Terrd wrote:
Oh so the new guy, Sanderson is good then?
Myself I am in the middle of CoT and boy is this book dragging. (Seriously more time passes in the real world while reading it than time passes in the book!)
Yes, Sanderson's novels are good. I'm not sure how much of that is Sanderson himself and how much is simply that Jordan finally came out of his middle-of-the-series funk and started writing well again...just in time to kick the bucket. His last book is good, and the two Sanderson has done have been pretty good as well. While the writing itself is decent, it's more the fact that the plot is actually moving fairly briskly. Things are being tied together that needed finishing. I'm still surprised that what's left could be finished in one book, but more has happened in these last two than in the previous 4 or 5.
Haguile wrote:
What I'm asking is how bad the pacing is. People say it's terrifyingly bad but some people say it's not really that bad and people exaggerate it.
The first half of the first book is very clearly influenced by the Fellowship of the Ring, but it's the only book in which there is a single cohesive group throughout (even if they split for a while.) Over the next few books, the cast is in several different places on their separate storylines, but they all come back together at the end. Starting with the fourth book, the plotlines become irrevocably dispersed and the characters simply go everywhere. Worse is that one of Jordan's plot vehicles often prevents people from dying and ensures they will reappear somewhere later on. So the overall cast just keeps increasing and increasing...eventually it reaches critical mass and the need to keep up with storylines in at least 5 distinct locations, plus background characters, brings the action to a crawl. The other noteworthy factor is that Jordan has a lot of excessively clever characters who are constantly trying to out-politick one another, and thus we are constantly reading about their interpretations of what someone really meant or what they aren't saying or what the narrator really wants from them. Dialogue becomes an adventure of its own.
Eventually the series wises up and starts to get out of its own way, but it takes a fair bit of time for everything to start on the path toward coalescence. So when you ask about the pacing, well, it's generally fine in my opinion up until it hits the spread-too-thin part of the series. Even then, if you're enjoying the books, it doesn't matter, because you still want to know what happens along each fork -- even when you don't actually give a damn about some of the characters or plotlines.
Kingbutz, I may take you up on your suggestion about skipping any and all Sea Folk scenes. I'd be tempted to do the same for Seanchan, except a bit of that is actually relevant, especially if label any scene Mat and Tuon are in as "Seanchan." I do, however, believe I will complete skip the succession in one certain country, as well as The Plotline That Never Ends (with Perrin.)