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I've read ten so far, but I won't read any more until the series finishes. The first five are pretty good, but after that, they really slow down (especially book 8).

I've heard he's trying to wrap everything up while he can.

Is Wheel of Time good enough to make it worth reading 11+ books, including several that you guys have said aren't so good? Is it worth slogging through all those thousands of pages to get to the reward at the end?

The last time I slogged through a long series it was Stephen King's Dark Tower. But I only had to read a book every five to six years, except for the last 3.

OK, there were all those other books that had elements of Dark Tower in them, but they were also interesting stories in their own right. Well, except for Hearts in Atlantis, which depressed me for some reason.

Well, the reward at the end is still forthcoming. So as of right now, no, it isn't.

Is there a soundbite version of what Wheel of Time is about? Is there some central problem to solve, some main enemy to defeat, or some main character trying to reach his goals? Or is it just a bigass sprawling story about a world that he created?

I know that Dark Lords can hang around for a long time (Sauron, for instance, was originally one of the angels, born before the creation of the universe), but generally their final ass-kicking only takes a few books. Tolkien figured out that the most interesting parts about Sauron's defeat could be squeezed into 3 books, and he relegated all the rest to appendices and the Silmarillion.

I think I'll skip Wheel of Time. Heroes who take 12 books or whatever to kick a Dark Lord's ass just aren't that impressive to me.

Now you see why I won't read the Left Behind books. God describes Satan's final fall in a few dozen pages in Revelation. It took those two literalist freaks 12 books to do the same. Clearly, the original was better.

Seven? Isn't that six volumes? Or am I missing something? Or were the appendices supposed to be their own volume?

All I know is that the combined page count of LotR, the appendices, the Hobbit, and the Silmarillion is STILL less than Wheel of Time. Quite a bit less.

And Tolkien described the fall of not one but TWO Dark Lords in all those pages.

I'm liking Book 2 a lot more than Book 1. It kind of reminds me of what Jadagul said about 10 & 11, that it feels (at least at this point) that they should all have been one book. 1 is a lot of set-up without a lot of payoff, and it has the feeling of a "walk through the zoo"/"lookit how cool I am" story in too many spots. 2 is clicking along.

My only real complaint at this point is that -- okay, I am the biggest Neal Stephenson fan ever, so it's not like I expect my female characters to be amazingly realistic and complex, but -- I hate the way he writes women. Every single one of them is all, "Tee hee, let's gossip snottily and then make a sarcastic comment about men and then fight about a boy we only met once, giggle! Sniff!" [Edited out a much longer critique on his characterization and writing -- I'll save it for when I've read the whole series.]

Either way, I'm enjoying it enough to roleplay it, and it's improving my geek cred.

I think Robert Jordan commented once that he has trouble writing women because he isn't one. He has a lot of strong female characters in his books—he said he was attempting to create a world that had an even balance of power between the sexes, although in certain locations one or the other might be on top—but I think he said he had a bit of trouble with the finer characterization of the women.

Thoreau: it's complicated because the books roughly break up into three separate parts.

The first part, roughly the first three books, are a sort of Tolkien-esque "There are powerful bad guys and we need to defeat them without ever engaging in open battle, because they're too strong for us to handle directly." But at that point, the good guys gain a lot of power and the bad guys suffer a setback, so the good guys can operate a lot more in the open. The next five books or so involve a lot of political maneuvering, as the good guys control some countries and military forces, the bad guys others, neutrals others, and non-evil jerks (not allies of the Dark Lord, but not very nice and hate the good guys) yet others. So there's individual badass ass-kicking, and also lots of military campaigns and politics. After this a lot of the political maneuvering starts heading to an endgame; I can't really summarize this part, because we're still in the middle.

It's sort of like if at the end of Return of the King, Tolkien had said, "Okay, now Sauron's crippled. This means that our armies have a chance against the Orcs and the Southlanders. Now we have to fight them and beat them. Once we win militarily, we can hunt down Sauron and figure out how to actually kill him, which didn't quite happen when we destroyed the ring." Tolkien had a rich world; he could have written a lot more. That just wasn't the type of story he wanted to tell.

Now how this fits in with the "it gets slow as it goes on" thing: the politics starts out really gripping, but there are so many different political factions and such that after three books of the politics, he loses his ability to move all the plot threads along at a reasonable speed—there are five or six major viewpoint characters, each with his own political circumstances to deal with, each in a different country, and none of them interacting with each other too directly. He just has trouble keeping all the balls in the air in every book. So the 10/11 split: in 10, he tries to pay attention to every viewpoint character, and does some setup, but realizes that if he wants to spend some time on all characters he can't quite get to the payoff. But he gets to the brink, so when 11 starts he can just jump into the payoff and it's awesome.

