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0345335651
| 9780345335654
| 0345335651
| 4.15
| 75,869
| Oct 12, 1982
| Nov 1982
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liked it
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"Queen of Sorcery" is the second book in David Eddings' Belgariad series. If furthers the plot along, introduces some characters, and ends with a bang
"Queen of Sorcery" is the second book in David Eddings' Belgariad series. If furthers the plot along, introduces some characters, and ends with a bang. It's not as interesting as the first book, but it's still quite a page turner. THE PLOT The story starts where the previous book left off. The motley crew is chasing Zedar who has somehow stolen the Orb of Aldur and is planning to give it to the sleeping god, Torak. They are joined by a "Thee" and "Thou" spouting knight named Mandorallen. They then meet a princess in Tolnedra named Ce'Nedra who runs away from her father and joins up with them. They make their way to Nyssia, hoping to cut off Zedar, but Garion, one of the crew, gets kidnapped by Salmissra, the queen of Nyssia. Then, we learn who the "Queen of Sorcery" really is. THE GOOD It's another page turner! I blew through this book quite quickly. There's enough characterization to make the characters interesting, if a bit one dimensional, and the plot moves ever forward. It's not a complex plot, but there's plenty of it and plenty of world building to keep one interested. The title of the book had me wondering...who in this book is the titular "Queen of Sorcery"? Is it Queen Salmissra? Or is it Polgara, daughter of Belgarath? Based on what happens, I'm leaning towards Polgara. Garion's character arc is good. He goes from being a child to being a young man rather well in the narrative of the story. Belgarath, his grandfather, is characterized as a wise man who knows when to draw back when needed but also enjoys drinking and having a good time. He dislikes having to "play the role of an ancient sorcerer" but can do it effectively when he needs to do so. THE BAD As with the previous book, the only character that seems to have any complexity to him is Garion who is the subject of this Hero's Journey and Belgarath, who is his mentor. The other characters are pretty much one dimensional. There's the knight who's so brave that he's never afraid and becomes concerned once he is. There's the barbarian who's "cursed" with the ability to become a gigantic bear and destroy swaths of enemies with his claws and jaws, but is sad about it because...I don't know why? Maybe because he loses control? Even though there's no evidence of this in the plot? There's the stern, disapproving, passive agressive older-but-still-beautiful woman who clucks at men disapprovingly ("MEN!"). There's the sexy lustful Queen with snakes wrapped around her suggestively who lusts after power (and sex). There's the little girl who pouts and stamps her feet on the ground (HMPH!). There's the simple moral salt of the earth type who is flummoxed and flabbergasted that there exists a world where people take bribes and women wear revealing clothing (Well, I never!), who's the comic relief. There's the slick slimy spy guy who does good things for people using oily subterfuge and mendacity (You're a bad bad man!), who's also the comic relief. There's the strong silent warrior who just wants to kill Murgos for his own private unrevealed reasons. These characters DO actually work within the context of the story, though. I found them all likeable in their own way (if not a little unrealistic) but definitely not realistic. If you want a realistic fantasy, go read Game of Thrones, I guess. CONCLUSION If you read the first book, and liked it, you'll find more of the same here. If not, it doesn't get any better with this book. I liked it and I like the series overall so far. I am fascinated by "page turners". I wonder if there's some kind of formula to them that I'm not detecting. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Jan 28, 2019
not set
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Feb 03, 2019
not set
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Feb 04, 2019
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Mass Market Paperback
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0345468643
| 9780345468642
| 0345468643
| 4.16
| 109,787
| Mar 12, 1982
| Jun 01, 2004
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The Belgariad is not new. It was first published in 1982, 37 years ago, before Game of Thrones or The Wheel of Time. "Pawn of Prophecy" is the first n
The Belgariad is not new. It was first published in 1982, 37 years ago, before Game of Thrones or The Wheel of Time. "Pawn of Prophecy" is the first novel in the Belgariad series which is 5 novels long. The Plot The Belgariad is yet another incarnation of Joseph Campbell's "Monomyth", or the classic "Hero's Journey". The hero in question is a boy named Garion and "Pawn of Prophecy" serves as a sort of bildungsroman for the series. It starts with a passage from a fictional book of scripture about how Belgarion's world began and then begins after this prologue with the central "hero" of the novel as a toddler running around a kitchen with his aunt (Aunt Pol) who is the head cook, taking care of him. Of course, it turns out that this boy is actually one of the central figures in a chain of events that will shake the world he inhabits. However, those in charge of him take great pains to insulate him from his destiny to allow him to be a regular kid. At one point, after Garion is a teenager, He gets "found out" by people who want him dead, so he, his Aunt Pol, Durnik the blacksmith, Barak the Barbarian, Silk the spy, and a bard known only as "Mister Wolf" make a run for it. But are they running away or running to something? All Garion knows is that "old wolf" is trying to find a thing that was stolen and this thing is very important. The Good This book is the very definition of a page turner. I blew through this novel so quickly it wasn't even funny! To me, that's a remarkable feat. This is probably because so many novels I've read just aren't paced in this way. I don't know if someone deliberately makes a page turner using proven techniques or if it just sort of happens like