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Anyone else have trouble choking down middle WOT books? (spoilers)

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Tasslehoof:
THANK YOU!  I reread the 6th one last week, and said to my friend who also read the series "Wasn't book 6 ALL about Rand being captured?"  I swear when I originally read it, he was in a box for like 400 pages, but its really only like 60.

Perrin running from wolves/being a lord irks me too, its very irritating.  Also, its not so much that I don't like Faile, its that I hate how he always "smells how jealous she is".  Its such a bitchy move, it bothers me everytime they bother to talk about it.  Perrin will be sitting in on a meeting with Rand and the Wise Ones, and all Perrin can think about is how his wife smells jealous.  Jesus man, get your act together.

Yeah, I also thought it was a little much that, unless they were killed with Balefire, every Forsaken could return to life, as a different person.  And I was pretty confident Lanfear was done for, but apparently not.  I felt she had a very fitting end, but now she's back getting tortured by Moridin.  It just gets old.

Morsker:
These are popular complaints I've seen in the fandom since the books were first released, especially that Perrin and Elayne's plotlines were too far of a diversion from the real story. Brandon even analyzed this, and thinks it's due to an overabundance of characters, which leads to entire books where no one's plotline progresses very far (what WoT did), or entire books where some characters never appear (what ASoIaF did). There's no way anyone knows to solve the problem with writing style alone; it's unavoidable if there are this many characters.

I think it would've been a blessing to kill off Perrin and Elayne before the consumed so many pages.  :D Perrin was awesome up to book 4, and Elayne was fine as a supporting character to Nynaeve before she ran off on her own. The only shame is that they lived longer than that!

Tasslehoof:
I think the only reason they couldn't be killed off is because of how important Perrin will be for the Last Battle.  At least thats what it sounds like from all the Prophecies/Foretellings.  Min's predictions kind of prevent Elayne and Perrin from dying too :/

Peter Ahlstrom:
I really don't mind the books. (Though I suppose that could be seen as damning praise.) This morning I finished listening to the Crossroads of Twilight audiobook on my morning commute, and it did a fine job of what I intended it to do: give me the Wheel of Time story in 20-minute chunks twice per day. I'll start on Knife of Dreams on my way home. I don't really think of these books as complete books (because really, they aren't) but just as parts of the overarching story. There are some parts in there I really really like, such as Pevara and her group, and the Mat and Tuon chapters.

Jason R. Peters:
Moving to audiobooks is how I made the middle ones tolerable during my last readthrough, which was around the time book 10 was released. I could get through them much faster by doubling up my reading efforts, making the books faster-per-day if not faster-per-sentence.

Also, Jordan's use of intimate voice, extremely close 3rd-person makes the audiobook more fun to listen to (for me) than the prose to read, particularly with the talents of Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. They bring the characters to life.

I think Jordan's close voice is part of the reason books 1-3 are so charming with just 3-4 viewpoints, and it just gets out of hand with so many.

Some of these chapters in book 8, I like what HAPPENS but I am having a lot of trouble reading paragraph after paragraph to get to the meaningful bit. I think if Jordan had adapted his style to match more characters, this could have gone much faster. Rand's and Mat's chapters could stay as detailed as they were before, but for some of the political maneuvering (Aes Sedai rebels, Forsaken, Shaido, Perrin, various royal families) a few scant paragraphs going straight to the bombshell cliffhanger would've made these books FLY by comparison.

I'm sure that's not what Jordan wanted to do, and if he started doing it as early as, say book 5, his fans who loved the in-depth character thoughts would likely have rebelled. So this all just theorizing ex post facto to improve my own fiction.

In book four, Jordan was my hero, and in book sevenI wanted to strangle him. I can't think of another author I've had such a love/hate relationship with.

When I read that Sanderson was going to attempt to emulate Jordan's style as much as possible (pre book 12), I thought:

NOOOOOOO! Write them in YOUR style!

But in the end, he had to cater to the fans, so can't fault that, and in the end his style is a hybrid any, which can't be avoided.

It is telling that of my fantasy-reading co-workers, only one made it past book 7. And I think she, like me, was reading them as they were released. The idea of reading 7 more books with as many characters is just exhausting to would-be-new-fans.

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