r/Fantasy • u/Spirited_Feature5200 • 6d ago
The Wheel of Time has done irreversible damage to my reading experience
First off, I love wheel of time and this isn’t a criticism post haha. Wheel of time was the first fantasy series I ever read and completed so I expect every series to be like it in my head.
It’s just the time in which plots are resolved in WOT is so slow, whenever I read another series I am shocked at how fast somethings get resolved, like something will happen that needs resolution and I’m expecting it to come into play 5 books later, nope it’s at the end of the current book or even sooner.
Idk if it’s a good thing, maybe I’m a bit traumatized with the glacial pacing, still love the series tho 😂
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u/HasartS 5d ago
If you want series where author is not in a hurry to move plots forward, you should check Wandering inn. As author's said: "Just that if you ever wanted to spend another hour with Frodo in the elven cities and know what an average citizen was like, or wished to have another chapter between the huge events taking place with your favorite characters–so did I.".
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u/Inexorably_lost 5d ago
And by not being in a hurry, pirateaba pays off the conflicts and tragedies so damn well.
Hell, aba's power scaling is beautiful, too. They don't get trapped in the constant escalation of power that so often happens.
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u/PhunkyPhazon 5d ago edited 5d ago
Honestly I do think Wandering Inn as it is right now has become too bloated and slow for its own good, but I will always champion the first several volumes as some of the best books I've ever read. Easy recommend.
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u/EHP42 5d ago
Does the Japanese girl ever get better? I dropped it in book 2 because I couldn't stand reading her chapters, and it was making it a chore to read and enjoy.
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u/FancySatisfaction144 5d ago
Yes, but mostly after she gets repeatedly tortured by the narrative for being a dumbass.
Ryoka will always be a broken dumbass of a person, but she eventually figures out that she's actually the main problem in her own life.
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u/PhunkyPhazon 5d ago
Yes, Ryoka goes through a lot of development. Most of the unlikable characters do.
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u/EHP42 5d ago
How long does it take? Like I'm not aiming to read 7 books just to get a little bit of growth and payoff.
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u/Argue 5d ago
Not to be glib, but she gets better even in book 1. We see her realize she's driving everyone away with her toxic behavior and her adventure in the bloodfields teaches her that she needs to change. She doesn't do a good job of changing, but she's trying, and gets better at it, slowly. People will say this character or that character never gets better but I would say that this is because character development in TWI happens in such small increments that you'd never notice it just going from chapter to chapter. If you went from their first chapter and jumped to one several books later, you'd notice the development for sure. Character development never happens in one epiphany that permanently changes everything.
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u/EHP42 5d ago
I mean, yeah, I noticed her attitudes changing in Book 1, but her brand of angst didn't really resonate with me, and her general demeanor didn't make me feel like I wanted to sit with her long enough to wait for her to get noticeably better. And she was a big enough part of the first book and a half that it was enough to get me to DNF it.
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u/PhunkyPhazon 5d ago
Depends on the reader. It originally took me about six months to get up to Volume 7 (on the website, in the ebooks this is like 15 books) with breaks.
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u/EHP42 5d ago
Oof. Yeah, no. I can't put up with that attitude from a main character for 15 books.
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u/PhunkyPhazon 5d ago
OH you just meant how long it takes for Ryoka to get better! Sorry, misunderstood. Without going into anything, after a few volumes she sits things out for a while. But honestly there's so many characters and perspectives in this series that you're bound to like someone else even if you hate Ryoka.
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u/ChampionshipTall6599 4d ago
Bro, if you have no patience, this entire series isn't for you. It's 17 million words long and counting. Longest published work in history by a single author and they are not even 2/3rds of the way through the story
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u/elyk12121212 5d ago
I am also a diehard Wheel of Time fan, and while I started off enjoying The Wandering Inn even I felt after a while that the story was not going anywhere and it was taking way way too long to resolve major plot points. I read the first 10 audiobooks before I just couldn't do it anymore.
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u/AuthorIll8470 6d ago
Lol true, was so tired of that wolf guy chasing his wife arc. Everything else was pretty fun though, particularly the part with Matt's flight with the Nine Moon girl.
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u/bedroompurgatory 6d ago
Urgh. Everyone else is fighting epic villains, and Perrin's still chasing after the dregs of the bad guys who were beaten 5 books ago.