magic. Maybe what a page turner is to me is not the same to someone else. Seeing as this is yet another Monomyth retelling, I can see how someone would think that it was boring. I was hooked, though, from the first page. I liked the dry scripture-like intro that then changed into the novel proper later on. I thought that was a nice touch and seemed to me to indicate that there was a lot of deliberate and systematic effort put into world building on the part of the author, David Eddings. This shows in the rest of the series as well. If I recall correctly, he was directly inspired by the longevity of the "Lord of the Rings" series and decided to doodle up a map of his "world" to begin the process of writing. I liked the interaction between the characters of the book. The interactions of the characters showed a natural flow of dialog between them. David Eddings certainly has an ear for dialog. It was well written and contributed to the page turner aspect of the book. I like a nice retelling of the Monomyth. I find it inspirational and beautiful if it's done well. It's done reasonably well here. The Not-So-Good The characterizations, while likable, were a little 2 dimensional. So far, what you see is what you get. Some have mysterious pasts, like "Mister Wolf" and "Aunt Pol", but it soon becomes apparent who they are. There doesn't seem to be any character development beyond the central character. Garion is the only one who changes and no one else, at least in the first novel. There are four more to go after this one. David Eddings doesn't write women very well. The main female character, Aunt Pol, has one defining characteristic: irritability. She's always harumphing or judging or clucking or stamping her foot and saying "MEN!". She of course makes no mistakes and brings no opportunity for judgements upon herself. I don't think it's a feminist move to write a female character with no flaws other than "bitchiness". That makes for an uninteresting and unlikable character and I kind of dread seeing how this develops in the future. The Verdict If you are a fan of a good page turner and of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth, then you should pick this up and see if it's your cup of tea. So far I think that the "Wheel of Time" series is a better series with better characters and a better telling of the Monomyth, but it was written AFTER the Belgariad, so it could have possibly benefited from any mistakes or missteps in the Belgariad. If you're a fan of The Wheel of Time and you're wanting to read a similar series, then this one has got you covered. It's enough of a page turner that it could possibly be a "fantasy literature gateway drug". I give it a solid 3 stars. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 10, 2019
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Jan 22, 2019
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Jan 22, 2019
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Paperback
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0553418629
| 9780553418620
| 0553418629
| 4.07
| 70,388
| Jun 16, 2015
| Mar 15, 2016
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it was amazing
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I can't really classify this book in a genre. That's what makes it great. It's bloody, hilarious, scary, and fills the reader with a sense of wonder. Hi I can't really classify this book in a genre. That's what makes it great. It's bloody, hilarious, scary, and fills the reader with a sense of wonder. Highly recommended. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jan 14, 2019
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Paperback
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0446580309
| 9780446580304
| 0446580309
| 3.81
| 17,136
| Apr 06, 2006
| Jul 10, 2007
|
liked it
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My first exposure to Mike Carey was his run on the various comic book/graphic novel series that he authored for Vertigo/DC. They were all very well wr
My first exposure to Mike Carey was his run on the various comic book/graphic novel series that he authored for Vertigo/DC. They were all very well written. Among them was his run on Vertigo's Hellblazer, which was a very long running series about a guy named John Constantine who is a kind of happy-go-lucky guy who happens to have a vast knowledge of magic and the occult...but is not actually a "wizard" himself. Felix Castor is basically a "non trademarked" version of John Constantine. The Plot Felix Castor is a freelance exorcist that people hire to get rid of ghosts. He lives and works in the gritty streets of London (sound familiar Hellblazer fans?). He dispatches ghosts by playing a tin whistle and concentrating on the ghost in question. This also seems to work on demons as well. The plot begins when his landlady needs money or she'll lose the building in which he currently resides (she's also an old friend of his). Felix "comes out of retirement" to take one last job in order to help her out. It seems that the ghost of an eastern european woman is haunting a book/document archive and they want Felix to get rid of it. The employees of the document archive think the haunting is due to the new collection of Russian documents they just received. However, rather than just getting rid of the ghost, Felix starts investigating into why the ghost is there. The plot unfolds from there. The Good I didn't really think of this as a "horror" novel, which is kind of how it was sold to me by a friend. I think it's been classified in other reviews here on Goodreads as an urban fantasy which is closer to the truth. I would classify it as a private detective mystery with supernatural elements (think "Phillip Marlowe with ghosts and demons"). It was unexpected but it was a pleasant surprise and not a disappointment at all. Mysteries aren't normally my thing but I could get used to more books like this. Like any good picaresque PI mystery there are plenty of MacGuffins, red herrings, dames, double-crosses, and secrets of evil men. Felix Castor is a flawed character who, while being a competent exorcist, is only a semi-competent human being. The supporting characters are all pretty memorable; the ones who get the most pages at least. The plot is constantly moving forward