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

i guess i need to read these again before launching into the next one, which means buying them all again.

As counter-intuitive as it seems, it really is easier to read these in one giant lump than it is to read them as they come out with the giant gaps between books.

problem is, that was a possibility when i was 15 and didn't have to do anything except eat, sleep and have hair. nowadays, not so much time for reading.

i never read number 11, and i didnt even finish 10.

i may just pick up 11 and see how it goes. i havent read a word of this series since 2003 but i read the first 6 or so several time each.

dilemma:

do i got a bookstore to buy a paperback of the eye of the world, OR do i order it from amazon, even though with shipping it's only a few bucks cheaper? I worry that if I wait for it to arrive in the mail my enthusiasm for nostalgia will have faded.

btw this is some secret shame shit, but the first time i picked one of these books up i was in 7th grade and i did it cuz i saw a (cute) girl reading one of them and thought maybe it would make me more likable/"cool."

I'd buy it at a store, but that's me.

other option is to ask my mom to look in the closet of my old bedroom for my old copy, but that might just make her confused and a little sad.

I am pretty sure I picked up the first book because I saw it on the shelf in the library and thought "oh hey, a huge fantasy book; I need something to read for the next two weeks".

that is how i began reading the fantastical works of Mr. Raymond E. Feist.

same as that. didn't fancy much else on the limited fantasy shelf of our local book store, which is always a factor.

there was one (short) aisle of sf/fantasy in the local library, and i swear i must have spent dozens of hours in my adolescence staring at those books. it's a shame i wasn't taller, i must have missed out on so much ;_;

Oh man, we had an entire section! Looking back, I can't believe how lucky I was re: the libraries my mom worked in.

We had a pretty big section in ours as well. It's how I ended up reading Avram Davidson, which I'll be forever grateful for.

to be fair there was a lot more stuff at the library a town over, but i couldn't ride my bike there.

even as a pre-teen i knew to avoid L Ron Hubbard though. I don't know how I managed that. I think I looked at those warlord of space books or whatever and just kind of knew they were crappy?

but they ere big, and there were a lot of them.

read the first one aged about 13, and it was just embarrassing

Unfortunately I read 8 of the Mission Earth L. Ron books. Thanks limited small town library! But this thread has made me decided to re-read RJ again after finishing Ulysses.

holy shit the audiobook eye of the world is 25 CDs long??!?

I think I read 1 L. Ron book...? I ended up being more of a Heinlein whore anyway; I don't think I ever even read 2001: A Space Odyssey

i read not one but THREE books by mercedes lackey. can't believe it.

i think my parents lost faith in my manliness when i stopped reading books with spaceships on 'em and switched to elves & fanciful beasts.

i read not one but THREE books by mercedes lackey. can't believe it.

hahahahaha you are not alone

CURSE YOU, SWORD AND SORCERESS ANTHOLOGIES

I mean, we could give you a pass for Diana Paxson, Mercedes Lackey or Jennifer Robeson, but ALL THREE?

(altho looking those back up makes me realize I have actually read Charles DeLint! hmm)

holy shit the audiobook eye of the world is 25 CDs long??!?

― ian,

It's like 27 hours or something. Took nearly two weeks of gym time and chores to make it through.

okay, i bought a paperback of the eye of the world.
if i have as much fun with this as i hope, i might have to begin a blog. or else you will all have to see this thread on new arrivals everyday.

happy coincidence: guy on the street selling records outside the bookstore, got a clean copy of Joy Division's "Closer" and also Fleetwood Macs "Pious Bird of Good Omen" so flipping those will pay for the cost of the book & then some.

the paperback editions of these are so flimsy ime

this crazy chick on another forum with like a talmudic knowledge of the series used many quotes and examples to convince she had worked how the series would end and now i am bummed a little.

You wouldn't be on the Steven Erikson forum, would you?

don't trust anything u read on the innerne what are you 12?

ha yah stone monkey i post there sometimes when i am not banned :/

nah man 4 real this chick knows the wheel of time liked she lived it like she blogged it like she died and was reborn tied to it

LOL She is a little... Full on...

the wheel turns and ages come and sad nerds write fanfic..

Most of the fanfic writing nerds seem happy enough in their little worlds of slash. I do wonder what the slashers amke of RJ; he pretty much does their work for them.

