Just read that this morning in fact...

 

And I wouldn't mind seeing more criticisms along the lines of - "The trials the characters face need to have more of an impact. Rand doesn't even care that he lost a hand so its not really a big deal." Instead all you hear is "People NEED to DIE!!" As if characters dying instantly increases the quality of the story being told.

 

I'm not saying that characters shouldn't ever die or that it can't be used to great effect in the story. I'm just saying its not the only way to create tension and its not some necessary and positive story telling device that will make a story always better.

 

Also, I like most of these characters. I'm not going to be particularly happy (not saying angry at the author, just sad) if characters I like end up dead. I'm certainly not going to root for it. To me the scene with Rand almost killing Min was just as effective in creating tension and a sense of danger as someone dying would have been.

If there is another way to cause tension without using deaths, RJ did not know what it was. There really is no tension in this series, and it makes it seem a little "kiddie". I mean, Harry Potter was written for children and people die. When you read parts you've never read before, you know that anybody can die anytime. With WoT...

The search for the bowl of winds

Was long and boring. You knew the whole time everything would turn out OK, and nobody was going to get killed.

Graendal tryin to bag Perrin,

Is stupid, because you already know ahead of time no matter what Graendal tries, it will end in failure, and Perrin will be just fine.

Rand's kidnapping,

Was also boring, because just like all the kidnappings that came before and after, you knew he would be rescued and nobody important would be lost during the rescue.

Perrin rescuing Faile;

Was stupid for several reasons, the #1 reason being it took 3 frickin books, and the whole time you knew that Perrin would rescue Faile, you just didn't know how or when he would hurry up and get it over with.

Don't get me wrong, there were some tense parts, and some excitement, but it is missing an element. When you read a good book, part of the excitement is that you don't know how it's going to end. When you read a kids book and can see the ending coming from halfway through the book, that's not really entertaining for adults. I only recently had a child, so have just gotten back into reading children's books but there it is. When you are reading the WoT for the first time, and you get to about book 4, you have it figured out. Nobody is going to get hurt in this fight of good vs evil.

I actually really don't like it when characters die in books. Especially with Steve King, he makes you love them so much, and then abruptly kills them. I thought the first 4 books of aSoFaI were obnoxious due to the amount of deaths (and gore and profanity for profanity's sake). But I tell you, I'm reading the new one, and I haven't been this hungry for a story in a long long time. I want to know what's going to happen, and each chapter is exciting, because it could be that character's last chapter. When GRRM's character falls in the river, you pretty much consider him a gonner. When he gets rescued, it's a total surprise! When Nyn fell in the river, I just rolled my eyes and wondered who was going to fish her out. I already knew how that was going to end, with Nyn safe and sound.

I guess there is a fine line between too many deaths and not enough deaths. No deaths is boring (in a story like this one, the age old battle of good vs evil). If the WoT was a football game, at the end of the game the score would be good guys 100, bad guys 0, the good guys would have no dirt on their uniform... and the crowd would be snoozing peacefully in the stands. (If you're not American, feel free to replace the phrase "football game" with the phrase "football match")...

I've read everything too, and have never heard of Gormenghast until just now. They have them on CD at my local library, so somebody has heard of them. I'm going to check it out!

Tam got his sword from king Stepeanos in the Whitecloak War where he fought with the Illian army (he was a Second Captain). He became a blademaster there.

The procedure to get a heron marked blade is to defeat a blademaster with witnesses, if you kill them you get the sword. Only Rand and Lan got their blades from their fathers.

One can also prove one's skill before a panel of Blademasters. I can't currently find the reference, but I believe it's in one of Valda's PoV's.

Either way, in the first method, most likely you'd need to defeat a Blademaster using a sword, not some other weapon, else why should you qualify as a Blademaster yourself?

Well, if you were to slip up behind a blademaster and slit his throat with a dagger... who would stop you from grabbing his sword? It might not technically be "earning" it, but once you got back to the TR nobody would know the difference...

Not that I think Tam got his by defeating the greatest swordsman in the world with a quarterstaff. I agree with the view that Jearom has been dead a long long time, and his legend has grown over the years. I mean, I don't even think he was a Warder. Lan could beat him easily, the overrated lout.

herid, it's simple. Owyn made Thom unable to resist helping a channeling man deal with AS. All Ashaman are now in need, because having their own place doesn't make AS regard them as equals (like it was in the AoL). If, on the way, Thom can take revenge on those Reds (who are bound to be vocal critics of any normalization agreement with the Ashaman), all the better.

how does any of this relate to the vision Min had? She saw a man (not Thom) juggling fire and the White Tower. What is this supposed to represent? I fail to see any connection between this vision and Thom getting revenge on the reds who gentled Owyn or him helping the Asha'man.

