I've finally gotten around to buying the first book. I've heard lots of good things about the Wheel of Time series...

I've finally gotten around to buying the first book. I've heard lots of good things about the Wheel of Time series. Had it recommended to me from friends who knew other authors I liked.
Shall I be pleased in the reading to come?

post a picture of the first page, and i'll read it with you

i'll tell you when im done

I've read the Eye of the World. It never becomes the story you're expecting. It's like Eragon, but worse.

I loved it when I read it. But that was back in 7th grade. If you like epic fantasy this should make you happy

The first is bad.

The second is great.

The third is great.

The fourth is great.

The fifth is alright.

The sixth is great.

The seventh is bad.

The eighth is the worst.

The ninth is alright.

The tenth is bad.

The prequel is good.

The eleventh is good.

The twelfth is great.

The thirteenth is good.

The fourteenth is good.

All by genre fiction standards, of course.

OP here.
The descriptive imagery is nice. I feel like the dialogue might become a little cliche here and there, but with a series of books this expansive, it should definitely keep me occupied.
I do have a special place in my heart for fantasy and historical fiction.
I've dabbled in Stephen Lawhead and Hubbard in the past, found them to my liking.

Meh. Sounds pretty hit-and-miss.
But I'm pretty loyal to a series once I get it started, so it'll just be a journey to slog through the bad installments.

It's well worth it to read the whole thing (if you like fantasy). Now that they're all out and you can read them at whatever pace you choose, and now that you know there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's not so bad to go through the mid-series hurdles.

I read them between serious works and I feel that this spaced it out pretty well so I didn't get tired of the series.

>All by genre fiction standards, of course

you clearly haven't read any good genre fiction

this is garbage for people who unironically talk about "world building"

What's wrong with worldbuilding?

There really isn't much worldbuilding after the first (which I listed as bad). After the very early books it's mostly focused on character interactions.

I am halfway through book 4.

The chapter with Rand reliving all the memories of his Aiel ancestors and realizing what actually happened was amazing.

>The Wheel of Time contains barrels of conceptual Lego, swiped or stolen or recycled from every great story-cycle known to Western man: which, I believe, was the author’s intention. But it has precious little originality. When you take it apart to play with the pieces, you find that all the pieces are somebody else’s. From Dune, you have the secret magic sisterhood that controls the fates of families and nations, the Bene Gesserit (renamed Aes Sedai); and the shockingly male creature that sets the world on its ear by having access to the magic and ignoring the sisterhood, the Kwisatz Haderach (renamed Dragon Reborn); and the wild desert-dwelling people who have a hard-won lore of their own, with whom nobody can tangle and not regret it – the Fremen (renamed Aiel). From Tolkien – well, the very first page of Jordan’s interminable saga mentions ‘the Third Age’ and ‘the Mountains of Mist’, and if that isn’t straight-up theft with the serial numbers left in blatant sight, I don’t know what it is. Nobody writes Wheel of Time fan fiction – at least none worth speaking of – for The Wheel of Time is itself fan fiction, in which all the fandoms collide together.

Wheel of Cucks absolutely BTFO

I hope you like spanking.

That was my favourite part of the whole series. I stopped reading after the author died so I guess I technically didn't finish it all.

hey, this poster here, please post the pic of the first page so i can start reading the book, eager to get started, thanks

it's only ever used in discussion to defend bad writing

also used by low-tier fantasy fans to describe how easily they're able to self-insert

>WoT thread on Veeky Forums

Haha, oh man. This is what I come here for.

It's SHIT. Complete and utter SHIT. Do NOT read it. I powered through this whole series one summer and I have never regretted anything more. I still feel searing disappointment at least once a week that Jordan is dead, because I will never be able to tell him what a FUCKING AWFUL NOVELIST HE WAS.

You will LITERALLY, LITERALLY LITERALLY sit through THOUSANDS of pages of USELESS FUCKING TRASH just to get to THE LAST TWO FUCKING PAGES OF THE BOOKS WHEN THE ACTION HAPPENS. YOU WILL SIT THROUGH LITERALLY LITERALLY LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF PAGES OF WHINY REPETITIOUS INNER DIALOGUE ABOUT THE STUPIDEST FUCKING SHIT.

Robert Jordan is the most insulting author I've ever read. He doesn't give a FUCK about the reader and will force them to sit through eons of meaningless text to get to the small interesting kernels of good fantasy.

None of the characters are good.
None of the relationships are good.

>your fucking face when Jordan fucking SKIPS the part where Mat kills Couladin despite that being the culimating point of about 3000 pages of uninteresting literary drool

I could go on and on but the bottom line is Robert Jordan, while good at world building and one-liners, was unfortunately one of the worst novelists of all time. The greatest thing he ever did for his magnum opus was die because Brandon Sanderson was able to take his ideas and turn them into something organized and intelligible.

Started it too. About 300 pages in. Jordan rambles but I like the more rustic fantasy as opposed to something like LotR.

Wew. As an impartial user about to start this series you've sure saved me a lot of ballache. Thanks man.

hey, me again, you're taking an awful long time, and im itching to get going on this, please post the 1st page soon

Holy shit, thank you. My sentiments exactly. Just finished Book 5, and I'm fucking done with this garbage fantasy series. Lost my shit when Nynaeve and the gang joined the circus. I can't believe I continued after that. Fucking abysmal.

Good, you stopped at exactly the right time. After that the girls go on a retarded side quest that is notorious in the fandom for being completely useless and unrelated to the main plot.

>notorious in the fandom

I liked the series up until around the 6th book. After awhile it just felt like nothing was happening. Rand goes here, Rand goes there, the nuns aren't doing shit. Rand goes back to some other place. On to the next book

>fantasy writer uses tropes!

You don't say

Next you're gonna tell me Tolkien invented magic swords.

You know how GRRM is notorious for being slow and late with all his books? It's because of writers like Jordan and GRRM that fantasy publishers now push all their writers to do trilogies and nothing longer. Seven volume+ epic fantasies are on the out, at last.

I'm reading a totally unrelated novel and just had a PTSD flashback when it said that a woman sniffed. Fuck.

i would also like to read the first page, but by myself. can you email it to me?

It gets pretty shitty by the fifth book, but the first few books are pretty classic IMO. They will by no means "change you" or revolutionize anything, but they are just fun to read. Jordan is a great writer; his Conan short stories are also worth checking out. Again, they have no real significant historical merit, but they are just fun, interesting, well written, easily comprehended fantasy stories. I don't think Jordan was really setting out to do anything else.

People here criticizing the shit out of WoT ... what do you think about something like the "Name of the Wind" and the "Malayan book of the Fallen"? Those series are INCREDIBLY SHITTY and MUCH MUCH worse than WoT in terms of long windedness, I mean, with the amount of spastic freaked outed-ness in some of these posts (), I would think some other of these series would be giving you people legitimate heart attacks.

People on Veeky Forums actully prefer Malazan to WoT. I never read it so I don't know why.

I got halfway through the first Malazan book ... aside from a cool assassin scene, and some good imagery, that book is disgustingly bloated, bland, and unoriginal. It is absolutely shocking what people accept as good in the realm of fantasy fiction.