and the ultimate mystery is unfurled piece by piece at a good pace rather than all at once. If you're familiar with Mike Carey's comics work, then I don't have to tell that he's a good writer...you already know this. That being said, he's a good writer. His turn of phrase is sharp enough to be notable but not obtuse. The Not-So-Good This wasn't what I'd call a page turner, but that's ok. I think too much characterization would be lost if it the novel had a break-neck plot. Sometimes, when Felix talks about the places in London he visits it gets a little "Locals Only". It's kind of like that SNL skit "The Californians" where they spend more time talking about what streets and highways they drive on rather than the matters at hand. OK, you went to the "such and such" building in (insert neighborhood of London here)...what does that have to do with the plot? It's nit picky but I didn't enjoy it. Maybe I missed a bunch of plot but from what I can remember, Felix Castor is an atheist, which seems logically inconsistent to me since he deals with ghosts and demons on a regular basis. I didn't expect him to be a devout catholic or bible thumping protestant, but an atheist seems kind of pushing it when he has firsthand knowledge that the metaphysical world exists. I wished that some of the supporting characters were a little more memorable, especially the ones who were red herrings. Conclusion This is a good book with good characters, I wasn't blown away by it but I wasn't disappointed either. I think if you're a mystery fan who can tolerate some supernatural elements, this could be your gateway into urban fantasy. I give it a solid 3 1/2 stars. However, since I will rate it 3 stars since I can't add a half star to the rating. Check it out. It's a good read. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 23, 2016
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Oct 20, 2016
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Jul 23, 2016
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Hardcover
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0765325950
| 9780765325952
| 0765325950
| 4.58
| 155,802
| Jan 08, 2013
| Jan 08, 2013
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really liked it
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It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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Hardcover
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0765325942
| 9780765325945
| 0765325942
| 4.48
| 169,061
| Nov 02, 2010
| Nov 02, 2010
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really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0765302306
| 9780765302304
| 0765302306
| 4.43
| 171,756
| Nov 07, 2009
| Oct 27, 2009
|
really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0812577566
| 9780812577563
| 0812577566
| 4.20
| 142,865
| Oct 03, 2005
| Dec 2006
|
really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0312864590
| 9780312864590
| 0312864590
| 3.78
| 134,514
| Jan 07, 2003
| Jan 01, 2003
|
really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
081257558X
| 9780812575583
| 081257558X
| 3.97
| 149,126
| 2000
| Jan 07, 2002
|
really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0812550293
| 9780812550290
| 0812550293
| 3.93
| 156,210
| Oct 20, 1998
| Dec 15, 1999
|
really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1857232097
| 9781857232097
| 1857232097
| 4.20
| 203,996
| Oct 15, 1993
| Jul 04, 1994
|
really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0812513738
| 9780812513738
| 0812513738
| 4.28
| 251,898
| Sep 15, 1992
| Oct 15, 1993
|
really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0765305119
| 9780765305114
| 0765305119
| 4.28
| 313,128
| Oct 15, 1991
| Sep 14, 2002
|
really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0812517725
| 9780812517729
| B005IGPUMY
| 4.27
| 343,463
| Nov 15, 1990
| Jan 01, 1991
|
really liked it
|
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of fe
It's been 3 years since I started this series. 11,500 pages later (I didn't read "New Spring"), it has all come to an end and I'm spent. It kind of feels like an old friend has come and gone because I originally started reading this series back in the 90s when it came out but I stopped and forgot about it in between book releases. This review is a review of the series as a whole because you can't just pick up "Lord of Chaos" or "Winter's Heart" and get into the series. You must read each book in order, starting with "The Eye of the World" or optionally "New Spring" (although I skipped "New Spring" and you can too). THE PLOT Like I said in my review of "Eye of the World", this series is Joseph Campbell's monomyth or Hero's Journey. Instead of a single hero, we get three young men and two young women. One of the men is the savior of the world. He is revealed by the end of the first book. The real story is how he fits himself into his role as savior and how the other four characters become heroes and discover their roles in the story. All of these young men and women become adults with responsibilities and roles in this world over the course of the 14 novels. They meet enemies, friends and lovers. Some are interesting and some are not. They get betrayed by false friends and confront evil in many forms. To attempt to describe the plot of 14 giant paperbacks in detail would be too big to put into a review of the series. The world in which the action takes place is a cyclical world similar to the one discussed in Hinduism and Buddhism; the titular "wheel of time". This wheel weaves a pattern called "The pattern" which is the world and the universe. People are born and re-born into the pattern; some have significant roles and others don't. Some people can access the "One Power" which allows them to do magical things. There is a separation between the male and female "halves" of the power. The male half is tainted and all males who are born with the ability to use the One Power go crazy and die eventually. The big bad guy is known as the "Dark One", who is pure evil personified. He is currently imprisoned but the seals to his prison are deteriorating quickly. When he gets out, every one will either die or be slaves with no choice but to serve the Dark One, or maybe the Dark One will just