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

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

feelin p fukken smug about being proven right abt a # of things

also [character x] is a true fukken ~*~*~*~pimp~*~*~*~ 4 all time

as a stand alone novel this wld be terrible - pacing and structural issues abound ~ but as a culmination it works okay. still weird to have the door slam closed on so many mysteries/plot threads/character arcs. it begins to feel like an entirely different series... still wish the chapters had more discrete sections w/ only one or two character povs it began to feel like i was reading one of those airport thrillers abt ravishing fbi pyschic detectives that clearly began life as tv pilot spec script

Just finished. The middle does sag a little (could have done without all the Whitecloaks stuff) but the ending was pretty awesome. Thought most the revelations were pretty obvious really. It's funny every time the characters go somewhere new i still expect them to doss around setting up camp, having petty arguments etc. but no, they actually get shit done now.

I'm waiting on the audiobook from my library. No reason to change up and try to read these now!

brandon sanderson should be hired to re-edit the entire series y/n

driving into work has drastically impacted my ability to read this

like, I don't think I noticed exactly how much of my commute time was taken up by reading until this week when I couldn't do it

brandon sanderson should be hired to re-edit the entire series y/n

YES! Well, based on the last book, which was easily the best written in the whole series.

This book was like BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM.

Perrin's stock rises so far so fast!

perrin should have been runnin things from bk 4 onwards imo

He's been the most skippable character from book 8 to now though, I think (and it wasn't like he was a big character in 5-7). I guess the siege of Malden in 'Knife of Dreams' was good.

If you meant his character could have jumped from book 4 straight to this book then, yeah, I agree.

Til now it's been easy to forget that in books 3 and 4 he was on a level with Mat awesomeness-wise.

you know what really is the worst about this thread, is that now i really want to read all these books. but i will have to read a bunch of the really boring ones to catch up. before getting to all this awesome resolution. sigh.

I'm waiting for the final one to come out before I start a re-read (I gave up at book 9), but my understanding is that the boring books don't seem quite so bad when you don't have to wait the 2-3 years between each book like people did when they first came out.

you know what really is the worst about this thread, is that now i really want to read all these books. but i will have to read a bunch of the really boring ones to catch up. before getting to all this awesome resolution. sigh.

― not everything is a campfire (ian), Saturday, 6 November 2010 17:49 (1 hour ago)

this is pretty much how I'm feeling. I got as far as....er... the one before "Lord of Chaos" I think, A pretty big undertaking, ploughing through that lot.

i finished Crown of Swords, the one just past Lord of Chaos IIRC. remember trying to read uh, whatever the next one was, path of daggers? never made it

thats the real slog imo ian, if you can get through that you're on the downslope i think

Til now it's been easy to forget that in books 3 and 4 he was on a level with Mat awesomeness-wise

yah - through the first four books perrin seemed like a much more interesting and substantial character - then he stagnated for another eight books...

part of it was that the book felt rushed and part of it was the characters that got a lot of 'screen time' but i feel kinda unfulfilled by this book. it was fun to read & its exciting to have so much happen after so long but most of the things that i cared about went unaddressed or barely rated more than a couple of pages.

also what did everyone think of the aviendha chapters???

wont get my mitts on this until friday.

Loved the Aviendha time travel thing but it felt like something it's gonna be really hard to actually do anything with in the next book.

it felt a little shoehorned in almost? from what i understand (ummmm) a lot of the qns those chapters raise were intended to be 'dealt with' in his outrigger series/sequel but placed as they are its kinda like 'oh, okay... anyways'. i thought they were the most interesting and jordan-eaque parts of the book tho

I think what I liked most about this book was the revisiting of themes from The Shadow Rising (which is probably my favourite of all the books) - trips into the past/future, experiments in T'A'R/the "wolf dream", Slayer, Eelfinn/Aelfinn, Lanfear! Perrin being a bad-ass. Mat ramping up his dickishness after toning it down for the last couple of books.

But yeah, a big difference is that back then the story basically had 3 or 4 main plot lines and was still at the world-building stage, whereas now there's about 20 plotlines converging very quickly, so the introduction of anything totally new and out of nowhere (as Aviendha's plotline certainly is) feels awkward.

But the theme of that chapter, the questions it raises, are top-notch jordan. It makes me wonder if he actually has a sneaking sympathy for Ishamael/Elan philosophically, for all that that character comes across as a kind of parody of post-structuralism.

Maybe it'll make more sense in the next book if Aviendha has a big role to play in determining whatever ceasefire between everyone is brokered.

It makes me wonder if he actually has a sneaking sympathy for Ishamael/Elan philosophically, for all that that character comes across as a kind of parody of post-structuralism

ive never read him this way! perhaps because its indicated somewhere in the supplemental stuff that he was a logician. he is a really interesting character partic his ease in shifting persaons & ive always gotten a sense that theres a kernel of his 'philosophy of inevitability' thats right. i also always think its interesting that the majority of the forsaken were academics before the war & that (at least prior to this book) the two most successful forsaken were a philosopher & a pyschotherapist.

hmmmm my favorite of the books is the great hunt & maybe thats why i liked the pervious book so much - it deals w/ the qns of identity & free will & purpose that 1st start to really develop in that book. e.g. how the journey through the portal stones gets mirrored in the 'veins of gold' chapter.

the most jordan-esque thing about the new book actually may be the obscure character from the eye of the world that he brings back for a pov in chapter 1 - i continue to be impressed by richly detailed and plotted the series is.

Seemed like the Aviendha stuff was basically just put in there to give her something to do, as she was fast becoming the most pointless member of Rand's harem. Oh yeah and i like the new keepin it positive Rand, he was turning into a bore,

ive never read him this way! perhaps because its indicated somewhere in the supplemental stuff that he was a logician. he is a really interesting character partic his ease in shifting persaons & ive always gotten a sense that theres a kernel of his 'philosophy of inevitability' thats right. i also always think its interesting that the majority of the forsaken were academics before the war & that (at least prior to this book) the two most successful forsaken were a philosopher & a pyschotherapist.

Graendal was actually the second forsaken after Lanfear right? I wonder why she turned. I wonder if she ultimately concluded that human nature was evil or at least not particularly noble and decided that aligning with the big bad would be more fun.

i can double check this but for sure lanfear, although responsible for actually drilling the bore, was among the last of the forsaken to take the oaths - the first is either ishamael or semirhage both of whom went to shayol ghul only a few years after the bore was created.

its so sad that i know this but bathameal, aginor & mogh are the other surviving forsaken that took the oaths during the collapse and before the war started.