Timewaster's Guide Archive

I agree that 13 is an important # in the series and have long thought that 13 books would be the appropriate number.

But Taim probably takes orders from Moridin/Ishamael suggested by his use of the colors of red and black.

IIRC when Brandon visited Harriet, she let him visit Jordan's study and pick out one of the swords to keep.

On your side if the screen, I am a peasant, on my side I am a surgeon, part of the reason for Razor, a takeoff for scalpel as well as the fact that I am living in the Razorback state of Arkansas.  I am a huge Robert Jordon fan and have since ead and enjoyed EUOL's works and am really loooking forward to AMOL.

As mentioned here the 3 scenes with Ingtar and his confessssion and death, when Matt blows the horn...with the heroes and Rand battling Ba'alzamon in the sky... and when Rand gets his Dragons are three of the best scenes in the book.  However,  those of you reading for the first time have lots of great scenes to look forward to, as there are many other scenes equally as good.

Most of the big WOT fans I know do not like the SOT series.  This is in part because SOT borrows so heavily from WOT ideas (which I do not mind as WOT borrowed from Tolkien, mythology, etc) but I and most WOT fans take big exception to how Goodkind denies ever reading WOT which appears to be such a blatant lie.  (If he did come up with all this on his own then we all owe him an apology but it seems unlikely).  My main complaints about Goodkind is that he is so preachy, his writing is too superficial and his characters are to two  dimensional.  The characters are either very good or vary bad (there are some exceptions like the development of the Mord sith characters).  Richard is always right, even when he looks wrong, he is right by some convoluted plot twist, etc.  Jordan has much deeper multidimensional characters.  The good characters have some darkness to them, and even the evil characters have some lovable points.  If fact the forsaken are some of my favorite characters.  Two other problems I have with Goodkind are his somewhat graphic descriptions,of evil (although descriptions of Richard's torture by the Mord sith may have been necessary to plot development) and the cheesy ending to the series.  Jordan says he knew how WOT would end from the beginning, and all of us WOT fans have been looking forward to this great ending for the past 20 yrs will be really po'd i the ending is as stupid and contrived as what Goodkind came up with.

I guess you know from my post how much I enjoy WOT.  In spite of the above rant  I enjoyed SOT as well but it was a much simpler, superficial series.  Jordan weaves such an intricate, complicated, multidimensional plot and characters that it is a great joy to read and read again.  Every time you reread the series you discover new things, either new foreshadowing, new subtle plot twists or details, that is is amazing.  I think much of the criticisms of Jordan's series stems form the fact it is so complicated and was written over such an extended time that each book  while much anticipated was always unsatisfying because when finished, we were left with the realization that it would be 2 years until we got to read more.  Book 10, for example, is very enjoyable as a reread knowing what happens in book 11 and being able to go right into the nest book, but as a stand alone, having to   wait 2 yrs for book 11 was another thing altogether.  For anyone that enjoys a good story and really interesting char ac`ters, I cannot think of another series to recommend above TWOT.  GRRMartin may be a better writer, and ASOF and I is a great series as well, but it is so graphic and violent, that it can turn off a lot of readers.