OK, Alienboy just wanted to know your favourite book in the wheel of time.
Is it:
a) the 1st
b) the 2nd
and so-on....just tell me your favourite and why.

The first.

For me the Wheel of Time series is like a curved line. It started out good got better until The Fires of heaven then it got worse, The path of daggers is almost a bad book. But I think Winters Heart pulled the series back alittle again, not to the class of Fires of heaven but on the way.

I liked the 3rd book, the Dragon Reborn, best because it introduced the aiel :) and mats luck and manetheren roots. I would agree with joacquin that the series got very good and then started to degrade. Probably because it got too big with too many characters and interweaving prophecies for the reader to remember.

The first three were great. I loved watching Rand, Mat & Perrin struggle as young farm boys in the middle of the apocalyse (more or less). Plus, Morgain (sp?) and Lan were a great team.

By the 4th book we see more scenes of Rand surrounded by thousands of enemies and slaying them all with a single fireblast, but the effort reopened the wound in his side, and some girl called him a "Wool-head".

I don't think I'm going to like this series again until Rand and all three women are married and we get a detailed account of the honeymoon ;) j/k (I need to re-read my #1 non-fiction book again :lol: )

I have to split my vote between two:

I like the Dragon Reborn (3rd) because Jordan really seems to get the pacing perfect. I fondly remember it as the first Jordan book I absolutely could not put down, and I think it's the one that hooked me on the series.

I also like Lord of Chaos (6th book?) because of the introduction of the Ashaman (an incredibly cool plot hook) and that ending. Whoo boy!

The first was the best, but the sixth was pretty good too.

Well it has to be book 1 for me as this showed great promise and I liked all the characters and the overaweing situation they found themsleves in. Of course a cynic might suggest it was just the lord of the rings start with farmboys replacing hobbits but hey I enjoyed it.

Many people have written that the middle of the series goes downhill and I agree. What I disagree with is saying that it regains it's readability later on. Yes it gets better but it only seems good because the midle books are so bad.

Unfortunately I became addicted to this series and so have read all of it so far. I would no longer recommend it to anyone though. Jorden is far too self indulgent and insists on padding out his books to 1,000 pages and then not actually moving the plot at all. More woringly, as was observed by a mate in another thread, Jorden's female charcaters just don't develop at all. Unless you consider changing from an annoying teenage brat to a really annoying teenage brat to be development. Much of the development of the male characters is also pretty poor.

So if you're reading this with a view to starting the series my advice is don't. You will become addicted, you will spend lots of money (the books are not cheap) and you will regret it as you plough through the same old ideas recycled over and over again and see far too many plots all advancing at a snails pace.

For more of my winging see here:
http://pub84.ezboard.com/fmaturegamerfrm1.showMessage?topicID=15.topic

For something to cheer you up if you're an addict, see here:
http://student-www.uchicago.edu/~kor2/WOT/WOTindex/humor.html

I especially recommend the adverts:
http://www.datajack.org/wotads/index.php3

Books 1 and 3...

Aside from that, the parts with Rand sofar haven't really interested me; though the ones with Perrin have...

I liked the first and third. And yes, after the third, the whole thing hit a veritable rock bottom. What I didn't like about the last, oh, three? was that he added about forty new characters, gave them names and everything and then just assumed you would remember which one was which during the four years it took to write [EDIT] Winter's Heart [EDIT].

I enjoyed reading the series, but now it's just like those last couple of boards on the original Lemmings game. It's not fun anymore, it's just work.

[MORE EDITS] - I knew something didn't look right...

[This message has been edited by Sapiryl (edited March 07, 2002).]

I agree on your all statements about the decline of the WoT. But with WH I think that Jordan made a move to knit things up. Lets hope he does. And for you people that dont remember all names and characters, read it again! I have read the whole series 5+ times. I am a hopeless addict and will read it even if it turns to utter crap, which is quite along way to go :D

First my favorite book was definately Winter's Heart (Sapiryl: Heart of Winter is the add on for Icewind Dale, I know confusing :)) Rand finally doing something about the taint while finding himself further attached to some of the Aes Sedai was cool and Mat finding his 'wife' was great.

Second I have to disagree with everyone who thinks the series has declined. I love how he's expanded the scope of the conflict beyond one small part of a continent to encompass many different groups of varying degrees of goodness or villany (as opposed to the simple black/white good vs evil of the 'great' LotR). I personally have had no problem keeping track of the various characters who each stood out fine to me. I read Winter's Heart over a year after my last reading of Path of Daggers and had no trouble placing any of the characters. My only real complaint is he seems to keep reincarnating characters. You know it isn't long before Moraine and Lanfear are back in some way.

God am I with you on this one Slappy!

I thought the beginning was great, didn't mind 2 and 3, then yawn, yawn, yawn until 8 at which point I'm no longer interested at all until it's done.

As for favourite: The last one when it finally comes out! Probably about 2007 for Christmas.....

Jordan's writing is simply not good enough to sustain this series. Once the plot was lost and the story thinned rather than really move on, it became poor. Sorry. No longer a fan.

The first book was cool because it gave some background on old, dead countries (Manetheren and Malkier)and I like that kind of stuff. The action and little plot twists were nice too.

I kinda liked all of the books, but I am just a geek, so that may be why. I found myself skipping around to find out what Matt was up to, then I would go back and read the rest of the story to see what happened. I kind of anything with Rand to be rather tedious, except for the last section of WH when he "cleans" Saidin. Hopefully, now that the madness is gone, we can see some people start to die and get the story over with.

One thing that I hopeto see is the rebirth of Malkier.

I really liked the first couple of books, but, as so many other people have noted, it just all fell apart after that. Books where nothing happened other than a few minor character subplots being introduced, where new story lines added without resolving older ones, blah, blah, blah. I've stopped reading the series, and I don't plan on picking it up again.

Jordan has created a whole world, and rather than try to explore it in a number of different stories, he's trying to do everything all at once. There's just too much going on (on the whole that is), and not enough story lines being closed off or even explained. He should have kept it simple, and then moved on through other complete stories, like most accomplished writers do with their worlds.

And the character's have completely stopped all development. Disappointing. And Slappy's dead on about his complete inability to write a decent female character. I could go on, and on, and on....but I'll save it for later posts :p

[This message has been edited by Gnolyn Lochbreaker (edited March 09, 2002).]

i have already posted that my favorite was number 3 - The Dragon Reborn. Mostly because of the twist in the end and that it had a lot of Mat and Thom in it. In the one before the Winters Heart i thought that the ending was really lame. Dropping a building on Mat who is one of the 3 main characters was a really bad way to finish IMHO. However i'm sure Mat wasn't in Winters Heart although i only read it once just after it came out. Maybe i should read it again.

Different question:
Anyone waiting for the "final battle"?

Bonzo: Mat's fun in Ebou Dar is one of the 2 main threads in Winter's Heart, Ithink you need to reread the whole series :). He was left out of Path of Daggers.

Alienboy,

"Waiting for the final battle" - well, I was round about book 3.... then I gave up.

I'll read it when it happens I suppose, but I have better things to do in life than wait for Jordan to pull his finger out on that one.

I've read a fair amount of dross recently, so now I'm re-reading LotR just to get a buzz from a great book again. All done in 3 volumes too, or six short books if you like. Whole story is about the same length as one and a half of Jordan's WoT books. Amazing, because you feel you know more about the characters, more about the world they live in and the story doesn't totally stagnate.

I wish it had been the other way around, with the Lord of the Rings being about 3 times the length of the bible and WoT long since finished....

Lord of Chaos, because of the ending. :)