who in this bitch reads robert jordan? -- The Wheel of Time thread

"won't get it don't deserve it" is like the party line directed at young people by auld curmudgeons like yourself deems, prepared to back myself in the task that lies before me. The tragic reality is that any advice or recommendations gained here don't make a whole world of difference because like it or not I'm more or less contractually obliged to listen to these things now, if only for the sake of a quiet life.

Thank you EZ Snappin for pointers, I find this extremely reassuring as my audiobook listening habits tend to involve a great deal of drifting in and out of the narrative. I have a four hour train journey to Wales tomorrow so I'm gonna try and pay attention and push on past the introductory section if poss.

EZ is right in that the first 50, maybe 100 pages are a slog

I tried to reread a few years ago but also couldn't quite get into it enough to continue

The opening prologue with Lews is more indicative of the type of grand sweep that RJ is going for

Once Rand dies (around pg 150 iirc) it picks up

Haaaaa

idk wd genuinely yeah id obv recommend the books as the best attempt at worldbuilding ive seen since tolkien ripd big man- but yknow ppl feel same way as that about grrrrmartin and his stuff left me dead cold.

First setup yeah, cliche after cliche. After four hours you'll know how it grabs you.

Let me know obv i'd take a 400 hr audiobook as a boon the way my new commutes looking

a decent chunk of 'the eye of the world' is a deliberate tolkien retread, partly as a way of nodding at or introducing important themes throughout the series (stories repeat themselves, 'echoes of legend') and partly because in the late 80s it was hard to sell publishers on multivolume fantasy epics and jordan thought basically retelling parts of the fellowship would help get his series published. i dont know if this makes it more appealing to listen to or not

the series has pretty much nothing to do with tolkien after the first two books, if you end up liking or caring about the series at all its sort of interesting how what seems 'important' in the first book shifts radically based on the way the rest of the series develops - theres all sorts of interesting groundwork being done that doesnt pay off for lots of time, solid world-building, &c. theres another jordan thread on ilx where the series gets discussed more seriously/in-depth but it has lots of spoilers. but generally whats worthwhile about 'the wheel of time' is how effectively jordan layers in all these minor mysteries and plotlines, how dense and detailed it is. the characters arent that great and the broad story loses its momentum because of his desire to expand it to include everything, its a little like someone in a borges short story writing epic fantasy so its definitely not for everyone. but its totally the sort of series that rewards for caring about the backstory and motivation of that one shifty innkeeper the characters meet in book one, because jordan does too. its also i think the most structurally/thematically interesting fantasy series ive ever read, it take some risks with its story and characters that dont always pay off but that i appreciate as a fan of the genre

Pashmina, iirc, posted about some of the past/alternative world thread setups that lend the series that just-over-the-horizon depth, but on phone so no help to you there.

Maybe yr either a jordan or a martin person idk

xp ya all that

It's better than ASOIAF

― 乒乓, Monday, December 30, 2013 10:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/forums/upload/Yi-Long/wrongcattext.jpg

i read a LOT of this in middle school. up through A CROWN OF SWORDS iirc. i got off the boat when things got reallllllly plodding.

Lamp starting to sell me on this. Either way, I've got at least 12 hours of train travelling to do in the next week or so, so I'm definitely going to try and devote as much of it as possible to getting through this first book and then I'll see where we are. Certainly heartened by news that it isn't just a LOTR retread and that the world building / depth of cast is a strength, that's the sorta thing I go in for usually. Nice 1 guys

lamp always makes me want to read these but i just

otoh, i did find the first nine in the bookcase at my local the other day

Lol ian I admit I was being a bit trolley

Just kinda sick of people saying ASOIAF is better because it's "mature" fantasy

being able to tell people they're better than martin is also a prime motivator for me reading these

in the cold light of the past couple books i think we can admit that ASOIAF is pretty lame and that GRRM is a rapey creep.

jordan ruled not only for all the grownup reasons that lamp was talking bout but also b/c dude occasionally demonstrated his mastery of awesome, thrilling, insane narrative prose in awesome, thrilling ways. i think at least once per book, which is worth it to me. they're long but it's not like they take a lot of effort to read.

average, i'd say a lot more often than once per book- just eeeeh not much at all there for two or three after book 6

The first book is actually the outlier in terms of the tone of the series

He's still getting his sea legs I think, or maybe it's due to the reasons Lamp mentioned above

Through book 6 it's straight fire...then it tapers off

I stopped at book 9 but am eager to restart and finish the series

wasted so much of my life on these, which is maybe why i couldn't bring myself to care at all about ASOIAF. i gave up after crossroads of twilight i think but get nostalgic every once in a while and go back to read the plot summaries on wikipedia

in the fifth grade i wrote part of a fantasy novel that was basically just a rip of WOT + dikuMUD and i am mortified by the thought that it might still exist somewhere

Yeahhh so 14 hours in and I’m predictably addicted. Still a tiny bit resistant to some of the most excessive world-building elements of it (when Moraine or the Gleeman get carried away and start reeling off lists of names of kings and kingdoms, blergh) though I think this is at least partially due to names really not seeming like Jordan’s forte. But there’s plenty here that I’m enjoying a lot. The occasional glimpses of Rand as reckless and a wee bit of a badass are fun.