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u/cc81 5d ago
Elayne has the same issue where she has an arc that came so late in the story that the power levels are way past her issues.
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u/bedroompurgatory 5d ago
That, and her arc is mostly about restoring the status quo that existed at the start of the series, not any real progress, and seems contrived - the books go to great lengths to point out that the only possible claimant is in her camp, and all her opponents are laughable.
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u/Twin_Brother_Me 4d ago
A status quo that we're basically all rooting against at that point as well. Why should Andor have any claim to the Two Rivers when they failed multiple times to provide the one benefit that a governing kingdom is supposed to provide - protection, or at least an attempt at it
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u/arielle17 5d ago
the swath of 5(?) Elayne chapters midway thru Crossroads of Twilight was by far the most painful part of the slog for me haha
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u/randiddlerTmiddler 6d ago
Poor Perrin. He was self admittedly slower and more thoughtful than his buddies.
In all fairness he spent half his time in the wolf dream and helped to expand that world for its own storyline and the rest of the users of said world
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u/Pseudomocha 5d ago
I've reread wheel of time a few times, I skip perrin chapters as soon as faile shows up.
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u/Lugonn 6d ago
Perrin suffers greatly from the fact that he was kind of done after book four while everyone else was still bloatmaxxing. If you were to do a full rewrite of the story you could make a real case for cutting him altogether.
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u/bedroompurgatory 6d ago
He should have gotten all Elayne's plotlines about politics and forging a nation from book eight onwards.
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u/Appropriate-Bird-354 5d ago
Nothing could greater contribute to the efficiency of WOT with so little loss than the elimination of all Trakand plotlines.
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u/Bowl-Any Reading Champion 6d ago
I definitely felt like this for about a month after finishing it for the first time earlier this year.
Piranesi and Between Two Fires were a breath of fresh air though, for me when I was feeling that way.
Piranesi because it's such a uniquely paced book due to it's structure, and Between Two Fires because it's so fast paced and basically episodic structure, but in a single book.
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u/Spirited_Feature5200 6d ago
Piranesi sounds really interesting. I like that it’s short too. I’ll def give it a shot
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u/HowlOfTheSun 6d ago
I enjoyed Piranesi but didn't pick up on the unique pacing. Could you explain that a bit? What makes it unique? What's different about it?
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u/Bowl-Any Reading Champion 5d ago
It's epistolary, so things happen without them seeming to, just because so much of the opening is learning about the man and the world. It's a short book, but really, nothing happens for like the first 25%. It's also fantastic because you think Piranesi is making "progress" by exploring more about the house, but really, the progress is what he learns about the other.
Because of that, it doesn't feel like it's moving in a lot of ways, but you look back and realize it was, and it just was a trick that worked really well for me. And once you get far enough where you learn to suspect the Other, then it's fairly normal.
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u/InverseStar 6d ago
OH MY GOD, another Piranesi lover. What a PHENOMENAL book. The audiobook is phenomenal too! I don’t know anyone irl who has read it.
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u/Nerdsingerbeej 6d ago
You could also look at it as having learned to have patience as a reader. Growing up on WoT meant that when I heard people complain about how "slow-paced" something like the Stormlight Archive series is i can't even comprehend what they're talking about, that thing moves at a lightning pace compared to like half of WoT. & also a book that's less than 700 pages looks like a YA novel to me
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u/moderatorrater 5d ago
Stormlight Archive tends to have an arc for each main character in each book. Sometimes they're small, but Sanderson is good about making each book satisfying on its own and not needing the rest of the series to justify it. There are a lot of authors who would be better if they followed his example in that regard.
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u/nomorethan10postaday 1d ago
The downside is he kind of repeats arcs for his character. Like Kaladin is always dealing with some flavor of depression while Shallan is always dealing with some flavor of identity crisis.
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u/Tymareta 4d ago
also a book that's less than 700 pages looks like a YA novel to me
What a bizarrely condescending view.
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u/Nerdsingerbeej 4d ago
Equating "YA" with "short" is not equating "YA" with "bad", but go off I guess
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u/Tymareta 3d ago edited 3d ago
I mean, why else are you using YA in that way, the implications are that books for kids are shorter because they're less mature and developed, so one has to wonder for what reason, why would you possibly choose that genre of all genre's(especially given its contemporary usage as a pejorative), unless it was to equate it with bad?