destroy everything and there will be only oblivion. The person who is born to be the savior of the world is called the "Dragon Reborn". It's his job to stop the Dark One. The Dark One has powerful human minions (called "The Forsaken") who can use the One Power more powerfully than anyone else. The book series is about the 5 young people being trained and finding their destinies before confronting the Dark One. THE GOOD STUFF There's a lot of good here. The plot summary I wrote above does not do the plot justice. Each book contains on average 827 pages. Each book has a glossary and character names and descriptions in the back. The main characters are well written enough that you begin to care for them, but they aren't really complex, whole people. Probably the most complex character I can think of is Lanfear, who seems torn by her love of the Dragon Reborn, her own ambition, and her service to the Dark One. She really keeps you guessing until the end. The characters seem to adhere to archetypes or tropes. There's Rand, who is very strong in magic but has little confidence and is uninformed in the ways of the world. There's Mat, who is a happy go lucky gambler who's looking to score a big bunch of treasure. There's Perrin, a blacksmith's apprentice who's huge, doesn't talk much, and is pretty much the dullest of the three. There's Nynaeve, who's super strong in magic but is also an asshole. Finally, there's Egwene, who's really strong in magic but not as strong as Nynaeve and who's pretty and sweet but definitely not a doormat. All of these characters seem familiar, like standard fantasy tropes almost, but they progress in their characterizations to the point that they are completely different people by the end of the series...except for Nynaeve; she's pretty much an asshole the entire series. During the course of the series, the continent on which the action of the story takes place is invaded by a foreign power from across the ocean to the west. It's actually a cool development that throws a monkey wrench into the mix. It's like two guys fighting when a third one comes in and takes them both on while they still fight each other. The reader is left saying "Whoa, things just got really complicated. What are they gonna do about this??" The world building aspect of the series is probably its strongest aspect. It's not quite as detailed as The Lord of the Rings but it's close. From what I understand, Tolkien created a detailed world and then wrote stories that took place in it and he had reams of information detailing the cultures, languages, and history of middle earth. Much of this information didn't make it into the books. Jordan, on the other hand, seems to put it all in the books. The world building is there on the pages -- all 11,500 of them. The quality of the writing is very good for this type of novel. Brandon Sanderson pretty much seamlessly integrates his writing into Robert Jordan's writing. Personally, I think that's a testament to his writing ability as well as his love for this series. One question that every fantasy series writer must answer is: How does magic fall into the politics of the world I am building? A corollary to this would be: Why don't people who use magic rule the people who don't use magic? My opinion is that this is critical to any fantasy series that has magic in it. The answer is usually that either magic is very rare and the people that use it don't have the desire to be burdened with ruling power (similar to the wizards in Middle Earth). Another answer is that they do want power but they're evil, like Sauron and they want to take over the world in order to have everyone be full of scars, wear leather bondage gear all the time, and sneer and murder each other because that's the kind of world in which "bad" people want to live. Yet another answer is that they DO rule the world like in the Recluce series or the Black Company series. In the Wheel of Time, the world was once ruled over by people who could use magic, but they "broke" the world. As a result, the male magic users go crazy and die before they can do very much harm (on a national level at least) and the female magic users join what is akin to a religious order that influences politics but must take oaths to only kill people who ally with the Dark One, only kill people to save their own lives, to never create a weapon for one man to kill another with, and to never lie. They are compelled by magic to keep this oath, unless they secretly serve the Dark One. READING THE WHEEL OF TIME There are two ways to read the Wheel of Time: First, it can be read all at once, which is the way I did it. The advantage is that you will be familiar with all of the characters and action since it is one continuous story over 14 books. You will be less likely to have to turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to figure out what the terms mean and who the characters are. The disadvantage is obvious: the huge time commitment. Even if you are a voracious reader it will take you months, perhaps years to read the whole thing. It took me 3 years, reading at my snail's pace to go through it all. The second way to read the Wheel of Time is to read it like it was read when it came out originally: one book at a time with some time spaced in between readings. That is, you read a book in the series and then go read something else, and then come back and read the next book in the series. The advantage of this is that you can mix it up a little and read other books (assuming you read only one book at a time) and return back to the series later on so you won't be "stuck" in the Wheel of Time until the end. The disadvantage is that you have to familiarize yourself with the characters and terms used in the series as well as bone up on what happened in the books before the present book. There are tons of web sites online devoted to the Wheel of Time where you can get this information easily. THE ENDING No spoilers here. This can be a sticky subject, because if Wheel of Time were written so that everything came out great for all the good guys and all the bad guys were either killed or turned into good guys then, let's face it, it would be a boring ending. On the other hand, with the time commitment required with reading this series, it would be a major