, what's-sheriam-up-to, lelaine-or-romanda-who-will-win, oh-noes-a'rangar, siuan-and-gareth, why-is-gawyn-a-psycho-tool, mesaana, foretold-seanchan-attack-oh-noes, probably a couple more I'm forgetting right now... into a single, neatly tied up plot) starts to cut down on the number of things the narrative will need to keep checking in on.

"That's what really sucks about all this too is that there're so many loose ends that I'm madly curious about, like what ever happened between Mat and the Daughter of the Nine Moons, and was there ever any more about the people on the other side of the desert all the way off the map to the east that ritualistically kill their kings all the time or something like that. And what about the lizard people through that one doorway, huh? Ooh! and what about that bad guy that only appeared in one scene in one book who could apparently channel the True Source and had a blue line crossing his eyeballs and scared the shit out of the other bad guys!?
But I'll be damned if I'm going to read the books to find out.
I don't know if I'm still super-nerdy for even wanting to know about this stuff, or if I'm redeemed by refusing to knuckle under and read 5 more books about bickering Aes Sedais.
― Dan I. (Dan I.), 03 May 2005 02:31 (4 years ago)"

next book plot summary?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apJJ0NzOXEg

lol but still... HYPE

11.02.10

lol but yeah but lol

last one was so good

lol dan i is so otm. i know i'm nerdy enough to at least read some spoiler summaries of everything i missed, once the series is finally finished. definitely don't think i have what it takes to reread everything in order to get back into it. seriously tho, what was up with those lizard dudes?

i cant remember the lizard dudes ;_;

last one might be the best book. Sanderson is able to work in Jordan's style without succumbing to Jordan's penchant for excessive repetition. Felt less padded than the any of the six or seven prior books.

last one is without much doubt the best of the last 6 or 7, yeah, but books 1-3 are similarly nonstop widening of scope while driving the story and 4-6 are still pretty kickass for the most part.

just glad it got back to anywhere near that level tbph

Kind of keep being dumbfounded by how much of this there is. I have read the first two books.

i'm not recommending to go fwd with anymore just yet, but if it finishes as well as the last book suggests then i'd say the purgatory of the middle 4000 pages is worth it

I'll repeat again that, while it bogs down somewhat, it's actually easier and more engaging to read the entire thing at once, largely because you don't have time to forget who characters are.

the juggalos in book 9 are definitely the highlight btw chap

Rand Al'J

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_good_juggalo_names

and to think the only thing ever stopping me penning the great fantasy work of our time was not being able to come up with character names. smh.

theres a piece by zach baron in the believer about the series: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201010/?read=article_baron. its p good as on overview but it spends a lot of time talking around the stuff that makes the books special. one of the things that he touches on - the layering and foreshadowing that jordan does - is kinda interesting to think about. theres never really been a time when the series wasnt in progress & i wonder if the books will suffer by ending? certainly a lot of what seems to occupy ppl online is the working out of various mysteries & theories - parsing the clues or w/e.

still p hype for the next book tho - only a couple of weeks!

did anyone up in this bitch used to read or pos to rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan? those folks were the ultimate nerds but it ruled.

I never got around to reading that; I was so into the music groups that I never had time to branch over into the book groups.

read over these again and book 9 is definitely the best

robert jordan fan 'humour' ^

i had a classic 90s geocities site with animated wheels where i wrote insanely detailed theories about the daughter of the 9 moons and why some random throwaway character was 'proven' black ajah instead of doing my homework.

i also had cool drawings of battles and the great cities

that is awesome.
sigh.
that believer article is pretty good. it almost makes me want to read the books i never did. but that would mean having to start at like book three or four or something, just to remember who everyone is.

i disagree with baron that the entire 7-10 run is plodding - book 9 has a crazy exciting set piece ending and some really good character moments as well as a load of intricate foreshadowing/fanbait. but that stretch is still interminable at times & i mostly skimmed book 10 on my reread.