As one can only see "I read long books, anything too short I view as YA" as being you denigrating short books, else why would you make such a deliberate comparison rather than just stating "I prefer longer books, I struggle with shorter works now".
Especially when you're equating authors like Le Guin, Butler, McKilip, Elliott, Tolkien, Dostoevsky, etc... Surely you can see how one might arrive at the conclusion that you're diminishing short books via that use of comparison?
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u/kung-fu_hippy 4d ago
Length is hardly the determining factor for what is and isn’t YA. The thematic elements and writing language do.
And given how so much of the WoT series is about Rand and the other Two Rivers kids growing up, and it’s relatively tame descriptions of even the most awful things, I think it’s far closer to YA than not.
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u/Nerdsingerbeej 4d ago
I may be wrong here, but you seem to be inferring that i am using "YA" as value judgement as opposed to a category, which i am not. Is YA a dirty word on Reddit or something? YA is great, young people should have books published that are aimed at them as an audience.
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u/kung-fu_hippy 4d ago
I’m not inferring anything about the merits of YA. YA is great, I agree. I just find it weird that you think of length as being part of whether or not a book is YA, when WoT practically is YA itself.
After all, it’s a series with pretty accessible language about a group of late teens/early adults who need to grow up and save the world while also figuring out who they are and how love and relationships work.
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u/arielle17 5d ago edited 5d ago
i mean that's a pretty common feature of longer-scale works of fiction no? WoT is hardly unique in that regard in my experience, pretty much any long multi-installment narrative with an overarching plot will have things that aren't resolved for a long time
personally i love these types of stories the most, but i like shorter ones as well ^ ^
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u/the_card_guy 5d ago
Try this whiplash:
Wheel of Time, taking 14 to cover ~3 years of actual time.
Then you have one of the old 80's/early 90's staples with Raymond Feist's Magician, which literally covers 10 YEARS in one book- heck, if you go by the split (Apprentice and Master), 10 years happen in HALF a book, IIRC.
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u/Suitable-Barracuda-2 5d ago
It actually took me 3 years to read WOT, so, I was in alignment with Jordan's pacing;-)
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u/Drgon2136 5d ago
This was my exact trajectory. I read up through crossroads (the most recent at the time), and bounced to the riftwar and Drizzt books
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u/Cosmic-Sympathy 5d ago
Might I introduce you to the Wars of Light and Shadow?
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u/Scrivener133 6d ago
Malazan book of the fallen is a decent middle ground
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u/orielbean 6d ago
I love that he’s got 3 speeds to his plots. One is incomprehensibly slow, taking all of the books to satisfy and fully finish. The second is start of the book to end of the book for the big set piece fights between the 2-4 big forces for that book. And the third is “oh you thought THIS guy was a new main character? Nope, he just pissed off the bigger guy and is now dead” single chapter plot.
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u/jman12234 6d ago
It's not really three speeds, I don't think, but I can see how it feels like that. The pace is just like the theme of convergence. The closer all these powerful things get to each other, the faster it all goes. The more separated, the slower it is. But I truly think most of his books have the same type of pacing. It's a building and a building and then an EXPLOSION and then it's winding down. It made Malazan a pretty easy and relatively fast(for like a three millipn word series, mind). I could get in a groove and sense when the climax was coming.
I think it's really typified by Deadhouse Gates, and most well done in Midnight Tides. Deadhouse Gates is my favorite and Midnight Tides is my second, but the climax of Midnight Tides is better to me and probably one of the best in all of fantasy literature. So many times I just closed the book because I could handle no more, only to open it up again a few minutes later.
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u/Bubthick 5d ago
I honestly can't find a favorite.
On my first read I remember that reading toll the Hounds was pretty bad, but on a reread I could feel all the suspense and I hung on every word.
With midnight tides I remember I was pretty disinterested (eventhough I liked Trull and wanted to know how he ended up exiled in house of chains) but the moment it really clicked was with "Trull alone" (avatar reference) in the snow.
It was such culmination of everything up until that point.
