"Wheel of Time" series

HeDied4U

Well-known member
Doctor
Elect
Joined
Jan 25, 2012
Messages
2,637
Reaction score
41
Points
48
Age
59
Location
Hammond, IN
Probably against better judgement, one of my favorite genres is Fantasy. Give me some Tolkien, Donaldson or McCaffrey and I'm good to go.

I've known of the Wheel of Time series for quite a long time. A guy I worked with back in the mid 90's was a big fan of the few books that had been written by that time. He loaned me his copy of the first book in the series, but I never got around to reading it and eventually returned it to him.

I've been looking for some new fantasy reading material of late; material that doesn't relate to vampires or witches (which seems to comprise a lot of the fantasy that's published nowadays) and am thinking about giving the WoT series a go. I guess I'm wondering if anyone here has read some / all of the series and if so, what your thoughts about it are? I remember reading a couple of years back that the entire series comprises somewhere around 4.4 MILLION words. That's a lot of reading I'd be doing, and I guess I'm just trying to gauge if it's worth investing all that time or not.

Thanks in advance for any and all comments.

:)
 
Starts out excellent. Gets reeeeeeeally slow. Picks up after Sanderson started writing and ended well.

Have you looked at Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy? That one was excellent. Actually anything by Sanderson.
Sword of Truth series - Terry Goodkind
Anything by Pratchett

Also recommend (historical fiction to follow):

The Pillars of the Earth (and sequel) by Ken Follett
The Heresy trilogy - by S.J. Parris
Roma and the sequel, Empire - Steven Saylor
 
Not a really big fantasy reader - the notable exception being Tolkien. There are many books that I could read over again, but I only do it ritualistically with The Lord of the Rings.

I picked up an omnibus edition of the Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny when I was in university. I don't recall when it was published, so I don't know how far into the series it went. Probably the first cycle of six books, though there are several more now. I liked that series fine, although it wasn't typical, Tolkienesque high fantasy.

In that vein, another fantasy trilogy I quite enjoyed was Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series: The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, and To Green Angel Tower.

There was another lengthy fantasy series that all the computer-science geeks were into. I remembered it as Robert Jordan, but that's obviously wrong since I saw it on dorm bookshelves in 1989, and the Wheel of Time series didn't start publishing until the next year. (It may have been Terry Brooks or Robert Asprin, who were suitably prolific and wrote about the right time, but nothing in their titles or cover art rings a bell.)
 
Totally forgot about Terry Brook's "Shannara" series. Read those many, many moons ago. I do remember them being pretty good books, although I thought the original trilogy was better then the second, 4 book, series.

As for the Mistborn series, I tried reading it, but only got about half way through the first book and then lost interest in it. Maybe I'll try it again sometime.

Just bought the first book of WoT for the Kindle app, so I'll dive into it this evening. Will it be a book that keeps me up half the night or put me to sleep? Guess I'll find out tonight.

:)
 
Top