Did any of you read that prequel book? I've refused to so far.

new spring is pretty good but i am like non-fanfic world's biggest moiraine stan so

A lot of it seems to be along the lines of: And then they did lez up. At that point, I think, RJ's other fantasies kicked in.

Hah yeah for some reason one of the only things I remember about the WoT is this one throwaway scene where a dark Aes Sedai or darkfriend or whatever is torturing a Warder by making him feel uncountable pleasure. I guess this is what happens when you read these books at the age of 12. Maybe I should just read slash to tide myself over until all three final volumes come out.

so im halfway through book 11, after abandoning the series right after 10 came out. and im really enjoying it, and fully invested in the absurdity of it all. and actually feeling kinda sad jordan died and didnt get to finish it.

and a part of me fantasizes about a college gender studies course on these books and their incredibly fucked up yet kinda fascinating gender politics.

I just finished book 5 and I have to take a break from this series. Book 5 was really, really, extra bad. Lots of pointless traveling - oh look, Cirque de Nynaeve! - messy, poorly organized fight sequence at the end (switching viewpoints and covering the same thing from multiple sides is a bad idea). Easily the worst book thus far.

I found it really discouraging - do I really want to slog through more mediocrity to get to the last couple of good books? Can the payoff be worth it? I'm on the fence; might just pick up the Steven Erikson books instead.

I did buy myself a new copy of the eye of the world, and i am reading it, and it's worse than i remember it being, in terms of the writing anyway. also rand is such a pussy wtf i hate myself for ever thinking he was cool.

The Erikson ones have a pretty hard learning curve. He deliberately makes no effort to explain anything at all in the first book and you either sink or swim. The second one is a work of genius, though.

The Erikson's sound right up my alley. I like books that throw me in the deep end.

Jordan assumes that each book is a new wading pool and you never get more than waist high.

the wikipedia article on erikson suggests that the first novel in his series was orig written as a stand-alone; does this mean i can read it with some level of satisfaction without feeling obligated to read more? i don't know why i'm asking if i've committed myself to this robert jordan re-read for the next few months butttttt

You can, but the second one is much better. The quality becomes... quite variable after that.His prose gets a bit purple from time to time too. And I say that as a long time member of his fan forum...

I couldn't get through the first Erikson. There was a surfeit of crazy ideas, but nothing compelling to hold them together. Read Mieville instead.

I've read all the Mieville stuff. Need something new.

I quite enjoyed Alan Campbell's Scar Night. Haven't read the sequel yet though.

the wikipedia article on erikson suggests that the first novel in his series was orig written as a stand-alone; does this mean i can read it with some level of satisfaction without feeling obligated to read more?

yeah first 5 books are independent after that it loses the pick em up in any order aspect - also the last couple were terrible on a lvl jordan couldnt even have contemplated

with jordan idk - i mean the writings pretty clumsy altho book 2 in particular was kind of clever and ~deep~ in a way i wasnt expecting but the world and its mysteries get really engaging its pretty much the sole reason that i think the series holds up its v. livable

been going full on nerd lately and skimming some of the older books and trying to remember some stuff with the help of the internet. lots of minor yet really cool stuff i had forgotten. (like Slayer, especially.)

I kinda wonder what the final word on this series will be. it's been mentioned a lot already but there is something pretty cool about the overall structure, starting out with basically a handful of characters and following their every move and then gradually pulling out to a very, very long shot that almost literally contains the entire fictional world, every moving part--it's sorta breathtaking and i wonder if once the entire thing is finished it will seems more satisfying. part of the fun of tolkien was always the sense that despite the main action there was an almost infinite depth of detail going on behind it, in other places or historically. Jordan seems to have been actually WRITING that out rather than suggest it. and that rather than being about a world in decline as in LOTR, Jordan seems to be writing the reverse of that, suggesting that the world was withering before the events of the first novel and that now it's experiencing a kind of rebirth.

the level of detail was especially brought home to me when i read that from the Eye of the World to Knife of Dreams the story takes place over about 2-3 years. i could have sworn it was at least 10!

and as i said above, the meta-gender theorizing that could be done about these novels would be really interesting, in that the "Fall" in the case of this universe seems to be the very creation or "break" between the genders. (admittedly this would be way more cool if every man and and every woman didnt act pretty much exactly the same according to their gender, tho there does seem to be some glimmers in the latest that maybe there's more to this, that it's a symptom of a larger problem/rift between the genders. that's prob way too generous a reading tho.)