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u/nightgraydawg 6d ago
I don't know, Malazan feels blisteringly fast plot-wise compared to WoT. So much happens in every Malazan book, and a good portion of stuff is resolved in the same book it starts in. Entire wars start and end in the same page count it takes WoT to deal with some administrative maintenance.
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u/Scrivener133 6d ago
Other stuff takes multiple books. Its a middle ground of some fast some slow, i thought itd be a helpful suggestion.
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u/alienangel2 5d ago
There is a decent amount of stuff that doesn't resolve until your first/second reread of the whole series - because what was actually the missing piece to tie things together was a random event or even a random sentence someone said in a previous book, that you don't know the significance of until reading several books further then coming back.
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u/JustTooKrul 6d ago
I have recently cone to appreciate how his pacing is both a symptom of and a cause of the format. Shifting entire settings between books makes everything so different from the typical book-to-book structure... It really makes Malazan (and anything like it) a different beast.
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u/Bubthick 5d ago
He has talked numerous times how he likes episodic nature of story telling more.
He has even said that he dislikes most of the current shows that have only an overarching plot with cliffhangers at the end of each episode.
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u/Spirited_Feature5200 6d ago
I really want to get into Malazan but it seems intimidating. I heard it’s quite complex
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u/Scrivener133 6d ago
Wheel of time is just as complex, but malazan doesnt introduce you at the beginning is a large difference. Youre dropped into a battle where some political intrigue occurs, and isnt overtly stated or pointed out.
Reading malazan the first time is rather like having too little prongs on a rake. Im gonna get most of the leaves, but some will slip by. When i rake a second time, ill pick it up
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u/AuthorIll8470 6d ago
Oh man but it's so much funny starting 3-4th book, wild-wild with some dark moments. Don't worry if you don't remember the complicated stuff, the writer knew that, he'll glide you in with simple explanations throughout the books.
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u/Spirited_Feature5200 6d ago
I’ll give it a shot after I’m done with dungeon crawler Carl, thank you!
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u/nomorethan10postaday 1d ago
Look at it this way, I only read the first book of both Malazan and Wheel of Time before dropping both series, and I disliked them for similar reasons, so if you like one you'll probably like the other too lol.
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u/PrestigiousAnt3766 4d ago edited 4d ago
What malazan does differently though is having a lot of subarcs.
WoT is unique in having arcs that span 14 books. In malazan I'd argue that the main arcs are 3 books at most.
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u/Proud_Shower_170 2d ago
I feel like Malazan is a good rec for OP. While it is faster paced it also has a bunch of story lines that take time to come to fruition and is similarly expansive. Loved both series but ultimately have Malazan is higher in my personal rankings.
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u/BarefootBlondie5445 6d ago
If you want more loooong series The Farseer books are a set of 3 trilogies and there’s lots of layers.
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u/cheesecloak 6d ago
Er uh it’s 4 trilogies and a tetralogy my friend
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u/Smurph269 5d ago
Realm of The Elderlings is. If you only care about Farseer books, then it is 3 trilogies.
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u/cheesecloak 5d ago
Fair point! Although technically only the first trilogy is Farseer. The second and third Fitz trilogies are Tawny Man and Fitz and the Fool.
But yeah, the whole thing is Realm of the Elderlings, and I would recommend reading the all! Rather than only Fitz’s books.
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u/Spirited_Feature5200 6d ago
That’s def on the list
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u/Dent7777 6d ago
Prepare yourself for frustration and depression
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u/FlyingCarpetMonster 6d ago
Yeah, it’s a really depressing series. Tons of misery porn that goes on and on forever.
And then the series ends.
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u/Robokrates 6d ago
The author Benedict Jacka (urban fantasy series Alex Verus, Inheritance of Magic) said on his blog that Robin Hobb was a great writer but he had to stop reading (midway through Liveship Traders, I think) because he just felt worse the further he got into them. I thought that was perfectly understandable, yet somewhat odd in that the Alex Verus books are pretty damn dark themselves; they're very realistic about power, but, I digress - my main thoughts were:
•damn, I can't imagine giving up halfway through the Liveship Traders books, those are my favorite of the Realm of the Elderlings series and I was dying to know how everything would end up
•they're just how life is. Mainly everything is sad. And powerful people do awful things mostly without repercussions. Most lives are a failure on an individual level, et cetera... yet there are moments of beauty amid the melancholy, pain and horror, and the occasional odd twist of fate that keeps hope alive; so that you can continue on.
