Okay, so I know there are already a million threads about Wheel of Time...

[Galactus]

Jordan's prose is the main reason why I haven't made it through The Dragon Reborn, and I have been told/shown examples of it not getting any better. Alot of times the dialogue makes me want to drop it. So I disagree

Now, with that being said, I brought The Dragon Reborn to work today and am making progress. Simply going to ignore what I dont like and immerse myself in the world/story.

Jordan can be incredibly verbose over pointless things which gets annoying fast, but occasionally he hits it right, Dumai's Wells are excellently written for instance.

Jordan's prose can get turgid, but he CAN write well occasionally, it's just that his good scenes are surrounded by blandness and reptitition.

[Shryke]

Functional would be a good word to describe Jordan I'd say, yes, and I'd also agree he wrote very good climaxes(hell, the ending of Winter's Heart was the only worthwhile thing in books 9 and 10 combined). I'd put Sanderson in the same boat though his dialogue and characterizations are weaker. You can't say Sanderson was crisper than Jordan became of where the books were at when the series was basically treading water in books 8-11 for the most part, any lack of pace in books 8-11 was entirely due to Jordan's writing style, or lack their of.

No, the series was "treading water" in 8-10. People who praise Sanderson often seem to forget that 11 was written by Jordan and was accelerating towards the climax like mad and wrapping things up.

And Jordan's prose is decent, and occasionally good, if a little overly long for my taste in some places.

Sanderson's is decent with occasional bouts of complete wrench-you-out-of-the-milieu type bits. In his WOT most especially.

[AUyushu]

No, the series was "treading water" in 8-10. People who praise Sanderson often seem to forget that 11 was written by Jordan and was accelerating towards the climax like mad and wrapping things up.

And Jordan's prose is decent, and occasionally good, if a little overly long for my taste in some places.

Sanderson's is decent with occasional bouts of complete wrench-you-out-of-the-milieu type bits. In his WOT most especially.

I didn't forget 11 was written be Jordan, hence I said 8-11. 11 had a much faster pace than 8-10, but it still had a ton of treading water. Egwene's plotline should have been finished in 11 rather than 12, Mat was treading water the entire book before the Tuon plotline was finally wrapped up at the end. Just because a couple of plotlines finally got finished after four books of verbose meandering doesn't mean Jordan was accelerating to a climax like mad and wrapping things up. KOD had a very leisurely pace with several plotlines being rushed through in the last section. I would say KOD is pretty much on par with TOM though, which was a very uneven book by Sanderson, but a bit worse than TGS.

Most of the take you out of the moment prose I notice by Sanderson in WOT tends to be more from him not hitting the right notes with the characters, which is kinda unavoidable. But some of them are pretty bad.

[fionwe1987]

Egwene's plotline should have been finished in 11 rather than 12,

Umm... no. There was a reason book 12 was so well received, and that's because Rand's and Egwene's storylines were in tandem. They both had to reach their peaks as characters at the exact same moment. Its one of the centerpiece concurrences in the series. Egwene appeared for exactly the right amount in book 11, in a chapter that was very well written, and one of the few occasion of concision from Jordan.

[Kosciuszko]

Not only is Egwene in KoD great but I also enjoyed Mat. His interactions with Tuon were interesting to read.

[Bill Foote]

Not buying, fionwe1987.

So throw out that rather well done 30 page chapter in book 11 for ~150 pages of book 12 that cover the same things, poorly? That's probably the main problem I have with tGS, the idiot ball gets handed around way too freely to make the chapter's focus character look good, while not that much really happens and some that does was already done better in a previous book.

Yes, the timelines of the various plots were hopelessly out of whack, and too many climaxes had to hit at nearly the same time according to the book 13 summary. Granted, pretty sure spoiler Rand having to be resolved in that book was editorial fiat...but haven't read ToM yet so can't really go into what can be moved where and still wrap some things up satisfyingly in 300k words.

----------

CoT: reread a few months ago, so with the caveat that I like RJ's prose and am willing to overlook a lot...

Mat: a chapter of material spread over 4. Who cares, it's Mat.

Elayne: she's blah to read, but there's a few interesting world nuggets in there. Once Elayne gets to Caemlyn, it's pretty much copy/paste for 4 books, so out of that slog, these are some of the better.

Think it's the White Tower side-story here? (Pavara, 3 of them with the same damn name...Saerin, Seanin, something else ridiculously similar, etc...) Wow, there's Aes Sedai with their heads screwed on straight. Too bad this eventually gets punted, but was nice while it lasted.

Perrin: There's actual good stuff in there compared to the rest, but Perrin's point of view sinks it. Horrible slog, and wait til you get to the riveting climax :)

Alviarin: Not bad, a little padded for what needs to be done, but wouldn't blue pencil it.

Cadsuane: Not bad. Yes, a little drawn out, but not Perrin bad.

Mat wrap-up: again drawn out...

Come to think of it, it was so unmemorable I bought the paperback a few years later thinking it was new and didn't figure out I'd read it before til about half-way through.

So I guess that's another vote for very long KoD prequel.

[fionwe1987]

Not buying, fionwe1987.

So throw out that rather well done 30 page chapter in book 11 for ~150 pages of book 12 that cover the same things, poorly? That's probably the main problem I have with tGS, the idiot ball gets handed around way too freely to make the chapter's focus character look good, while not that much really happens and some that does was already done better in a previous book.