The man in the vision was a man who could channel. He needs help, the WT doesn't like men who can channel. Thom is going to help him by working to unite male and female channelers. The Reds who gentled his nephew will oppose this unification, and need to be dealt with in some way. This may be how he will get revenge.

The main counterargument I was considering was when Moggy tried to balefire Nynaeve while Nynaeve was on a boat. The boat jumped backwards a few yards and then started sinking. If the boat jumped backwards in time because the boat was balefired, that would blow my theory. However, I think that Moggy must have balefired some of the rowers, and that caused the backwards jump.

It does say in the book that she balefired the rowers and that's why the boat jumped back up the river...

What? How is New Spring not a part of the series? It's set in the WoTverse, deals with events central to the main series and contains many of the same characters. I fail to see how it doesn't count.

I am excited to see what condescending remarks we will get from Mr Ares. I'm sure it has to do with the phrase "series proper". He'll be here soon to explain it to us like we're 5 years old. Like the time he explained to me what Christmas is.

I thought about the post all day yesterday though. My daughter is almost 2, and we took her to some stables. All day she kept saying "Hi horse!" but I kept hearing "high horse". (true story)

Well, Christmas is a holiday celebrated every year on the 25th of December. Giving gifts to others at this time of year is traditional, and consequently the run up to Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year for retail.

It's hard to argue with that. I do know where you're coming from. I just think you should give the WOT more respect.

Upon its release, Crossroads of Twilight immediately rose to the #1 position on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, making it just the third Wheel of Time book to reach the #1 position on that list.

I know you think that WOT fans are destitute creatures who can't possibly save up $20 over the course of a year so they could buy the new book when it comes out. So you'll probably argue that CoT only did so well while being released in January because the peasants still had a little Christmas money left. I think it's because WOT fans do have $20 and get the book on or as close to the day it comes out as they can. Any time of year.

And while you don't think New Spring is a part of the series, everybody else does. For example, if you go to wiki, under "books in the series" it's right there, the first book. If you go to wot wikia, you can read things like "CoT consists of a prologue, 30 chapters, and an epilogue. LoC, KoD, and New Spring are the only other Wheel of Time books to have an epilogue." If you go to Dragonmount home page and click books, there is a list of "The Wheel of Time books", and it made the list. Go to your favorite character list, and there are people there who only appear in NS. For the characters like Lan and Moiraine, you can look at their pages and what they did in NS is included with all of the rest. If I go to my library's site and search under "series" for "wheel of time" New Spring is one of the search results. If, in your mind, you would like to consider it an imaginary book, by all means, I won't hold you back.

I only say this because for me catching typos is EXTREMELY easy...in fact I can't NOT. it is my burden and my curse.

This is the boat I'm in. I'm trying to read and enjoy the story, but my eyes just fix on the typos. Then I have to quit reading and start thinking about what went wrong. And it wasn't like there was an error on each page... it's just that the errors were so glaringly obvious (to me) I didn't understand how they survived all the way to the printing process.

It is a very minor thing though, when compared to the other dislikes I've read in the thread.

the following choices: get the book out, accepting there will be mistakes; delay the book for months, missing Chritmas.

qué? like I said all they have to do is hire additional or more competent proofreaders (me) I could unilaterally get it done in under < one week. lol @ 'months'! what you are describing is a breakdown in management. if they can't get it done by 'Chritmas'.....then they should have started earlier, it really is that simple. again a single work week is all it would take for ONE competent proofreader to fix every typo. "oops mr. jordan we actually need it one week ahead of when we thought (we suck rather badly you see)" <- whats so hard about that. if they really cared about their product they would QC it properly before releasing it. then no one would have to go through with your proposed boycott of the series. sounds to me like the same forces are at work which caused an originally-planned eyeless 3 book series to be milked into 15 eyeless books (corporate greed).