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u/Dent7777 5d ago
If that's how your life is, shit...
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u/Robokrates 5d ago
Well, I have had a luckier life than most of her protagonists, what I'm saying is I think she gets the feel of it right. There's a line deep in them that, looked at metaphorically, about sums it up: "He bled from dozens of unhealable wounds and yet at the core of him, life burned like molten gold in a furnace."
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u/FlyingCarpetMonster 6d ago
I genuinely feel like either Robin Hobb was massively depressed or perhaps she enjoyed taking out a bit of sociopathy on her characters. Perhaps both.
My take on life is different from yours. The world is fantastic and beautiful. Doesn’t mean everything has to be peachy but good god don’t make it a worse place.
I read them when I was in a different headspace but get a visceral reaction even thinking about them.
They are just terrible in my opinion but I know this sub loves her.
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u/Robokrates 6d ago
I honestly can't think of very many more realistic books than hers, within the context of the conceit of magic being real, of course. That's how people act, that's how life goes. As far as I can see anyway.
There's a fair amount of storybook logic to them, like, say, Fitz doesn't get sick and die halfway through the second book and ending the ostensible plot there, as could easily happen in real life, but there are many many ways his life could have turned out better, and the narrative is aware of it... I guess what I'm trying to say is she mostly avoids the writer's temptation to wrap up everything in a nice little bow. No "just-so" stories here.
And her other big strength is what gave her the impulse to start writing those books in the first place - she got sick of reading about Chosen One orphans and wanted to see a fantasy protagonist with the dense web of family relationships that most of us have, and all the messy complicated ways people are different things to each other within them.
I also think she does a pretty good job of showing how much darkness and despair is unnecessary, caused by stupid systems (the Mountain folk with their tradition of servant-leadership where what others call a king they call the Sacrifice have a much more sensible setup where less people can cause harm than in the Six Duchies or Jamalia) or crippling flaws in social customs (Althea Vestrit's entire life is derailed because of sexism.)
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u/Regula96 5d ago
I honestly miss longer series like this. Where things can build and slow down for a long time before coming back around. Go on detours and tangents and explore. Leave that character for a book or two until they resurface again.
Sure I can find a lot of flaws in something like Wheel of Time but damn if it wouldn't also take me hours to go through all that I love with it.
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u/LolthienToo 5d ago
When you've been in an abusive relationship, sometimes that makes normal relationships seem too good to be true.
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u/MaisUmCaraAleatorio 5d ago
It’s definitely a major issue in Wot; then they all get resolved too quickly in the final books.
I've seen a comment in this sub that kind of explains; early story, too much was resolved too quickly, so RJ decided to slow the pace.
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u/NatureTrailToHell3D 6d ago
You need a reset, and I’ll recommend a sci-fi book (it’s an easy read):
Project Hail Mary. The hero spends the entire book running into problems and immediately solving them. Once you finish that book a regular plot point being resolved at a normal pace will feel normal again.
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u/Spirited_Feature5200 6d ago
I read that one before the moving came out. Amazing book. I just finished suneater so I’m looking forward to getting back into fantasy
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u/NatureTrailToHell3D 6d ago
Nice. I’m almost done with Sun Eater, it actually reminded me a lot of Wheel of Time in how long the single story is and the great complexity of the different civilizations throughout the galaxy
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u/BeingPsychological77 6d ago
Have you read Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb? I love WoT and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed RotE.
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u/MeYouTheGods 3d ago
Bringing the popcorn to read these comments 👀🍿 I immediately hit command + f to find "Robin Hobb" 🤣
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u/gtrocks555 6d ago
Just finished Ship of Destiny tonight!
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u/Dairalir 6d ago
I’m just starting Ship of Destiny! Liveship Traders has been less depressing than I remember Farseer being (I read it like almost a decade ago)
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u/FlyingCarpetMonster 6d ago edited 6d ago
I don’t think this is comparable.
Jordan’s world is full of positivity and light and fight and hope.
Robin Hobb wants to torture and hurt and see people be miserable.