bummer if the bad guys won conclusively and killed all the good guys. It would feel like Robert Jordan was screaming "screw you" from beyond the grave. (As a side note, I must confess that I would find this hilarious...everyone is killed and the Dark One destroys the pattern and existence is winked out! Time ends! Space ends! There's nothing left!) I'm sure everyone has an idea of how they wanted the series to end. The problem is that none of these endings would be satisfactory to everyone reading the book. I think that's the problem with writing a well-loved 11,500 page novel: everyone feels they have ownership of the story because of the time commitment involved with reading it through to the end. Therefore, any ending would have its admirers and detractors. I liked the way it ended. However, it didn't end exactly the way I wanted it to end. I would have liked to see some more information as to how the surviving characters turned out over the course of their lives, not just immediately after the end of the "Last Battle". It's a minor gripe and illegitimate because I'm not the storyteller here and have no actual ownership over the characters and story. THE NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF There's very little "Theology" (for lack of a better word) concerning the good guys while there is one for the bad guys. There is a singular and personal "Dark One" and he has agents who serve him. Each one wants some kind of power from him which he promises to them. The agents fight each other in a sort of darwinian way in order for the strongest to be the Dark One's top man. The good guys' theology is that there's a creator who's infrequently mentioned. The "Light" is basically photons and goodness. That's it. The only thing that personifies the light is the Dragon Reborn, who is basically Johnny-Come-Lately on the time scale of the Dark One. There's no religious rites or worship or anything resembling religion that I could detect. Now, I know that a significant number of you want to say "GOOD! Religion stinks!". You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these books should have been Christian books. Like it or not, religion is a major motivation for individuals, groups, nationalities, and cultures. You can't build a realistic world inhabited by humans with a sophisticated enough society to have farming, mining, and government and not have a religion or religions. I understand that you can't just whip up a religion in the average fantasy book, but if your fantasy book has 11,500 pages, I think you can maybe cut something out and make a little room for it...even it it's just worshipping the sun. I mean they have holidays but there's no basis for the holidays other than that it's a big party for planting or for harvest or the anniversary for a battle or some other event. How do the rulers justify their place over the ruled? In the olden days it was due to the "Divine Right of Kings" which is that the ruler is chosen by God to rule over the peasants. This justified him having clean clothes and hot meals all the time while the peasantry starved and had feces smeared all over their stuff. It would be unreasonable of me to expect every character to be memorable. There are memorable characters. However there are a great many "helper" characters who are not memorable. You will constantly find yourself saying "who is this person?" and you'll need to consult a website or the dictionary at the back of the book. Robert Jordan seems to fall into the trap of "Men are doofuses and women are smart and wise" characterization. Men are stupid but are handy to have around and women really rule the world and are smart and wise but, brother, don't get 'em angry! Amiright, fellas? (fist bump). The women all seem to be logical and cold while the men are all befuddled happy-go-lucky types who snap into action and suddenly become competent when trouble shows up. The women all cross their arms under their breasts (an actual phrase in the book that's repeated often), tap their feet impatiently, and do a lot of "Harumphing". The only ones who don't do that are the evil women and Birgitte, a female bodyguard for one of the main characters. It just got a little annoying after 11,500 pages. In my review of "The Eye of the World", I accused Robert Jordan of "padding" the story. After reading the entire series, there were one or two books in which very little seemed to happen. There were long passages of inner feelings and history regarding the people doing things at that moment of the narrative. There would be long passages of history and inner thoughts inbetween lines of dialog. It got a little tiresome, but I slogged through it and you can too. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Well, I know that I will not read this book again. It's just too long. If you are a fan of the kind of books where a "chosen one" type hero who comes from humble beginnings goes on the hero's journey and becomes the world's superman, then you will like this series, as I did. If you are on the fence, then read the first book and see if you like it. I thought it was worth the time. 3 1/2 stars from me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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Mass Market Paperback
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0812511816
| 9780812511819
| 0812511816
| 4.19
| 570,640
| Jan 15, 1990
| Nov 15, 1990
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really liked it
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I've gotten back around to re-reading the Wheel of Time, now that it's finished. I had originally read the first few books but then gave up on it when
