Latest Wheel of Time book out

Sanderson is a fantastic author, so have no worries. Have you read his Mistborn trilogy? Pretty damn good.

God, it's been quite a few years since I picked up a Wheel of Time book. I think I left off at volume 9 or 10...

I'll probably have to start at 1 again....by the time I'm caught up to #12 the final 3 will have been completed...

+1 to this all. Added to that, I was eighteen when I started with this series. I want to get it over already.

Piobaire,

I hope you know your SF. On a whim I bought the first part of the Last man something something series per your recomendation.

If anyone wants my rec: The new part in the stand allone series from Matthew (Woodring) Stover was out last year. Another will be out next year.

Heroes Die
Blade of Tyshalle

And now

Caine Black Knife and the next one (CBK ends with a cliffhanger...)

Best action packed fantasy(-SF hybrid) books I ever read. (I'm open to new experiences, though.)

I can't believe you read that entire shitty series.

I feel for you. But come on, even the creator was dying to get away from it.

I never got started on the series because I heard it fell off the table after the first few books and kept going downhill from there. +1 on Pio's recommendation of Sanderson. I liked Elantris more than the Mistborn series but Mistborn was still very good.

I liked the ending of Elantris, but it took too much to get there.

True but it was a good payoff and I liked the characters a bit more than I did in Mistborn. The series was great but it ran a bit long and the continuous references to the elements really started to wear thin after a while.

I read about the first 8 with increasing frustration before giving up. They went from average if generic fantasy that was just on the readable side of badly written to being really hard work for me. I only didn't give up sooner as I'd invested the time getting so far. This Amazon review should be read by anyone considering starting the series: 22 of 29 people found the following review helpful: How can you justify wasting your life? Caveat Emptor., 5 Sep 2004 By John (Dublin) - See all my reviews I would like to dispell the myth that has grown up around Jordan; that he has written a massive work of incredible depth and vision, and that people who do not like his most reecent book do not understand the subtleties of his work.I wish to disillusion those few die hard fans by an analogy which cannot fail to expose the ridiculousness of this myth. Taking each full novel at 800 paperback pages (the Lord of Chaos is 1016 pages, so this is a conservative estimate) and that there will be 15 books in the series (again, highly conservative estimate), also that there is a prequel of 300 pages, and two more in the works, that the total length of this story is 12,600 pages long. Bear in mind that I am so annoyed that I have read most of the Wheel of Time that I actually took the time to add up the total pages of the following books and compare them with the length of Robert Jordan's best effort. So, your choice is either Wheel of Time on one hand, the story of which is explained elsewhere, or: The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milian Kundera Brave New World, Aldous Huxley Goodbye to Berlin, Christopehr Isherwood The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster Keep the Aspidestra Flying, George Orwell The Barracks, John McGahern The Black Album, Hanif Kureishi The Great Persuit, Tom Sharpe The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad The Quantity Theory of Sanity, Will Self War and Peace, Count Leo Tolstoy Dune, Frank Herbert Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre The Female Eunech, Germaine Greer Candide, Voltaire Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess The Aeneid, Virgil The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan Straight is the Gate, Andre Gide The Plague, Albert Camus Daisy Miller, Henry James Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak Malone Dies, Sameul Beckett The Complete Works of William Shakespeare One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K Dick Travels with Charley, John Stenback Notes from the Underworld, Feyodor Dostoyevsky The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli Beyond Good and Evil, Fredrich Nietzche Stalingrad, Antohy Beevor Catch 22, Joseph Heller Ulysees, James Joyce There are, I think 7 nobel winners here (Marquez, Stenback, Fitzgerald, Beckett, Sartre, Gide, Pasternak). Tolstoy, Joyce and Shakespeare are each considered geniouses; their works have been the subject of whole academic lives (think of all the professors of Shakespeare in the last 400 years). And Niezche, Machiavelli, Voltaire, and Greer are just four writers whose words have shaped the world as we know it. These are not the best books ever written, simply what I had to hand this evening. And you could probably read these in less time than you could read Wheel of Time, because WoT is boring and badly written, so each page takes twice as long to read. In short, I read 200 pages of Crossroads of Twilight. And if I had enough time to read 600 pages of something, should I read the rest of this stupid annoying book, or should I just read A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. I could read the Bible or the Koran. I could give War and Peace another read. And I've always wanted to read the Count of Monte Cristo....

This holds water for most books I've read. There is always something better. If reading 13,000 pages of low brow literature (lecture?) seems like a daunting task, this series is not for you, nor most other fantasy/SF. I think it took me a total of max 15 weeks of intermittent reading (including my other activities). What's fifteen weeks in a lifetime?

Even in the genre of fantasy there is a lot better than Jordan, one of the few authors I genuinely wish I hadn't ever picked up. There's discussion of well written, good fantasy novels in this thread: http://www.styleforum.net/showthread.php?t=90067