It was definitely not greed that lead this series to expand from three books into 15 (it has only expanded to fourteen, for one thing). RJ's initial plot breakdown was considered too extensive to be completed in three books - that's why his initial contract was for six books. RJ was just bad at estimating how much left he had to write. And they couldn't start earlier, because they hadn't finished writing it. TGS: Sanderson hired, works, finishes book, it is brought out. ToM, the same. Unless they had hired Sanderson a couple of months earlier? Of course, Tor needs to hire psychics! Some of the purely RJ books were rushed through editing - this proved unpopular as it led to a high number of errors, so they abandoned it for KoD. And as I have already pointed out, missing a deadline by mere days could potentially lead to months of delay. Publishers have slots when they release books. If your book isn't handed in in time to be released in that slot, you'll have to wait for another one. Or they just rush it through editing...wait, wasn't rushing it through the cause of the errors to begin with? You have demonstrated no particular knowledge of the publishing industry (neither am I, I've just picked up a couple of things) and despite the arrogance of your assessment I see no compelling evidence that you would be a better proofreader. Remember, just because you could get it done in under a week, doesn't mean they have a spare week to let you make one last pass before it goes to the printers. Because it has to go to the printers to get printed to get sent to the shops. And the printers won't necesarily stop and wait - they have other books to print. That is the point you so singularly failed to grasp about my one day line - I didn't mean all proofreaders have to do their job at the rate of a book a day, I mean that they are pushed for time. They have to edit the book, make the changes, get it sent to the printer in order to get it into the shops. And if the book is handed in close to deadline, then they have less time to prepare it - from what I can gather from reading comments Sanderson has made, he has to work long hours to get things done. I hardly think everyone else has masses of time to spare for nice, leisurely reads. And when you are up against it, timewise, there does exist the possibility that errors will slip past unnoticed. Unfortunate, but unavoidable unless you are prepared to spend much longer with the book in editing - and thus you delay the book by months. So your recourse as a reader is either to buy a book that you know will have errors, or wait until they have had time to fix them. By refusing to do the latter, you send the message that the errors are acceptable.

Interesting stuff. How often do these slots occur? Every 3 years or so? The fans would really be upset about waiting 3 extra months to read a finished story? They would rather buy a book that's full of errors and typos? Personally, I would rather wait the 3 months. What's the Christmas thing about anyway? ToM was released 2 November 2010, I think they could have taken the afformentioned week to fix the (at least) the typos and released it November 9. And people are going to buy the next WOT when it comes out, even if it's not Christmas. It's not really a Christmas gift. The ones that do come out near Christmas, it's more than 2 months before. No WOT fan is going to sit there for over two months waiting to read the next book because they are getting for Christmas. And no gift purchasers are going to buy book 8 of a series for somebody who doesn't read the series. It would make sense for the first book to come out before Christmas, that would get all kinds of new readers into your series. EotW came out 15 January 1990. CoT was released 7 January 2003, which tells me that getting these books out in time for Christmas is not that crucial to TOR. And looking at the release dates of the books of this series, I do not see any apparent slots.

I read my friend's copy of ToM and felt real bad for him. I'm cheap so I hate to buy a new book anyway, but to buy one with so many glaring typos? Ouch.

(it has only expanded to fourteen, for one thing)

Which one do you not count? And why not?

Do pasta or noodles exist in the WoT universe?

 

If so, I don't believe we have seen them. There was, however, a sweet and sour stir-fry, which for some reason I found odd.

I found that exceedingly odd myself. And then... I went out for Chinese food.

They don't talk about food too much in the books, but lots of stuff does get mentioned. Everybody is ready for some cheese at any time of the day. I cracked up when I read a thing earlier in CoS, where the girls are puking over the side of the boat, and that reminded Mat of his own stomach. I was eating, so I was hoping he wasn't going to start ralfing as well. No, turns out he was hungry! So he started munching some cheese.

Is there a database of food mentions? Weird question, I know, but... Toy'varen started it with weird questions about noodles!

Alright, my last question just flew by y'all like the wind at the beginning of a WOT book, but I'll try another.

I just finished CoS. Liah. Rand went to Shadar Logoth to kill Sammael, and came across her. I was confused, how is it that she's still alive after all of these months? I looker her up: http://encyclopaedia-wot.org/characters/l/liah.html says she was corrupted by the evil of Aridhol, but that really doesn't explain what she ate or how she avoided Mashadar for all those months, only to be eaten by it later (she obviously wasn't Mashadarproof).

ALSO, when Mashadar grabbed Liah she screamed and howled and struggled and it took quite a while. Meanwhile, Rand glances at her, glances back at Sammael and he's just gone without a peep. Mashadar really ate him!?

i don't think it's ridiculous to suggest that a reasonably concise writer could have told this story well in 3 books. given that RJ was never reasonably concise, i expand the range to 7, which is 2 books past where many many readers had enough and stopped reading the thing.

 

while the prose is nice, most of it, and most of the subplots, and most of the subcharacters, and most of the repetition, and most of the sidetrails are unnecessary to the story.

 

3 - 7 books. plenty of room for wandering. he could have told the main story/ies, ended it/them, and started on outriggers.

 

doggone it. it's my opinion, i'm entitled to it.

 

and my other opinion is that it's not naughty enough for HBO, at any length.

I think this post kicks arse.

