Current Events > Started the wheel of time series

(+) Yeah! (+)

I binge read the entire series over a few months a couple years back

I loved it, though there were a good few books where every main character was being a shithead, and that made it pretty taxing to read because I just wanted them to grow the fuck up already

Also, gender politics is a major subtheme, so get ready for lots of people talking past each other
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Romes187 posted...

is the switch to Sanderson noticeable? Love the dudes lectures online for craft

but Ive tried to start a few of his books and didnt make it past chapter 1 (I def need to give him more time I think)

There are some characters he struggles with, but it isn't bad. Dude was clearly a fan of the series and gives it a lot of care.

And yeah Sanderson was hard for me to jump into. He likes to just drop you head first into the world with little exposition. I'd recommend Warbreaker as a first book by him because it has a pair of naive protagonists that need the world explained to them (which obviously benefits the just as clueless reader).


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Compsognathus posted...

And yeah Sanderson was hard for me to jump into. He likes to just drop you head first into the world with little exposition

thats so funny because I felt he was too heavy on the exposition...well for 20xx readers. But I also need to get my mind away from the thriller genre.

i feel big expositions were popular a few decades ago but now theres no attention span haha

I am in book 10 and I love it

I love the huge main cast and how they all have cool skills and are not just fodder for the slaughter for Rand to save.

It is like shonen fanatasy only the entire cast does not drift into worthless for main to do everything.

I hope you enjoy hair tugging and skirt smoothing

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spanky1 posted...

Honestly, I had to give up half way through the first book. I enjoyed Lord if the Rings, but I didnt have a desire to read it again, except an even longer version. I got halfway through the book and it was just a lot of traveling. I cant do it.

I recommend trying to push through book 1 and into book 2. If book 2 doesn't grab you then it's much more likely you'll dislike the series than if you're just bothered by the LotR parallels. Those will drop off towards the end of book 1 and are pretty much absent from the rest of the series. Traveling is still a thing but often in more interesting forms than early book 1 IMO (especially as magical forms become more common).

Compsognathus posted...

I'd recommend Warbreaker as a first book by him

i've been thinking about starting to read his stuff.
is that standalone or part of a series?
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You just dedicated the next 13 years of your life to one book franchise with comparatively little payoff.
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ROBANN_88 posted...

Compsognathus posted...

I'd recommend Warbreaker as a first book by him

i've been thinking about starting to read his stuff.
is that standalone or part of a series?

It's standalone, although he has mentioned a sequel here and there IIRC.

Also it has ties to Stormlight Archive but that's really something you only appreciate if you end up reading Stormlight, it's not required at all.
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is the switch to Sanderson noticeable? Love the dudes lectures online for craft

I really didn't think it was that bad. He keeps the same narrative style and the characters mostly fit their molds, albeit with maybe a little more humor. Given the very difficult nature of finishing someone else's work, he did well.

I do agree the books lagged a little in the middle, especially with Rand's mopey period and there's at least one book (Path of Daggers, I think) where I couldn't remember anything happening for the entire book.

Also, gender politics is a major subtheme

True, but it's at least built into the plot somewhat with the curse on male magic.

ROBANN_88 posted...

Compsognathus posted...

I'd recommend Warbreaker as a first book by him

i've been thinking about starting to read his stuff.
is that standalone or part of a series?

Warbreaker is standalone so far. He plans to eventually write a sequel. Notably, Warbreaker is available free from his website.

Warbreaker does take place within his larger Cosmere universe which provides a loose connection between most of his stories, but that's not really important for the story Warbreaker is telling.

tiornys posted...

spanky1 posted...

Honestly, I had to give up half way through the first book. I enjoyed Lord if the Rings, but I didnt have a desire to read it again, except an even longer version. I got halfway through the book and it was just a lot of traveling. I cant do it.

I recommend trying to push through book 1 and into book 2. If book 2 doesn't grab you then it's much more likely you'll dislike the series than if you're just bothered by the LotR parallels. Those will drop off towards the end of book 1 and are pretty much absent from the rest of the series. Traveling is still a thing but often in more interesting forms than early book 1 IMO (especially as magical forms become more common).

I'm wary of doing this because the same thing kinda happened with Malazan Book of the Fallen. I was having a hard time with book one, wasn't into it, and everyone told me to just push through and get to book 2, so that's what I did. Book 2 was even worse than book 1 and i gave up halfway through.

It's not the lord of the rings style specifically, I think it's just any kind of huge, plodding, super serious high fantasy books I cant get into.
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spanky1 posted...

tiornys posted...

spanky1 posted...

