Is the Wheel of time good or bad?

[Matias]

As simple as that, i've read is good but also people think is boring, i want to start reading it soon, i just want to know your opinion

[SwordNimiForPresident]

8 minutes ago, Matias said:

As simple as that, i've read is good but also people think is boring, i want to start reading it soon, i just want to know your opinion

I've read it several times. There are some slow spots. The exciting parts make it worth while. If you're a Brandon Sanderson fan, I think you will enjoy it.

[+Doomstick]

1 hour ago, Matias said:

As simple as that, i've read is good but also people think is boring, i want to start reading it soon, i just want to know your opinion

About half of them are warbreaker+ level of goodness*

 2 are less than Elantris* and the rest are in between

*in my opinion 

Edited June 11, 2019 by Doomstick

[Wander89]

2 hours ago, Matias said:

As simple as that, i've read is good but also people think is boring, i want to start reading it soon, i just want to know your opinion

Feel free to visit the Wheel of Time portion of the forums, might be best to ask there however I have a feeling we'd just be biased!

It's your own decision if you like it, I happen to really enjoy the books ad did not have any slogs that others encountered but can see where they came from. You can only try and if you don't like them, no-ones gonna judge!

[Ethan_sedai]

Yeah, there were some slow parts, but the endings of so many things were amazing!

[+robardin]

(This is my personal opinion... As if I needed to caveat that...)

Brandon Sanderson himself has cited The Wheel of Time as something hugely influential to him, and you can feel some of that come through in his own work in the "multi-volume doorstop fantasy epic" genre that is The Stormlight Archives.

Through the first six books, The Wheel of Time was - and of course, still is - amazing ("Lord of Chaos"). The very satisfying conclusion to that book felt like it was about the midpoint of a ten book story arc that would be one of the greatest of all time. And in fact, Robert Jordan said more than once that he envisioned it as exactly that, a ten book arc, the end of which he had "already written".

But as the next few books played out, instead of progressing towards that ending, more new side characters, plots, and prophecies got laid on the table faster than they were getting resolved (practically none of them).

Books 7-9 definitely "had stuff happen", but they felt rather drawn out. A lot of what happened until the last third or quarter of Book 9, "Winter's Heart", to me felt like could and should have been edited down to a bit more than one book. But the last part of that book did pick up the pace, ending on a major cliffhanger.

After a few more years, Book 10 ("Crossroads of Twilight") came out... And it turned out to be largely a retelling of the events of Books 8 and 9 from other characters' POV, many of which had either never had POVs before, or had only been relatively minor. Then, it ended on the SAME cliffhanger as "Winter's Heart", but this time from anothers character's POV!

Jordan defended this as a legitimate writer's technique to add depth and scope to a key part of the story, to see it from different POVs, but for fans already frustrated at the lack of progress towards anything resembling an ending, it was infuriating. (Yes, I was one of those fans.) Basically, if I were an editor with the benefit of hindsight, I would wave a wand and say, "hey, RJ, go and redact books 7-10 into just two books, 7 and 8, and now wrap it up in 2 more books like you said would happen!"

Shortly after "Crossroads of Twilight" is when he became seriously ill; book 11, "Knife of Dreams", would be the last one he personally wrote. And in a complete flip-flop from books 7-10, Book 11 felt weirdly sped up. In a few cases, things foreshadowed or outright prophecied way back in books 2 and 3 got wrapped up so abruptly and almost trivially that my main feeling wasn't "whoa, so that's what that was all about!", but rather, "What? THAT's what that was all about?"

You know the rest. He worked with Brandon Sanderson to go over his notes for how he wanted to end the story, having previously promised he would end it with a 12th and final book even if it turned out to a 1500 page Gargantua of a novel, but Brandon padded it out to three more books. And Jordan's ending was retained verbatim, he had indeed already written it years ago.

So, bottom line: should you read it? -- Well, why wouldn't you? The main reason not to START to read it would be that it might never finish, except maybe in a way that was executed less expertly by showrunners and script writers going off of overview notes for material once their plotlines went past the point of published prose, as clearly evidenced by much clumsier dialogue, pacing, implausible speeds of travel, and so on. (I hope that never happens to a work I cherish... Again...)

In this case, The Wheel of Time has been finished, and in the opinion of many, Sanderson's task in completing the final three books was well executed.

So yes, you may find yourself skim reading through books 7-10. Or not. In my re-reads of the series, which hasn't been for a while, mostly I read through "Lord of Chaos", then essentially go off of chapter summaries of those books to cherry pick which passages to actually re-read. But your first time through, maybe you just plod through, with the benefit of knowing that it's all there for you in the end, versus spending a decade or so waiting for books to come out in 2-3 year windows, only to feel like that could or should have been just two books and 4-5 years of your life.

[Eggdogg]

The wheel is super

[BreezeCauthon]

On 6/10/2019 at 6:39 PM, Matias said:

As simple as that, i've read is good but also people think is boring, i want to start reading it soon, i just want to know your opinion

Good. It's very good.

[Mat]

Currently I am trying to get through Crossroads of Twilight, and making no progress. I want new things to happen :/