At the moment I’m trying to puzzle out what’s going on in the dreams they all keep having. Is the guy they keep meeting actually the Dark One? The guy narrating is giving him the same voice as the baddie from the prologue, but I could have sworn that wasn’t actually the Dark One himself, just a lieutenant or something.

Anyhow, this has now stopped feeling like a direct retread of LOTR (though still soooo many broad similarities to Fellowship) and this is a good thing.

Attaboy

No spoilers btw get tae fuck

Can feel already that it's going to become the bane of my working days that I can't listen to this. Get in an hour through commuting, maybe a bit before bed, that's yer lot. Fucking sucks, this is gathering pace brilliantly.

lol

continually impressed by Jordan's ability to up the tension by bringing in new and viable threats. very enjoyable hunt narrative, this. also the narrator's doing a damn good job at voicing so many different characters

Even when he goes meandering off onto ridiculous tangents you ultimately don't care about, Jordan is pretty baller

"Remember your oaths, al'Lan Mandragoran, Lord of the Seven Towers! What of the oath of a Diademed Battle Lord of the Malkieri?"

ehhhhhh hate this shit

How dare u, listen to book 10 and say that again

makes me feel nauseous with guilt that I'm listening to sthing so nerdy, wish he'd rein it in a bit. It's fine though cuz it's still all really enjoyable, just that those sorta bits make me wince

I'm sure this will have been gone over in detail elsewhere (avoiding spoilers like the plague atm so don't wanna check) but like, did this guy actually know any women other than his mam? Every female character is basically fucking identical to all the others! And they're all total shrews! At first I was thinking "Oh matriarchal society, badass, kind of interesting inversion of Eve as cause of the Fall going on here" but the more I listen the more I'm beginning to feel that this is just Jordan's blind for the fact that they're all paper thin characters "Oh no it's cool guys, this isn't derogatory to women, can't you see they're in charge?". In spite of the fact that even supremo badass magician lady still needs a brooding, muscle-bound king-in-exile to take care of her, to take just one example. Like, all very well and good to create a world where women are on top of the heap, but then it seems like in loads of important ways (guards in the cities, village councils, business owners, travelling entertainers, you name it) it's all still just totally male-dominated.

No spoilers obv., but could someone who's finished these things indicate whether this central dynamic - male protagonists as a bunch of goons with nary a clue about what might be going on inside the heads of the women consistently get ticked off for being a bunch of goons by interchangeable feamle characters apparently modelled on a disliked primary school teacher - runs through the whole series? Not gonna influence me especially, y'understand, but forewarned is forearmed.

Idk why everything I post itt looks like a complaint, I'm having a great time with this, first book has been a rip-roaring tale

Idk why everything I post itt looks like a complaint, I'm having a great time with this

Jordan fandom in a nutshell

Came here to note what an A++ line "Death is lighter than a feather, duty is heavier than a mountain" was in the context of this story, espesh when considering that (so far) Jordan's prose has had to be carried along by the narrative. Cursory Google leaves me entirely unsurprised to find that this is an old Eastern proverb and not a Jordan original.

Which is not to say that I haven't enjoyed the second book, bcuz this is fucking aces

Picky enough imo

Avoiding spoilers for this shit is p. much a daily struggle at this point, particularly given the number of references to ppl and places that are flying over my head now. But fuckit, I refuse to be drawn, mostly out of fear that if I find out what's actually going to happen here then I'll just be robbing myself of hundreds of hours of listening pleasure. Jordan upsetting my expectations at almost every turn so far. Although even bearing in mind that most of my predictions to date have been dead wrong I would still bet my mortgage on this shady Selene character being a baddie of some import.

otoh this sorta shit - "men often mistake killing and revenge for justice. They seldom have the stomach for justice." or "My mother always told me the best way to learn to deal with a man was to learn to ride a mule. She said they have about equal brains most of the time. Sometimes the mule is smarter" or "Men! When you cannot win an argument, you either run away or resort to force" smdh at how this guy has created a nominally female-dominated society and yet still manages to have misogyny and condescension leaking from the pores of his prose

Ah jaysus so no confirmation but I think I just found out who Selene is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://bookandborrow.com/UploadImage/Author/10242009105514PM.jpg

are you really surprised that a failed dr john stunt double finds solace in writing awkward, misogynistic, condescending fantasy? tho i think it is mitigated somewhat by the obvious terror jordan had of actually writing about sex.