I've gotten back around to re-reading the Wheel of Time, now that it's finished. I had originally read the first few books but then gave up on it when it seemed that it was going nowhere. I just don't like getting into a series and then having to wait for the next book to come out. Therefore, I just don't start them until the series is finished, unless all of the books are stand alone novels set in a common universe. That's why I'm not going to read George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire until it's done. I don't think George R.R. Martin needs any more semi-obsessed readers looking at him expectantly and tapping their watches meaningfully in his direction. I'm opting out until he's done. Unfortunately, the author, Robert Jordan (a pseudonym), died before he could complete his series, but left copious notes for another author, the very talented Brandon Sanderson, to use in finishing the last books of the series. I think it's rather obvious that the series is needlessly drawn out in order to sell more books. However, I don't think that's a bad thing in and of itself. If I had a cash cow, I'd milk that sucker until its teats were leathery air bags. I don't think I can quite find it in myself to point my finger at someone else with a cash cow and say "For SHAME!". The Eye of the World is the first book in the Wheel of Time series. The Plot It's pretty much a Joseph Campbell monomyth, following the standard Hero's Journey plot line. I make it sound dull but that really sums it up in a nutshell. The reason the monomyth is so ubiquitous is because it's really cool and great (Star Wars, anyone?). It can be terribly dull, but it's done really well here. It's a great, straightforward plot mixed in with intriguing world building and characters that are good archetypal representations. Three boys, Rand, Mat, and Perrin are whisked from their idyll pastoral small town existence and hurled into big, world changing schemes. All three are considered to be "ta'veren", which means they're important from a past and future point of view (time's a wheel, remember?) and so Gandalf...I mean...Moraine, who's a Wizard...I mean Aes Sedai...leads the three boys and two women with the ability to become Aes Sedai from their small village to their ultimate fates. They're chased by Ring Wraiths...I mean...Myrddraals and Orcs...I mean...Trollocs. The Good I think the thing that Robert Jordan does best here is world building. The world that the characters inhabit is well fleshed out. It has a compelling and realistic history. It has decently intriguing prophecy. The cultures are distinct and interesting melanges of real world cultures. The locations are well described without sliding into overly verbose descriptions. I think it must be hard to give just the right amount of information to make the world believable and "likable" (for lack of a better word). That has to be a really fine line that an author must walk. Robert Jordan also introduces many made up words (neologisms) to introduce concepts and items that are unique to his world. They aren't so pervasive that they're annoying. However, you may want to have a Wheel of Time wiki open in your ebook reader when you're reading it. In this day an age, it's probably difficult to make the hero's journey something compelling enough to read. That's a skill too and it's one that Robert Jordan does well. The main main characters are singular and interesting enough to be likable. It's not too hard to invest oneself in their well being. The Not-So-Good The characters are pretty much cardboard cut outs. That is not to say that you won't like them. You will, most of the time. The characters do also change over time, which is good. It's just that Robert Jordan doesn't write women very well, in my opinion. It's like he's the author character from the movie "As Good As It Gets". The women characters are written to be men, minus reason and accountability. It's really too bad. The supporting characters are even thinner cardboard than the main characters, so they tend to run into each other and I sometimes would forget who is supposed to be who. Conclusion It's really an epic journey and a good retelling of the Hero's Journey. The characters do change and grow over the course of the book so I do think that if you like books of this type, then you'll like the Wheel of Time. This first book really opens it up with a blast. ...more |
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not set
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Aug 20, 2013
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Sep 13, 2013
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Mass Market Paperback
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0007232187
| 9780007232185
| 0007232187
| 3.30
| 4,172
| Apr 02, 2007
| Sep 03, 2007
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really liked it
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TL/DR: Read this if you're a fantasy fan. My Review: The Scene: A pub in London, England. Stephen Hunt(SH): I have this great idea for a novel! Buddy: TL/DR: Read this if you're a fantasy fan. My Review: The Scene: A pub in London, England. Stephen Hunt(SH): I have this great idea for a novel! Buddy: Yeah, what? SH: Imagine a fantasy kingdom that has undergone the industrial revolution! Buddy: Cooool! So you're writing a book, then! SH: Yes! And in this kingdom, a revolt has happened and they now operate under a parliamentary system, keeping the royal line around for the purposes of mocking them. When a king comes of age, they cut off his arms! Buddy: Uh...ok. Well, can't they just save money by getting rid of the monarchy altogether? SH: And there are socialists, too! They're called "Community"-ists and they follow the writings of this underground writer guy! Buddy: Are there dwarves and elves and stuff like that? SH: There are dwarves but I call them something different. Buddy: What? SH: The guy who's writing these words for me right now forgot what they're called. Buddy: Ok. Way to go meta, there. SH: Thanks. And there are steam powered robots, too! They are kind of polytheistic in a Jamaican Hoodoo type way. Buddy: Wow, that's a lot of-- SH: Hold on! There are crab people too called "Craybnarians" and they live beside the humans in peace and harmony. Buddy: Are they deathly afraid of clarified butter? SH: This society is steam powered and they use steam powered computers called transaction engines. Buddy: ...to do what? SH: Computer stuff. And there's this thing called the Feymist that either kills you or grants you magical powers. It bubbles up randomly in the countryside. Buddy: So the magicians rule everyone, right? SH: No, they leash them up and use them as royal guards or they put them in the insane asylum. Buddy: yeah, makes sense...you don't want them running around, right? SH: There are airships and a navy that travels and fights in these