Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 800 -
Buy: Book/eBook
I have spent the past eight commentaries talking about where I was as a reader in my early-to-mid 20’s when I first read (and then re-read, in some cases more than twice) the first eight volumes of The Wheel of Time. For the first seven, I read them all within a two-week stretch in-between and just after my MA exams in November 1997. The eighth volume, The Path of Daggers, I bought on its release date and re-read either once or twice (memory is faint) before November 7, 2000, when the ninth Wheel of Time novel, Winter’s Heart, came out in the US.
The astute readers probably have realized by now that if I am talking about books last read around 10 years ago, then it must have been Winter’s Heart that gave me a long pause in my reading. That is indeed true, as not only was there a shade over two years to wait until the tenth volume, Crossroads of Twilight, but I never re-read any of the first nine in the interim, nor did I read that volume until 2006 on a lark. What happened in this reading that finally caused me to do the metaphorical throwing up of hands in surrender? Read More »
Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 704 -
Buy: Book/eBook
If A Crown of Swords is the first WoT book that I bought, A Path of Daggers (October 1998 publication) is the first WoT book that I bought in hardcover, on its release date. I read the first seven volumes while I was finishing up my MA in History at the University of Tennessee in 1997, but this volume I purchased while I was halfway through my 16 month teacher education/student teaching coursework. I remember using the internet in the university computer lab to look for several release dates for books I had a vague interest in and I saw when The Path of Daggers would be released in a few weeks, so I used some of my student loan money that I had at the time (between classwork and my required 60 hours of classroom observation, no way was I going to be able to hold even a part-time job) and bought the book in a local mall. Read More »
Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 896 -
Buy: Book/eBook
As I believed I mentioned somewhere earlier in one of my commentaries, A Crown of Swords was actually the first WoT book that I read. I was in the midst of my MA exams (I want to say I purchased the book during the week between my MA writtens and my MA orals) and I wanted something light to read. I was doing my usual late-night grocery shopping when I thumbed through the books in the display. One of them looked somewhat promising. Said it was one of several books by this author (I should note that this was the alternate paperback cover that didn’t feature any of Darrell Sweet’s artwork, or else I might not have ever picked up the book in the first place), but no indication if this series was a bunch of stand-alones or part of an ongoing serial. Since it was only $7 or so and I was bored, I picked it up and read it the next day/night or two between my readings on the Second International. Read More »
Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 720 -
Buy: Book/eBook
I’ve reached the halfway point at least in this series to date. Death is like a feather, duty like a mountain, and around 5000 pages of WoT is like carrying a 400 lb. woman wearing spandex and a tube top on your shoulders as you run up that mountain. Not the most pleasant of images, true, but this book was much more of a slog than the previous book, The Fires of Heaven, had proven to be.
When I first read Lord of Chaos back in November 1997, I even then found it to be the most difficult of the seven books to date to enjoy. Back then, used as I was to reading cultural and religious histories in English and German, it wasn’t the size of the novel that daunted me but rather how disjointed it felt. Nearly 13 years later, that sense of disjointedness was even more pronounced. It was a struggle at times to pay attention to what was transpiring, which might explain in a perverse fit of reasoning why I am reviewing it so soon after completing it (I finished it about an hour before I began writing this post), when I typically wait 1-2 days. Between the often-interchangeable character types (Aes Sedai, Cairhein, Aiel, Forsaken, Tairens, etc.) and the over-explanations of things that I first read about several books ago, I fear my own complaints may become just as repetitive if I don’t spice them up with some actual observations. Read More »
Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 992 -
Buy: Book/eBook
Five volumes into the Wheel of Time series, I find myself struggling more and more to pay close attention to all the details. The earlier novels were easier in that the number of subplots were very few and generally no more than a few chapters separated any bunching of each subplot. The narrative was relatively straight-forward and although the prose never was anything to write home about, enough interest was generated in the characters to make the first few novels at least bearable to read and on quite a few occasions, enjoyable.
However, by the fourth volume, The Shadow Rising, my interest began to waver. I noted in my previous commentary that I believed Jordan tried to cover too much, to explain more than what was vitally essential to the main plot of the series, that of the Dragon Reborn being readied for the upcoming Last Battle. Here in The Fires of Heaven, my complaints about the previous volume probably can be multiplied by at least a factor of ten. Although I recall enjoying this volume almost the same as the previous one when I first read it in 1997, a decade away from reading it has reminded me that time might have the ability to remove bad memories and to enhance the few positive ones that remained. The Fires of Heaven was at times a terrible mess of a novel to wade through. Read More »
