I started the audiobook of this with great trepidation. I had read that the first 5 or 6 books were incredible, extremely addicting. And then the series falls flat around book 7. And then Sanderson may or may not have brought it to a satisfying conclusion with book 13.
Well, I'm over two hours into the audiobook and I'm still waiting for anything interesting to happen. It's incredibly slow.
Do I just need to give it more time? What makes this series so popular?
Posted by RyanB (Member # 10008) on :
Will no one speak for the Wheel of Time? Did everyone skip it?
Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :
I enjoyed the first few books--athough reading them is a little different than listening to them.
I gave up around book nine. Jordan just kept adding more characters, more complications, more locations--and never resovled anything. Not even a tiny subplot. I quit when I realized I was hoping for Rand to go crazy and destroy the world just so there'd be some resolution. By that time there were only a couple of characters I still cared about. Rand wasn't one of them.
YMMV
Posted by wirelesslibrarian (Member # 9513) on :
Read them all. Brandon Sanderson did a really good job with the last one, I thought. There was finally resolution, about most things anyway.
I also ended up not liking Rand, but there were other characters (Mat Cauthon and Lan to name two) who I really loved. I couldn't not find out what happened to them.
Posted by rcmann (Member # 9757) on :
The Wheel of Time would have been just about right for a trilogy, IMO.
Posted by MartinV (Member # 5512) on :
Never succeeded in hooking me.
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
By the time it started to surface, my rule about not bothering with open-ended series books had pretty much firmed up. Never read it.
Posted by wetwilly (Member # 1818) on :
I read the first book and had no interest whatsoever in reading any more of the series after that. I don't recall finding anything new, original, or interesting in it. It felt like a generic ripoff of every other fantasy novel I had ever read.
In its deense, I think it was just about the time I was starting to lose interest in the whole medieval fantasy genre when I gave WOT a try, so it really didn't have much of a chance with me.
Posted by legolasgalactica (Member # 10087) on :
Listening to the audio helped me plow past some of the slow stuff and finally get interested. What I loved was the detail, the interesting magic system, complicated religion, history, politics, etc. All boring stuff, I know, but all that and a neverending medieval fantasy kept me satisfied for many years... Of course I still need to read the last two books of the series by sanderson. And I've forgotten or confused much of what happened in the middle of the series and maybe missed a book, but after reading for a few hundred pages it starts to come back to me again... see the obscure details, thoughts, and plot twists really do keep me occupied until the story shifts into gear.
Don't suppose that added much in its defense but anyway I liked the series.