airships. They're filled with celgas that's mined from the ground. The celgas is not flammable, though. Buddy: OK, so no "Oh, the humanity" moments in the book. SH: Right! People in this world communicate over long distances by using a network of crystals to magically transport messages around. Buddy: Wow! You really thought this out. What about -- SH: Hold on! And the world used to be ruled by a brutal empire who worshiped Lovecraftian insect deities. Buddy: Does that have anything to do with the lobster people? SH: Crab people! Shh! They had a large underground empire that preserved the civilized world during a big ice age. Buddy: That sounds kinda similar to -- SH: Shut up! He doesn't hold the patent on snow! Anyway, one of the characters is a former u-boat commander... Buddy: So they travel in a submarine? Is it a magic submarine? SH: No, no submarines! Did I say anything about submarines? Anyway, the whole shebang is monitored by this huge airship way high in the sky with spies and agents that make sure that the country is running according to their plans. Buddy: So it's like a sort of Tolkien Illuminati? SH: I guess...the guy who's writing the words I'm saying isn't sure exactly, but it's called "The Court of the Air". Hence the title of my book! Buddy: Well, that really sounds -- SH: Hold on! In this world, large chunks of land just lift up into the sky! Buddy: Why? SH: Because magic, that's why! or Feymist or something like that. Buddy: so do they have magic swords and stuff? SH: Yeah! And magic pistols that shoot cartridges made with a propellant from a special kind of tree! Buddy: Preventing forest fires must be a big preoccupation, huh? So no gunpowder? Do bats not take dumps in caves in this world? SH: The parliamentarians debate by hitting each other with debating sticks. Buddy: So bats don't even exist in this world? SH: STOP WITH THE BATS! Buddy: OK so what is the novel about? SH: A couple of kids from different backgrounds go through adventures because they're being stalked by the same people. They start out as two different plot threads that converge in the end. Buddy: Do they spank each other with debating sticks? SH: It's not that kind of a book! There's a TON of ideas in this book, ALL of them are extremely cool. I know it sounds like I didn't like the book but I really did. I plan on reading more of the series in the future. My only issue with the book is that the plot wasn't as interesting as the ideas. Also, some ideas were introduced, but didn't really go anywhere. The floating pieces of land was one example. Maybe I need to go back and re-read but that didn't really affect the plot in any way. This is a great book, though. I recommend it whole-heartedly if you want to read about one of the most well thought out (despite how I make it sound above) fantasy worlds since Middle Earth. Stephen Hunt knows how to build an interesting world, that's for sure. The plot isn't bad as plots go, but it's just not as interesting as the ideas. All of the cool world building and background ideas outshone the characters and plot, so there was somewhat of a letdown there for me. Everyone who's a fantasy fan should read this book. Non-fans looking for a gateway drug should probably look elsewhere. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 16, 2012
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Jun 22, 2013
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Oct 16, 2012
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Paperback
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0439554934
| 9780439554930
| 0439554934
| 4.47
| 10,972,926
| Jun 26, 1997
| Nov 01, 2003
|
liked it
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How can I possibly review a book adored by millions? I liked it. Harry Potter wasn't too much of a reader insert character...he had his own little issu How can I possibly review a book adored by millions? I liked it. Harry Potter wasn't too much of a reader insert character...he had his own little issues and quirks that I liked. I'm not a big fan of reader insert characters. The silly names of the characters kind of brought me out of the book to a degree: Dumbledore, Weasley, Snape, etc. A lot of the characters seemed rather silly themselves. Maybe this was a children's book rather than a "young adult" book, I don't know. Certainly I love the fact that millions have been compelled to read books because of this series, and for that alone it has truly left a positive mark on the world. Yeah...it's good. I'd have probably liked it more if I read it as a kid, though...but that's kind of obvious, isn't it? ...more |
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not set
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Sep 18, 2012
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Sep 21, 2012
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Hardcover
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0671831526
| 9780671831523
| 0671831526
| 3.89
| 10,479
| 1950
| Mar 1977
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it was ok
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This is a quick review and I'm not going into too much detail. If it's millions of years in the future, will earth be familiar at all to those of us wh This is a quick review and I'm not going into too much detail. If it's millions of years in the future, will earth be familiar at all to those of us who live here now? It's an interesting concept. Jack Vance didn't come up with it but he did bring it into the modern science fiction/fantasy genre and it influenced many who came after him. The Dying Earth is a collection of short stories all set on the earth in the far far future. The stories are interesting, but they're written in that kind of florid pulpy prose that's common to the era in which they were written. They're good but not great. The characters are morally ambiguous, which makes them interesting. It's interesting to note that Jack Vance inspired the creators of Dungeons and Dragons to come up with their magic system of memorizing and forgetting spells after they're cast. They named the evil magician/demigod "Vecna" after him. Overall, it's an ok read. D&D nerds (like myself) should read it just for it's sentimental/historical value. ...more |
