WOT negative feedback

[RAND AL THOR]

First of all, I would like this thread to remain on this forum because I want to hear what the guys on THIS forum have to say on this. So Majsju, please don't shift it.

 

I have been to several websites where fantsy readers/writers discuss various issues and books. I have wondered for ages why WOT isn't more popular than it already is. I may have found the answer.

 

Many people recommend reading the first 3 books of WOT. However, the same people discourage others from reading any further.

The main accusation against WOT is that the latter books are way too concentrated on description and people generally find the latter books BORING.

 

This opinion is even expressed by fantasy writers (though they are obviously anonymous in the forums).

 

What do the people here think on this?

Myself: While I love the series, I agree somewhat that I did not find the latter books as interesting as the former ones. For me, interest declined somewhat after book 6. I can't give reasons or explanantions.

Even now, I always re-read the first 6 books and rarely the others.

 

However, I don't think it is justifiable that people are actually telling others: "Don't read the last 6 books! They suck!" which is the attitude I have found among people whom I would otherwise respect to a certain degree.

 

Have any of you experienced similar attitudes from anyone?

 

(And before people start accusing me of being a traitor merely for posting this-I wouldn't be here if I didn't like WOT)

[bad company]

I agree in parts of that, like the first 6 books are more consise then the preceeding ones and COT really did get on my nerves with the same day thing but KOD did go someway to a resolution. The main problem is with so many characters and storylines it was always going to be hard and unless some characters missed out he wouldn't have been able to get too far in the series so in a way the first 6 books started the plan for the last 6 thus the last 6 would be slower and less progressive of the story as it has alot more to deal with.

 

This however doesn't make them any lesser, it isn't like a filler episode for an anime that goes nowhere it does go somewhere much like the sheer amounting of walking in the lord of the rings could have potnetially slowed it down considerably if not for tolkiens ability to write, and the awareness that noone truly likes to read hundreds of pages of walking straight.

[Celdiruen]

Yeah, this is true. People usually recommend the first few books in the series, and say to skip the later ones. The rationale behind it is that the starting books are good and the later ones are boring and the pace is slow.

 

Now, while the pace DID slow down, it by no means makes the book "boring". There are still plenty of things happening, just less than the non-stop action that the previous books may have enjoyed.

 

[bad company]

Some of the best books aren't action packed and you can get alot of enjoyment out of more story less action in certain cases depending on how good the writer is

[Bob T Dwarf]

There are WOT websites that exist for purely historical reasons.  The site originators having abandoned WOT years ago, the information stale and not updated.  Then there are the ones that no longer exist.  The originators there got so fed up they took down the site.

 

From the standpoint of contemporaneous reading, books 6-10 were not only boring, they took too long to appear.  The Eye of the World came out in 1990, Lord of Chaos in 1994.  It will have taken an additional 15 years before A Memory of Light shows up.  Five books in four years, and the next seven take fifteen.

 

It isn't so much that the latter books are bad.  It's that they aren't up to the standard of the first few AND they took forever to appear.  People like me who started with the series when EoTW first came out simply got tired of having our time wasted by an author who couldn't seem to decide where he wanted to go and then actually get there.  After I finished LoC, I walked away from the series for 10-11 Years.  I decided to see where he'd gotten to sometime after Winter's Heart came out.  Enough had changed that I had to go back and buy all of the intervening novels too in order to make sense of WH.  By the time I got completely caught-up, Crossroads of Twilight was due.

 

Then I started finding sites like this, got a better idea of how long it would still be until we get this thing wrapped up, and decided I could spare the time to stay involved until then.  If I were advising someone who is thinking about starting the series today, I'd first-of-all, tell them to wait until A Memory of Light comes out and then to read The Eye of the World.  IF they liked it, then I'd tell them to read all of the rest.  And in order.

[bad company]

Sound advice. I came into the game late so I've only been reading them for maybe  5-6 years so I didn't have the long catch up.

 

But then I've been reading other series and haven't read the books in ages.

[RAND AL THOR]

The Eye of the World came out in 1990, Lord of Chaos in 1994.

 

This is a shocking revelation to me. I had no idea that the latter books had such huge breaks in between. However, we really can't fault RJ for the delay in books because of a simple thing.

 

An author may choose to write all the books in his series before publishing. That way there is no pressure on him later to write the last few books and he gets everything done at his own pace. However, very few authors do this because if their first installment doesn't sell then they have more or less wasted years and years on a series that cannot be published.

 

What happens most of the time is that the author writes and published the first book or the first 2 books. He then observes the sales and continues writing the remaining books. If the books gain publicity, then the pressure begins. The author must now write something which doesn't let the reader down. This is true for many series including Harry Potter. The story must continue steadily and the author may take longer than usual to publish the next installment merely because he wants to make sure it is absolutely perfect-that would be due to his large number of readers.