branderson sanderson is a goofy mormon so his books are super super awkward too.

nb i love these books w all my heart.

ahh, a universal look (the beard! the hat! the glasses! the cane!). would be interested to know if there was anyone out there who didn't have a guy with this aesthetic at their school

i think somewhere on an other thread i half-heartedly tried to, if not defend, then at least contextualize the obvious "gender trouble" of the books as a pretty damning portrait of a society suffering from a kind of gender crisis. i think the idea was that Jordan's whole saga is basically about conflicts between the genders--albeit a totally flawed one still grounded in gender essentialism. i prefer to think of it all as jordan trying to imagine what its like to be a woman but sadly getting no farther than imagining how annoying men must be from the outside. so all his female characters become bad stereotypes--tho not always!

Assumed u thought selene was an ilxor tbh

Man if only I was a lady rather than woolly-headed male I would've been able to zing u so hard darraghmac

No spoilers obv., but could someone who's finished these things indicate whether this central dynamic - male protagonists as a bunch of goons with nary a clue about what might be going on inside the heads of the women consistently get ticked off for being a bunch of goons by interchangeable feamle characters apparently modelled on a disliked primary school teacher - runs through the whole series? Not gonna influence me especially, y'understand, but forewarned is forearmed.

i think this is fair comment and no, it p much sticks to this format

*pulls braid*

Moving through these at a fair old lick now, just polished off book 3. Ending sequence as all characters converge and the narrative jumps between the PsOV was very very good. From what I can gather it's a gradual but steady decline for quite a while now? So much enjoyable shit that I can already tell is to come (I hope) but definitely foremost among that is an encounter of some kind with all the Two Rivers village folk from the start of book 1. Gimme more Tam Al'Thor, dammit! Little aside in this book when Perrin just lost dropped out and lost himself in being a blacksmith again for a few days was satisfying. "Most improved" goes to Mat, fro transforming himself in the space of three POV chapters from a whiny little bitch who "snickers" at everything to a roving devil-may-care gambler figure. Bcuz being a lucky chancer who just about gets away with it is much cooler and more fun to read about than wolves or magic.

Flipside to this is that bit when out of nowhere he takes on the two princes with his quarterstaff and destroys them. Never shown the remotest aptitude for that kind of thing in the book before, these two are very nearly finished training to be warders who are apparently the supremo ultimo warriors in this world, wtfffff??!!
"no worries guys, I've just been playing at being a whiny douche for two and a half books, I'm actually a total badass with a quarterstaff cuz that's how farmers do" aaaaaaargh consistency

it is actually fucking admirable that this guy was so confident that his readers would care deeply enough about the potential payoff from the (admittedly enthralling) main story that he was happy to just level a constant barrage of bullshit in their direction pretty much from the word go

4-5-6 are the high point imo.

a post to brighten my day, thank you

It's 7-12 that are rough.

i'll worry about that in 3 weeks or so

It's the audio version of Villa's last three seasons.

If you know that theres gonba be 13 books from the start id imagine it changes yr pov a kot tbh

1 thru 6 arent challenged by much imo

ps rand, matt, egwene, nynaeve, perrin are all from manatheren its a 'thing' so yknow he kicked some guys asses its gonna happen btw town boys are p soft ime

Wish I could just get the remaining 10/11 condensed down to say, three books, really. Not even a quarter of the way through but I don't ever need to read another description of clothing / emotional state / scenery (be that urban or rural) / appearance by this guy ever again. Enough with this "writing" business, give me plot points and give me action, puhlease

It's gonna get rough for you, my friend. There is 1000 pages of "Men! How frustrating and stupid!" and "Women! WTF?!?!" interior monologues in your future.

I'd honestly advise you to quit after book 6

ive been travelling a lot for work so i decided to start rereading these, enjoyed the hell out of the first book but a big part of that was spotting all the easter eggs for whats still to come. but i thought it was fairly briskly paced with the exception of the nyaneve chapters during the middle third of the book. i remember that whole section being really boring but the stuff with perrin and egwene is genuinely tense and involving, particularly the part where they are being hunted by the ravens. i like how it emphasized the diminishing of the human race too which ends up being a reasonably important part of the series all those vast open spaces and abandoned places. the second book in contrast is a lot worse that i remember, rand doesnt so much progress as snap into place, which is maybe sort of true to life - you fight against the inevitable and then give in all at once but it makes for tedious reading. still lots of good parts and the lines of if sequence is so great, and theres lots of small moments that reverberate throughout the series but i wish it was better. one thing i do like is that these books still used the scatter everyone at the beginning and then draw them together for a big, climatic showdown structure to great effect