Bottom line: I like the books, but largely because I like incredibly complex plots with twenty unrelated things going on at the same time. If you like more focused books, you'll probably not like these; but if you enjoy just wandering around in rich worlds, and don't feel a need for the story to arrive anywhere anytime soon, these'll be good.

George R.R. Martin is a GOD AMONG MEN.

I finished Book 4 (The Shadow Rising) earlier this week, and definitely found it the most solid of the books so far. 3 and 4 are definitely where it started getting enjoyable for me to read. I think the main thing is that Perrin, Mat, and Rand are all finally given separate personalities and depth, giving them their own motivations and their own storylines, instead of getting tossed hither and yon to advance the plot or show off this or that culture. Sure, they're not stunningly complex characters or anything, but they finally feel more like real people.

Which is probably why the way he writes the female characters is becoming even more grating. Nynaeve, Egwene, Elayne, Min ... all totally interchangeable. Oh sure, Nynaeve pulls her braids, and Min wears pants, or whatever, but they all behave exactly the same way. Elayne is far and away the most annoying to me, because she hasn't had a real role in anything that's happened so far. I'd much rather see her in the White Tower using her lessons in diplomacy to pull strings, pretending to be cowed by Aes Sedai while thinking "I was spitting in Elaida's eye before I was out of diapers, you don't scare me at all."

And oh my god, how much do I hate Faile. I have a big soft spot for Perrin, and their wedding ceremony was adorable, but good god do I want to stab her in the eye.

Anyway, onwards and upwards through the series. I'm definitely going to write a massive critique/essay of thoughts when I'm done, because I am a crazy person.

That's very good to know, Jadagul. Sometimes I worry that I'm getting overly critical, but at least I'll have company while I do it!

Oh, and (while I won't deny that having an evil character be in love with the MC presents interesting plot opportunities), the whole "Rand won't kill one of the Dark One's most powerful and feared minions any of the multiple times he has the chance, because it has a vagina"? SO. MUCH. HATE.

No, I didn't think it was meant to be a good quality, but I find it totally unbelievable. Like at the end of Fires of Heaven, when she comes blasting out of the wagon skinning people alive and shrieking and torturing Aveidhawhatever and Egwene with murder in her eyes? And he still can't do it? Um, no. I couldn't bear to hurt a kitten, but if an evil kitten was holding a gun to David's head, I'd probably manage to at least tweak its ear.

I do like that RJ has had the characters acknowledge in several spots how difficult it is to kill someone, instead of turning them into mindless murder machines. But the Lanfear thing just feels false, and it takes away a lot of my empathy for Rand because I'm so busy yelling at him.

Of course, my complaints should not be taken to mean I'm getting no enjoyment out of the series, since I'm still barrelling through them.

Long digression saved for the upcoming Mondo Essay of Doom.

In Crown of Swords, Mat is forced to have sex at knifepoint by the Queen of Altara. And then everybody mocks him, even though he's upset about it. Because see, it's funny! Women are weak, and men can't get raped!

Dear Robert Jordan, I hope you are the victim of ocular penetration within the next month. No love, Ellie.

I'm out. There's still some good stuff in the books, but this made me want to vomit.

I think the reason the Mat-Tylin thing never bothered me is that Mat doesn't seem too deeply bothered by it. When he meets her, as I recall, his reaction is, "wow, she's hot--wait, I can't think that, she's the bloody queen." When she starts chasing him he gets really confused, because it's all backwards from what's supposed to happen. And afterwards, he seems to be thinking more along the lines of, "Well, that was hot, but--damnit, backwards!" Embarrassed, maybe, but not really genuinely upset.

Still, I see your point. That never occurred to me when I was reading them.

Yeah, Robert Jordan is no Tolkien, in terms of world-building. But as you say, he does pretty much exactly what he intended to do. As for the editing, you're probably right but that never bothers me; I've never read a book where I got to the end and said, "It was pretty good, but needed to be shorter," I think for two reasons. First, I read at a speed I'm told is unnaturally fast; the WOT books I uniformly got through in under a day, if I remember right. So a book that's a bit too long doesn't bother me nearly as much as it does people who'd read slower.

Second, when I enjoy books I don't want to leave. Either I love the world or I love the characters, and either way I don't want to leave. So if the books drag on and have more silly and random detail, that's just more time I can kind of soak in the world and enjoy the setup.

Very good comment on "evaluate the author on what he's trying to do"; I have lots more to say but my prof just showed up and I should start paying attention.

Apparently he left a detailed outline with his family, or something like that, though. So someone else could finish it.

And presumably this someone else will actually have an editor.