My wonderful beautiful fiance and I had this talk the other night. She is a really really big WOT fan, she's the one who made me start reading them. I was busy reading The Dark Tower series over and over and studying that cycle. I believe that Steve King told a much better and more complex story, (I mean, more stuff happened) in just 7 books. My biggest point was that hell, this guy Miguel de Cervantes wrote more "stuff" into one big fat book called Don Quixote. Sure, we didn't get the description of each blade of grass, or every single person's outfit, but... A LOT of stuff happened! Almost as many stories as are told in the 13 books of WOT.

Yeah, so we can basically blame Faile for the potential future destruction of the Aiel!

Nice! She is one of the things I hate about the series!

What I primarily dislike about her is her desire to be yelled at. It made me think her dad beat her mom, and what's really going on is she is wanting to be beaten by Perrin, but RJ refers to it as "yelling" because the whole domestic abuse thing was a little too much. When I re-read it though, I go ahead and read between the lines, and understand that Faile is actaully begging for a beating.

The repetition bugs me as well. The more times I re-read, the harder it is to understand. He explained what an *'angreal is in every single book, sure. But at the same time you are expected to keep all 1880 characters straight, with no reminders of who this person is. It's a head scratcher.

My fellow audio book listeners!! I have been thinking about this so much lately.

Kate has always bugged me, the accent she uses for Elayne and Gawynn and them drives me nuts. And now in the new book, it seems like she's doing it the whole time. Rands dad Tam has suddenly become "Tom". What really really drives me crazy is "The Lost Battle". Why does she keep calling it that!?

For me, changing pronunciations between books is acceptable. It would be better if they learned how to say things before they started that first book, but having them change is better than having them keep pronouncing it wrong. What really drove me crazy in the beginning was when Kate and Michael would pronounce things differently from each other. In one chapter you hear about Bridgette, then next chapter it's Burgadette, and the next book she was Beergetta.

Rhuidean is another good one. I've heard that one pronounced at least 6 different ways, and 5 of them were Kate Reading. Roy Dean. Roy Deon. Rui Deon. (she always seems to make it sound like a person's name to me).

I really like Michael Kramer, he's awesome. The Perrin thing doesn't bug me, mainly because the text is constantly describing him as being slow and deliberate. If he read it differently, I think that would bug me.

Do you guys check out other ebooks, or just this series? My favorite reader of all time is Frank Muller. He read most of the Dark Tower series, but was unable to complete the series, so another guy picked it up. George Guidall is another great narrator, I felt bad for him with such large shoes to fill. There is a character named Oy, who is described as having a low, gravelly voice. Frank nailed it! George, not so much. He used a high pitch whiny voice, which sucked a lot. ESPECIALLY when we got to the part when the text said "'something Oy said' he said, in his low, gravelly voice." So the guys voice totally contradicted the text. So it would be kinda lame if Perrin spoke all quickly and then the text talked about how slow and deliberate he is.

Rhuidean

I've been thinking a lot about it. I'm in the middle of Aviendha's trip into the future. If it was hard for the Aiel to accept their past (many who go to Rhuidean never return) it must be nearly impossible to see their future and survive.

Is that the reason that no wise one can go through the Pillars twice? Back when they were figuring out what the Pillars were for, they sent someone in. They came back and told the story. The wise ones decided it would be a good test to become a wise one. They sent her back to find out more... she never returned. Could it be that Avi didn't actually change a thing with the Pillars? They have always shown you the past the first time, and the future the second time. It's just that Avi was the first person strong enough to cope with the second trip. Just a thought...

Also... all those people go into Rhuidean and never return, but... what happens to their bodies?

There is a metal band named "Lanfear"

The band Nightwish has a song called "The Kinslayer", though it is not about The Wheel of Time. Seems likely the title is a reference to WoT though.

 

The band Nightwish is badass! <3

The title is not a reference to WoT. The song is about the Columbine massacre.

 

I said the song is not about the WoT. It does, however, seem likely that the title is a reference to WoT, especially considering Tuomas is a fantasy fan and many of their songs have literature or movie references. I have no proof that the title is a reference to WoT, it just seems likely.

 

It does not seem likely at all. I know Toumas is a fan of fantasy,the song Wishmaster is one such example. But why would the title be a reference to WoT when the song is about the killings at Columbine, doesn´t make much sense...

The song is about Columbine, we've established that. Is the title referring to Columbine though? The slayers at Columbine did not slay their kin. Nobody ever referred to them as kinslayers. I think it's obvious that the title has nothing to do with the song, which is not at all unheard of. Smells Like Teen Spirit comes to mind, it has nothing to do with deodorant. Toumas obviously got the name of the song from somewhere... I guess he could have made it up, but being a fan of fantasy it doesn't seem that likely.