Robert Jordan

The Wheel of Time

Series currently contains 7 books: The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, The Shadow Rising, The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos, and A Crown of Swords (Just released). There is no end in sight.
In homage to whomever the comedian is who does the very funny "Seven Stages of Drinking Skit", here are the

Seven Stages of Reading Robert Jordan

Stage 1 (The Eye of the World): This book is awesome! The characters are great, the world is astounding, the plot is interesting and fast paced. What a great book! I can't wait for the next one!
Stage 2 (The Great Hunt): This book is really good! Long, but good! The characters are good, if a little dense at times, the world is really amazing, the plot is interesting, if a bit confusing. Looks like a cool series! I'm looking forward to the next one!
Stage 3 (The Dragon Reborn): This book is pretty long. But the series is pretty good! The characters are pretty good, although they do some stupid things. The plot is getting a little hard to follow, but it is still kind of cool. I wonder how the next one will be?
Stage 4 (The Shadow Rising): This book is really long.
Stage 5 (The Fires of Heaven): This series is really long. The characters are so stupid and relate to each other so poorly that it's starting to give me an ulcer. I lost track of the plot somewhere in book 3. What book are we on now, anyway?
Stage 6 (Lord of Chaos): I think I'm going to set myself on fire if this series doesn't end soon. I'm drawn by some irresistable urge to keep reading these long drawn out books about characters who act like complete imbeciles involved in a plot so complex and spread out that God couldn't figure it out! Please, please let the next book be the last one!
Stage 7 (A Crown of Swords): Dear god! How much longer will it take?! We've gone nearly 5,000 pages and this series is still going!

And as you stumble blinking out into the summer sun (having started re-reading the series in January and reading continuously during all your waking hours), you fall to your knees, raise your arms to the sky and cry out (all together now!): "I WILL NEVER EVER READ ANOTHER ROBERT JORDAN BOOK FOR AS LONG AS I LIVE!!!"
Then you toddle off down to The Stars Our Destination to buy the newest book in the series.

OK, so this may be a little harsh, at least partly for the sake of humor. But there is an element of truth to it. When I first started reading this series, I thought it was fantastic. Incredible world, unique style of magic, interesting characters, enveloping plot - it had it all. Easily a 9, maybe even a 10 on the big list. Even through the third book, I was still relatively involved and looking forward to what was coming. Hell, my roommate and I liked the series so much that we created a game based on it while we were in Europe.
However, as the series has gone on (and on and on and...), I have started getting more and more frustrated with it as a whole, and it has been becoming more and more of an effort to read each new book. I mean, really, 5,000 pages?! And it's not over?! And it's not part of the Library of Congress?!
To be honest, though, even the length and the incredibly complex plot involving characters distributed from one side of the world to the next probably wouldn't have soured me on the series enough to drop it out of the top part of the list, if it weren't for my frustrations with the characters. I swear, if I hear one more time "I can't trust men" from a woman or "All women are like this" from a man or "I can't possibly trust my best friend since I was knee-high to a grasshopper with any information about my life at all", I'm going to go absolutely ballistic. The relationships in this book absolutely suck. It isn't even that I don't like the characters individually, it's just that as soon as they are forced to deal with one another, they start acting like four-year-olds. Paranoid four-year-olds. With severe prejudices against anyone of the opposite sex.
<Whew>. OK, I'm calm. To his credit, there was some vague hope that this trend might be starting to change in the A Crown of Swords, but I haven't finished it yet, so we'll have to wait and see.
I would really like to like this series, but to be honest, it's going to have to have one mother of an ending to be able to get me to feel like it was worth all the effort of reading it. I'd quit now, but I hate to leave things unfinished. Hopefully we'll wrap it up before we hit 10,000 pages.

Further note: At the time of my review, I had not finished Crown of Swords. I now have, and while everything I said above I still feel, I must say that it appears that he is starting to make a turn for the better. If the next book continues improvement, I may even raise my rating of the series...