Yes, the timelines of the various plots were hopelessly out of whack, and too many climaxes had to hit at nearly the same time according to the book 13 summary. Granted, pretty sure spoiler Rand having to be resolved in that book was editorial fiat...but haven't read ToM yet so can't really go into what can be moved where and still wrap some things up satisfyingly in 300k words.

You're talking about two different things here. One is about when Egwene's storyline needs to get resolved in the timeline of the series. The other is how her storyline was spread between the books.

My only point was that Egwene's story had to come to an end on the same day as Rand's did. The events were just to thematically significant, the shift in the balance too critical for things to be otherwise.

Now, you're perfectly right that tGS ended up repeating in a more verbose manner some of what was already covered in KoD. If you read ahead to ToM, you will again find some of the White Tower subplots to be very very filler like.

Which is why I don't completely agree with people who claim that Sanderson fixed the pacing problem in the books. ToM, and to a lesser extent tGS, are actually regressions to the pre-KoD pacing issues that the series had. Reading these two books, I can really see what RJ meant by saying there was really only one more huge book left in the series. Sure, it would probably have ended up being split as two volumes, but the story itself is of one book.

Sanderson had to pick major moments from the one story to make three climaxes, and since he couldn't confirm how many books it would take early on, and they went with three to be safe, he later had to add filler to make these moments seem climactic enough to justify a pause in the story.

Barring the need to do that...

I think its pretty clear that in the single story version, the victories at the White Tower and Dragonmount would have occurred in the first third of the book. The other storylines would have been aligned so that the major "despair moments", from Aviendha seeing the end of the Aiel, Perrin and the White Cloaks, Mat and the Gholam, Elayne and the BA escape, everything would have happened just at the moment Rand himself was living his darkest hours. Then, the Shadow's two major plots, to turn Rand and destroy the Tower, would have been unraveled simultaneously. There's a sudden change in tone, and energy as the two main protagonists have set their houses in order and can now be proactive instead of reacting to the Shadow. Much of what happens to the others from that point on is dependent on what Rand and Egwene do anyway.

So we would have ended up with fewer Egwene and Rand chapters that lead to this major moment, Then we get the bulk of the content in ToM (a lot of which was stretched), which of course we know will end in the Shadow's counterstrike. How much more powerful would that have been, when it came in the same book where the reader believes everything is going great?

Anyway, the point is I agree that there was padding in tGS for Egwene (and even Rand), and added to the awkward writing at points (which has made Egwene end up as a pretty uneven character under Sanderson), kind of robbed her moment of glory of some of its power. Still, I'm glad we at least got to see something of where RJ was going with these characters, even if it wasn't exactly as he would have done it.

[Caligula_K]

No, the series was "treading water" in 8-10. People who praise Sanderson often seem to forget that 11 was written by Jordan and was accelerating towards the climax like mad and wrapping things up.

And Jordan's prose is decent, and occasionally good, if a little overly long for my taste in some places.

Sanderson's is decent with occasional bouts of complete wrench-you-out-of-the-milieu type bits. In his WOT most especially.

Book 11 definitely had a faster pace than 8-10, I'll grant you that, but that's not saying much. It's still a massively bloated book in which little happens for most of it and in which the stuff that does happen is covered extremely quickly. The rescuing of Faile finally happens, for example, but only after an entire book of buildup (after all the buildup in books 9-10)- the rescue itself takes two chapeters. Elayne's plotline is the worst- it is thankfully resolved but takes up so much space, and is boring or annoying throughout. Which doesn't mean that KoD doesn't have some good scenes (it does), but well paced it is not, and it definitely does not accelerate towards anything like mad.

[Mon43]

I have had an affection for WOT for a long time. Jordan has flaws as a writer, and as the series progresses they become harder to ignore, but he has a womderful world and core story despite those flaws.

Every so often it all comes together and he will create a scene that is really very special. I have moved on to other series over the years but some of those afore mentioned scenes have always stayed in my mind.

Some examples,

The trip through the Portal Stones when they all see their lifes in other realities. Jordan is very good at that type of scene, he replicated it somewhat in Rhuidean when Rand sees the history of the Aiel. Sanderson tried something similar with Aviendha in the last book. It is good, but pales in comparison IMO. A lot of the dream sequences over the entire series work very well.

Ingtar's Death, the entire battle at Falme, Jordan was very good at combat, creating a mood. Dumai's Wells, Machin Sin, Perrin fighting in the Two Rivers, Rand v Rahvin in Camelyn. So many others really.

For all the frustration inherent in WOT there is a lot to Love in it as well. The Epic nature of it, and Rand has always been a fascinating and compelling lead character.

COT was so frustrating, similar in many ways to AFFC and ADWD. The anticipation is great and little happens. However later on I realize that I like both worlds, all the little nuggets of information. You want the end of the story but dread it as well.

[tuthmoses]

It's not Stanek bad, there's no defilement of character, not even that horrible prose (compared to the rest of the books that is)

It's just 800+ pages of NOTHING HAPPENING:

sounds pretty much like the first book in the series so

[taurunum dire cat]

I read 9 books and tried for 3 times to read 10

I didn make it.

I will give it another try one day cose I realy wont to se the end of the series but right now i would rather read wogon poetry than read 800 pages of absolutly nothing

[Maithanet]

I read 9 books and tried for 3 times to read 10

I didn make it.

I will give it another try one day cose I realy wont to se the end of the series but right now i would rather read wogon poetry than read 800 pages of absolutly nothing

Just skip book 10. There are online summaries that will do just fine. Yes, I'm serious, I did it myself and don't regret it for a second. Book 11 is much better.