Honestly, I had to give up half way through the first book. I enjoyed Lord if the Rings, but I didnt have a desire to read it again, except an even longer version. I got halfway through the book and it was just a lot of traveling. I cant do it.

I recommend trying to push through book 1 and into book 2. If book 2 doesn't grab you then it's much more likely you'll dislike the series than if you're just bothered by the LotR parallels. Those will drop off towards the end of book 1 and are pretty much absent from the rest of the series. Traveling is still a thing but often in more interesting forms than early book 1 IMO (especially as magical forms become more common).

I'm wary of doing this because the same thing kinda happened with Malazan Book of the Fallen. I was having a hard time with book one, wasn't into it, and everyone told me to just push through and get to book 2, so that's what I did. Book 2 was even worse than book 1 and i gave up halfway through.

It's not the lord of the rings style specifically, I think it's just any kind of huge, plodding, super serious high fantasy books I cant get into.

Lol I fucking hated Malazan, but that's mostly because it just drops you into a story with little to no explanation.
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MC_BatCommander posted...

spanky1 posted...

tiornys posted...

spanky1 posted...

Honestly, I had to give up half way through the first book. I enjoyed Lord if the Rings, but I didnt have a desire to read it again, except an even longer version. I got halfway through the book and it was just a lot of traveling. I cant do it.

I recommend trying to push through book 1 and into book 2. If book 2 doesn't grab you then it's much more likely you'll dislike the series than if you're just bothered by the LotR parallels. Those will drop off towards the end of book 1 and are pretty much absent from the rest of the series. Traveling is still a thing but often in more interesting forms than early book 1 IMO (especially as magical forms become more common).

I'm wary of doing this because the same thing kinda happened with Malazan Book of the Fallen. I was having a hard time with book one, wasn't into it, and everyone told me to just push through and get to book 2, so that's what I did. Book 2 was even worse than book 1 and i gave up halfway through.

It's not the lord of the rings style specifically, I think it's just any kind of huge, plodding, super serious high fantasy books I cant get into.

Lol I fucking hated Malazan, but that's mostly because it just drops you into a story with little to no explanation.

It was a baffling book to me. I honestly dont know how people can enjoy that kind of thing. I had no idea what was going on the entire time and then book 2 took me to completely different characters and places.

For the record, I'd much rather read Wheel of Time than the likes of Malazan.
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to be fair to Jordan, the LoTR parallels were on purpose, to bring a sort of familiarity to the start and always meant to be dropped as soon as he could
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Chapter 2 review

So Tam talks some shit with other village elders and the younger kids eat some pastries and lug booze around.

then they go outside and meet Moiraine. Apparently she pissed off Nynaeve (how is this pronounced) but is packing good looks and silver coins. The boys get boners and are p thirsty.

but moiraine gives a pretty cool speech about the wheel of time. Oh and a raven shows up and some lame knight character

my thoughts

i actually like when some info is held off because it makes me want to keep reading and he does this with whatever a Wisdom is. He also gives a nice sense of vastness if history by simply stating the inn had been there for thousands of years. Simple but effective.

Nigh-neev

At least per the audiobooks.

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I believe pronunciations are in the appendix
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I'm gonna reread these books again because of this topic. Think I'll start when I get home from work today. Might even bring one to work with me tomorrow..

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Couldnt grab me. But I might try again.
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Wheel of time is a great series, but it definitely slows down a bunch in the middle. The problem I'd say is that it feels like you are going nowhere and stuff is happening for no reason. Ultimately pretty much all of it is important, but it doesn't really feel that way while you are reading it.

ROBANN_88 posted...

i've been thinking about starting to read his stuff.
is that standalone or part of a series?

Warbreaker is standalone. It's part of the greater cosmere series, but the way the cosmere is written is that if you don't know it's a thing, you won't realise it's a thing by reading any single book.

Also Warbreaker can be downloaded for free legally on Sanderson's own website, here's a link:

https://brandonsanderson.com/books/warbreaker/warbreaker/warbreaker-rights-and-downloads/

The links to download is at the bottom, the final version is 6.1

uwnim posted...

Rainbow_Dashing posted...

I still don't get how balefire works exactly. I understand what they meant by what it does, but I mean...it kind of gets spammed and I'm not sure I realize the consequences of it.

It burns the pattern. If you use it on say a person, then their thread gets burned. How much of it gets burned depends on how powerful the balefire was. This causes the target to effectively be destroyed in the past. When it is just a small thing, the pattern can easily put itself together into its new form, but if enough threads are destroyed, then the stress put on the pattern would be too great and the whole thing would fall apart and destroy the world.