I think the awesomeness of Lord Of Chaos set a precedent which Jordan struggled to live up to in the next few books. Nothing can excuse Crossroads of Twilight though.

the sharp contrast in how irritating Jordan's "and here's the same story told FROM ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE" trick was compared to Glen Cook's similar trick in the Black Company books is startling

although the payoff to both is great

love that believer article.

this part actually gets at one of the things i actually find interesting about the books as an adult:

Even more problematic, Jordan possessed an understanding of women so bankrupt it would make a seventh-grade boy weep. It was admirable that he tried: Jordan’s heroes were as liable to be female as male—more so, even—and most of the societies he depicted were either matriarchal or, at worst, equal opportunity.

But Jordan’s women do a lot of “sniffing,” usually loudly. They cross their arms under their breasts. Men to them are “wool-headed lummoxes” or “wool-brained mules.” (A disproportionately high number of women in the Wheel of Time are also lesbians—make of that what you will.) Jordan was not above describing rivals for the same man as “two strange cats who had just discovered they were shut up in the same small room.” That is, when he wasn’t making Borscht Belt jokes about their bad cooking, or spending pages describing their dresses. (In this respect, Jordan put romance novels to shame: the Wheel of Time without a doubt holds the record for inexplicably extended rhapsodies over brocaded silk, embroidery, hemlines, and necklines.) Mostly, what Jordan’s women are is the same: some combination of cold, willful, quick to take offense, and—around the right man—weak in the knees.

Basically, that intentionally or not, Jordan has kinda of created a weird not-quite inversion of our own patriarchy, gender imbalance, etc. that the (very obnoxious) coded ways men and women act in the novels could possibly be read as deriving from that.

ha, the thing is that his women are annoying in such a specific way that it's actually pretty easy to overlook that his men are also broad-brush caricatures who often act like nonsensical buffoons

I think he spent some time in the earlier books fucking around with character perspective in a way that makes a lot of the gender stereotyping into something that shouldn't be taken at face-value; specifically, the internal monologues of Rand, Mat and Perrin where they all are doubting their ability to talk to and connect with girls while envying the ease with which the other two do it. The facts were all consistent but their interpretations by each character were so wildly divergent that I stopped taking his descriptions of other people's behavior as being driven by the omniscient narrator and more filtered through the perceptions of the character that was the focus of the scene; through that filter, the sniffiness of some of the women makes a LOT more sesne, as does the sheer stupidity of some of the men.

Granted, it doesn't handwave entirely the roteness of some of his characters' traits but it does make them more... interesting, in that you can use them to flesh out the preconceptions/prejudices of the scene's focal character.

all the lead male characters are idiots tbf? wool headed fools etc

yeah exactly, (to both posts above), i think it's possible to see the characters as restrained by and reacting to a heavily gendered society (like our own). i mean, i think the the event that set the whole thing in motion (tainting the male half of the source) resulted from the men going off and acting without the women.

ha yeah i suppose dudes being 100% responsible for the apocalypse might give the women an edge when it comes to arguments

http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg http://matt.waggoner.com/images/wheel.jpg iMAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!

MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!
MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!

MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!

aw, stupid img limit ruining my quote

taint on the img src

^^^^ name of Weezer's next album, iirc

i think it's possible to see the characters as restrained by and reacting to a heavily gendered society (like our own). i mean, i think the the event that set the whole thing in motion (tainting the male half of the source) resulted from the men going off and acting without the women.

yah - one of the things that baron talks about in his article is the way jordan used repetition to 'harden' certain ideas (like women's fundamental disapproval of men) into something more foundational and encompassing than just cliche. as frustratingly as seeing 'wool-brained' come up on a once per 6 pages average is it does help in giving a real sense of the basic, fundamental prejudices at work in his world

I think its about time for another attempted reading of this series.

please liveblog your efforts here.

I've probably read the first five books three or four times each, but have yet to make it past that point. Each time I want to do this, I start over, but then get distracted by other books before I catch up.

hmm, make it to six at least. theres kind of ...a lull after that for a decade or so

I would never have read them if it weren't for audiobooks.

only read 1-7 or something, but i was all up in them for a time