 

I really can't fault the writer in this matter because it is only typical. I generally avoid book series unless the series is complete or only the last book remains to be published. But writers DO need time to write after all. We can't expect them to be at MS Word the whole day-merely because we want to read.

[Thorum]

If I were advising someone who is thinking about starting the series today, I'd first-of-all, tell them to wait until A Memory of Light comes out and then to read The Eye of the World.  IF they liked it, then I'd tell them to read all of the rest.  And in order.

 

Don't forget 99.99999% of the people that haven't gone to dragonmount need more than a month to read each of the books; and will read other books inbetween. You can advise them to start today, they may have finished Knife when the paperback appears.

[bad company]

I've already finished the tawny man series and the dark tower series between books, plus many more books

[Bob T Dwarf]

I've got kinda strict rules for fiction.

 

If it doesn't grab me hard enough that I've gotta read it in one go, with at most a single night's sleep between starting and finishing, then it isn't interesting enough to read at all.  If I'm so blase` about it that I can pick it up, read a few paragraphs or a chapter at most and then put it down and walk away, it isn't saying anything I have any real interest in knowing.

 

The latter books here, fit that category.  A couple, most notably Crossroads of Twilight were work.  I had to make myself finish.

 

I read for enjoyment, not to punish myself.

[RAND AL THOR]

Crossroads of twilight was truly a disappointment. I read a review of it where a person quotes the usual WOT stuff like, The Wheel of Time turns and ages come and go......and then he says in CoT, the Wheel of time turns, but only barely so.

 

Can't help but agree with that despite the fact that I like the series as a whole.

[Corbett]

The only one I ever had a problem with was CoT and that was becasue it was basically no action, and mostly the essential details that would get the story where it needs to be. The first time was rally hard becasue i was young and wanted more action but now I can read it and apperciate the plot more

[Razor]

I like COT now that the next book is out and I can read it as a lead in  to the action to come.  It was dissapointing to read in a few days and then wait 2 yrs for the next one.

[Razor]

I think a lot of the criticism will go away if it has a great ending.  I hope it  does as RJ knew the ending when he started the story and has been building for that.

 

Please tell me that the Sword of Truth gets blasted on those sites, because it is done and IMWO the preachiness could have been ignored and the series enjoyed with a great ending, but with perhaps the lamest ending in the history of Fantasy series, it deserves blasting big time.

[Jonn]

It's interesting to bring up the subject of how the earlier books seemed to come out more rapidly than those following.

I can't remember where I read it, but I do believe that he started writing the series around 1988. By writing, I mean putting time into actually putting the story together as a series.

 

We hear again and again how he originally wanted to make the series shorter, but it just seemed to grow with each book coming.

 

I do think we can see what might have happened here. In order to try to meet his original goals of finishing he series within...6 books, he was really much more to the point and faster with the action in the first 3 books.

 

While I do enjoy the first three, book one was my favorite of the first books...And then came The Shadow Rising.

 

To this day, I consider the Shadow Rising, the pinnacle of the series and the most epic of them all up to this point. In book 4 you had a spotlight on ALL of the main characters. Everyone had their moment, and the narrative propelled forward while giving a sense of time passing and depth in what happened in that time.

 

Up until about the end of the Bowl of Winds plotline, I think the series was quite fast. Unfortunately, I think once we started delving into the Seanchan more and the Seafolk characters and got more in depth with the Kin, things started to slow down. While there were a lot of enjoyable parts to Mat's big arc from Ebou Dar up till Knife of Dreams...I honestly have to say that his plot has been the most uneven.

 

I know what a lot of you are thinking...what about Perrin? His plot after Two Rivers, I know has been a drag, but I think Jordan really did have to pull Perrin back after Shadow Rising, because in all honesty, he stole the show in that book.  Personally, I think he was the most likeable character in the whole series up until book 6. I do think that RJ was aware that if Perrin got any more likeable, he was a danger in terms of keeping the narrative centered around Rand's arc.

 

Mat started to show a lot of promise in book 3, and you have Rand just deteriorating more and more, so I do think that RJ decided the best thing to do was play Perrin down and go a little heavy with Mat's storyline.

 

I do like Mat's character a lot more, but the reason why I think his arc is uneven is because I think that maybe RJ brought Perrin to too dark a place, and pushed Mat a little more than he needed to. Rand meanwhile continued down this dark dark path, so he's barely even a character anymore, so much as he's walking ball of burden and suffering. Anyway, Mat's character, I think, has been too much of a crutch against the other two.

