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

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

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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

Went to the bookstore today but the new one wasn't there ;_;

People overstate how plodding these books got. 1 mildly and 1 substantially plodding book out of 12 in total (not incl. the new one) is really not bad!

Yeah, I will say that the pace crawl in this series has nothing on Steven Erikson (although part of Erikson's issue is his prose style)

Anyway the last two have been on a fucking roll and I'm hyped for the new one.

btw thank you for reminding me to actually take lunch today so I can grab this

eagerly awaiting my copy, sadly wont have it till next week

50 pages in!

gah. Getting this at the weekend

spoilers pls

SPOILER: It has Perrin in it!

dennis perrin?

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Media/Pix/pictures/2008/08/26/reggie460.jpg?

damn was there ever anyone called perrin that wasnt awesome

This is very good so far (about 100 pages in) though the fact that things happen so quickly now is a bit jarring. One chapter is spent on plot developments that would have stretched over a book or two previously.

Perrin is more interesting in this book than he's been since about book 4.

Mat is typically awesome, and Brandon Sanderson has gotten the tone of the character better than in the last book I think - and it's important to have the best character in the series actually be the best character in the series.

you say all the right things you dog you

Also touching (I don't think this is too spoilerish) is the Rand/Nynaeve relationship (not in that way), which I guess was foreseeable from the previous book but not from anything prior.

first book laid foundations for that tbf, tho i dont know what it is yet