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Sep 19, 2011
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Paperback
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0670020559
| 9780670020553
| 0670020559
| 3.53
| 272,736
| Aug 11, 2009
| Aug 11, 2009
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really liked it
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The Magicians is a good read. I recommend it to everyone, not just fantasy fans. The Plot Quentin is a graduating senior who's an overachiever. He's The Magicians is a good read. I recommend it to everyone, not just fantasy fans. The Plot Quentin is a graduating senior who's an overachiever. He's recruited by Brakebills Academy, a college that teaches magic. Being a die hard fan of a children's fantasy series called "Fillory" (very similar to Narnia) he jumps at the chance to learn magic. It turns out that studying magic is more boring and tedious than studying law. The Good You have to love a book about magicians where one character remarks to another character "Wizard needs food badly!". A lot of reviewers have drawn parallels between this book and another book about a guy going to a school for magicians. I tend to disagree. In the Rowling books, the lead character is more of a "reader insert" character. The reader is supposed to put themselves in the place of the lead character in order to sort of experience the plot firsthand. It's an effective writing tool and it works for those books as well as the Twilight series. The Magicians is different, though. The lead character, Quentin, is very much his own character. As with any well-written character, there are aspects about Quentin that a reader will enjoy and other aspects about Quentin's character that a reader will find alienating. The plot of Quentin's matriculation from Brakebills is very entertaining and captured my attention. I also found it very interesting that these magicians, with all their power, were still unable to really affect any meaningful change in the world. The Not-So-Good I felt that some of the characters were a little superfluous and unnecessary. I don't know. I mean I couldn't tell you which ones I would get rid of, but I felt that it was a little unnecessarily crowded. The Fillory subplot seemed a little tacked on. I guess it was necessary but I think the book would have been a little better if it was about a guy who obtained all this magical power but still found that changing the world for the better was an unrealistic goal as far as magic goes. Conclusion I recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who likes modern fiction. It transcends the fantasy genre. It is a fantastic read. If you're looking for an alternative to Harry Potter, or the next Harry Potter, you will be sorely disappointed. ...more |
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4.15
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Feb 03, 2019
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Feb 04, 2019
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4.16
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Jan 22, 2019
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Jan 22, 2019
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4.07
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it was amazing
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Jan 14, 2019
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3.81
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liked it
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Oct 20, 2016
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Jul 23, 2016
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4.58
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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4.48
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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4.43
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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4.20
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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3.78
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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3.97
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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3.93
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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4.20
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really liked it
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not set
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Jul 14, 2016
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4.28
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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4.28
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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4.27
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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4.19
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really liked it
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Aug 20, 2013
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Sep 13, 2013
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3.30
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really liked it
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Jun 22, 2013
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Oct 16, 2012
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4.47
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liked it
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Sep 18, 2012
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Sep 21, 2012
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3.89
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it was ok
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not set
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Sep 19, 2011
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3.53
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really liked it
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Aug 14, 2010
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Sep 28, 2010
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