 

By design RJ brought Perrin, formerly one of his most cherished characters, to this limbo of what could have been, so as to not make him the outright favorite. So we get a huge heaping dose of Mat, Mat and more Mat for about 5 books, his character going the other way. Rand...still tiresome.

 

Mat's character has been on a big upturn since book 3. Perrin has been going downhill since book 4, and Rand has been down since book 2, and has been crawling towards the end ever since. Granted he's had some great moments, but all that he's suffered overshadows it all.

 

I think the pacing problems or perceived pacing problems has a lot to do with this struggle with the balance in the series.

 

More so than even Jordan's initial expectations of how long the series would be.

 

sigh..I've lost what I've been trying to say here exactly, but I guess that's the point of my theory.

 

Like RJ, I had good intentions of where I wanted my post to end up, and the points I wanted to make, but then I got caught up with a balance problem and sort of just petered out. Hopefully book 12 wont end up like this post.

 

Essentially though, I think this series, flaws and all, is the most epic and grand piece of its genre, in fact, it has come to define the genre for our generation.

[bad company]

That often happens when a book has so many character arcs the balance can be hard to get from them. Personally I am a fan of matt and perrin  and you don't see much of Rand for a while and I think he became more his task in the book then as a personality

[Bob T Dwarf]

Unlike most, I find Mat a real drag.

 

All he does for the first nine plus books is try to run away from any and all responsibility...  for anything.  Both boring and stupid.  And, lasting far too long.

 

It's only after he meets Tuon and begins to grow up that he becomes the least bit likable.

[bad company]

Isn't it sort of like having the three different personalities and it does suggest that matt is the more immature of the three. Nyn says a couple of times he shouldn't have been let off the apron strings

[Corbett]

I happen to love the three ta'veren and there story lines. And i definatly agree that this is the grandest series in the genre and i would even go ever for all types of books.

[Jonn]

There's a lot to love Corbett, but like I said, I do think that there are some problems with balance between the three story lines.

It gets even more complicated when you mix in the female leads and then all of the peripheral characters and cameos.

 

So when traditionally you would be following one main thread centered around a main protagonist, it becomes a task to find that sense of evenness when the plot kind of spirals in upon itself, shifting several times even in just one book.

 

I think it's breathtakingly ambitious and it succeeds on many levels, but as per the criticism leveled against the perceived problems the scope creates, I can definitely understand why some would become disenchanted by the series.

 

Still, sometimes a piece of art you enjoy simply isn't for everyone.

[kleribituc]

 

I read for enjoyment, not to punish myself.

 

This is one of my new favorite quotes! 

Thanks, BTD

[anamul]

After reading a lot of fantasy book series, I came to a conclusion.

 

"Some fantasy books only exist to glorify the other".

 

So, I came accross some really pathetic fantasy book series, which in turn made me realize that as much as WOT has deteriorated from book7, I still find them far far better than most fantasy book series.

 

Ofcourse it depends on reader perspective.It seems from book 7 to book 10, some plotline deteriorated.There could be many reason, depends on each individual. For me, I found the later books less appealing due to a majore shift in main character, ie, Rand.

[Safia al-Maaz]

What I don't understand is why they cut off at book 3... I thought book 4 was one of the best ones.  And I personally liked 5, 6, and 7.  8 was ok, 9 was good, 10 i didn't hate but would not willingly read often, and 11 was amazing.

 

But not all fantasy is like that, Harry Potter kept me on the edge of my seat for every book, and I loved it.  On the other hand, Lord of the Rings is pretty slow paced and discriptive but I loved that too.  I think it really depends on what the reader enjoys.

[safwd]

While i somewhat see what people are saying about the later books i have liked all of them. I did like the early ones a bit better but not hugely so.

 

My main problems with WOT are:

1. It has taken way too long to finish them. Granted im not a writer and i dont know what it takes to do a series of this magnitude but the distance between books got a bit long for me.

 

2. The jumping around got a bit irritating to me as the books went on. It would tick me off a little when i am deep into a great story about Mat or Perrin, i turn the page to the next chapter and it starts with "Elayne". I understand why it was done but it still made me a bit mad. I would have to fight not to flip through the book until if found where the Mat/Perrin thing continued.

 

That is pretty much it. WOT is my favorite series and probably always will be.

[CUBAREY]

. It has taken way too long to finish them. Granted im not a writer and i dont know what it takes to do a series of this magnitude but the distance between books got a bit long for me.

 

Well it took Cervantes 10 years to write the Second Book of Don Quixote and it took Victor Hugo 30 years to finish Les Misarables.

 

Also remember each book is at least 700 pages (except for New Spring which is a novella). It takes time to write and edit that large a book.