EvenSpoonier posted...

So the basic thing about balefire is that it wipes something out of existence. But if something gets hit with too much balefire at once, the balefire starts killing wiping it out of existence backward in time, to a degree proportional to just how badly it got zapped. This has the consequence of undoing its most recent actions, since it didn't exist to do them, though the person who cast the balefire still remembers what happened "before" the casting.

The effect is very dangerous, because WoT does not follow the many-worlds interpretation: there is only one timeline, and so the Pattern must be unravelled and respun to rewrite history every time balefire is used. Every time this happens, there is a risk everything could simply fail, and the further back in time the balefire has to go, the greater the risk. Fortunately, nobody has managed to balefire something back very far.

Oh this I can somewhat understand, and I guess the power of balefire has an effect. But...This is pretty big spoilers for book five? I think. I lost track since I'm just reading them pretty quickly with no regards to title on my kindle except making sure I'm in order.

Rahvin gets killed by a pretty pissed off Rand, I figured that would have disastrous effects, or maybe they don't mention it until next book. ALSO, it's a bit confusing, I understand they get killed to the point that they don't exist in other people's heads (that was shown by the darkhound biting Mat but not really biting him due to the balefire erasing that history and some people aren't sure about a darkhound attacking), shouldn't Nynaeve have been wondering why she was there in the dream world with Rand, shouldn't people have forgotten about Rahvin at that point? Shouldn't some of the damage he have done been reversed, or maybe he just completely ceases to exist [unlikely since he's thousands of years old], but still, see where I'm going with this?)

I guess I wish they made sense about strong balefire is exactly, it often just gets cited as a bar of light and sizzles with motes of light fading. But I don't know exactly how strong that is, and how damaging it is to unravel days, months, years? of existence.

And as an aside, anyone sad Natael/Asmodean got offed by a mystery, loved his musical jokes.
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Oh I'd be googling about how balefire works, but I've heard if you look up anything most likely you'll get spoiled, so that's what I've been trying to avoid sadly.
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Rainbow_Dashing posted...

Shouldn't some of the damage he have done been reversed

some of it was.
IIRC, it was very clearly shown that some people who Rahvin killed, were alive again afterwards
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ROBANN_88 posted...

Rainbow_Dashing posted...

Shouldn't some of the damage he have done been reversed

some of it was.
IIRC, it was very clearly shown that some people who Rahvin killed, were alive again afterwards

I just realized that Rand thought Rahvin killed Morgase, so he should've killed Rahvin as hard as possible with Balefire to bring her back. Even though she ran away, but still lol. Why worry about people dying if you can just balefire the killer. Confusing stuff. And yeah there's the balescream or whatever if you abuse it.
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Balefire spoilers.

Rainbow_Dashing posted...

Rahvin gets killed by a pretty pissed off Rand, I figured that would have disastrous effects, or maybe they don't mention it until next book. ALSO, it's a bit confusing, I understand they get killed to the point that they don't exist in other people's heads (that was shown by the darkhound biting Mat but not really biting him due to the balefire erasing that history and some people aren't sure about a darkhound attacking), shouldn't Nynaeve have been wondering why she was there in the dream world with Rand, shouldn't people have forgotten about Rahvin at that point? Shouldn't some of the damage he have done been reversed, or maybe he just completely ceases to exist [unlikely since he's thousands of years old], but still, see where I'm going with this?)

I guess I wish they made sense about strong balefire is exactly, it often just gets cited as a bar of light and sizzles with motes of light fading. But I don't know exactly how strong that is, and how damaging it is to unravel days, months, years? of existence.

Balefire doesn't completely remove what it hits from ever existing inheriently. Basically only a certain amount of their existance is undone, how much is determined by the amount of power used. So you may only undo the last five minutes, or the last five hours, or even the last five years, it just depends on the amount of power used. It always goes back directly in time, so if you erase five hours of existance, it removes the last five hours, rather than some random five hours.

wife Yelled at me not to read in until we finish the book we currently read so Ill bump this until the time comes haha

If someone tried to police what I read, there would be murder.

I exaggerate, but still. :(

Leanaunfurled posted...

If someone tried to police what I read, there would be murder.

I exaggerate, but still. :(

well I read to them so I get it. Its be like watching the next episode on Netflix alone. Bad move with a significant other

I'm past 80% of Book One. It's definitely worth slogging through to reach this point.
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They made a card game for it too..back when the craze of CCG hit. Like the books, the card game took FOREVER.....