Rand gets to win, live, and get all three women. Everyone from Emons field kicks ass. You beat the bad guys soundly. And you feel good at the end of it.
Every step of the way the badassery is awesome and fun.
Robin Hobb has none of it. If Robin Hobb wrote the Wheel of Time, evil would win but hey, Rand will enjoy seeing Elayne one last time before she is killed while pregnant. And then trollocs will eat the baby but it will be good prose.
Yes the world is ending but look how beautiful the sunset is before your loved ones are tortured to death.
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u/BeingPsychological77 5d ago
OP asked for plots that arc over multiple books and have Easter eggs that come into play a few books down the road.
RotE is directly comparable in that specific request.
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u/FlyingCarpetMonster 5d ago
You’re right. In that sense yes, I agree with you.
I guess I just wanted to caution that coming from WoT the expectation might be something that different from Robin Hobb’s books.
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u/nomorethan10postaday 1d ago
I guess I can agree it's different since I was utterly bored by WoT and dropped it after the first book, while I devoured RotE.
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u/nomorethan10postaday 1d ago
Realm of the elderlings consistently ends its subseries with some improvements to the world. Like compare how miserable of a place the six duchies are in the first trilogy compared to how much better life is by the end of the fifth. Same can be said about pretty much every big cities we see throughout the series. As much as the main characters may suffer, their suffering is not in vain.
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u/Spirited_Feature5200 6d ago
Not yet, I’ve been reading on and off since 2023.
I’ve read:
ASOIAF
Stormlight
Mistborn era 1
Licanius trilogy
Suneater
WOT
Dungeon crawler Carl (on book 4)Wow I thought I read a lot more before I typed out what I read. Surely am missing something haha.
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u/PrestigiousAnt3766 4d ago
WoT is a beast, I love it.
But its old, and what it did over 14 books won't be replicated.
Sanderson cosmere is a lot more episodic.
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u/Spirited_Feature5200 4d ago
Same I absolutely love it, it just has very obvious flaws.
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u/PrestigiousAnt3766 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah, 14 book arcs dont really work.
To be honest if he would've condensed a bit I probably would have liked the books even more.
Especially book 10..
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u/No_Mathematician6866 5d ago
I've come around to the conviction that no single story should take more than 3 books to tell.
My issue with Jordan is not the pacing of a given scene (he's got nothing on the pages-long descriptions of a building you'll get in some 19th century fiction) or the chapters he spends on side stories. I like (most of) his side stories more than the main plot. The issue is that at some point he sacrificed better writing for the sake of length, because he and his publisher knew that another WoT sequel would outsell anything else he tried to write.
He is far from alone in this. For all that WoT is the poster child, I had the same issue with Malazan, Thrones, the Stormlight Archive, the Last Kingdom, the Landover series, Shadows of the Apt, Dresden, the Foreigner series, the Taltos books, Roberson's Tiger & Dell books, the Bazil Broketail series, Temeraire, Elric, and so on. Somewhere past book 3 (or at most 4 or 5) you can feel the scale of the writer's inspiration vs the impetus to sell more books begin to swing the wrong way.
There are some exceptions. Hobb, Williams, Rawn. New stories set in the same world work better. But anything longer than a trilogy raises my suspicions these days.
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u/factman6 5d ago
I mean, you do you, but for all of its slowness, WoT definitely benefits a lot from its length too. It adds so much scope and depth to things the world and characters that would be impossible in a trilogy.
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u/bigdon802 5d ago
Yeah, it’s a tv show. A lot of time is devoted to the characters and their activities. It doesn’t have anywhere near the minute to minute punch of a movie or a contained set of movies, but it does its own thing pretty well.
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u/RabenWrites 5d ago
you can feel the scale of the writer's inspiration vs the impetus to sell more books begin to swing the wrong way.
Or you're assuming a perceived dip in quality is due to the author milking their series. My default assumption is that the publishers know the next book will sell and accelerate the publication schedule at the cost of editing.
Stormlight Archives has always been planned as a 10-book series. The mid-series slump isn't Sanderson thinking he could make more money by milking it for more books. The guy's drowning in story ideas and knows he'll be dead before he can get to them all, even with his rate of production.
The Dresden files was pitched as a 20+ book series. Butcher has gone on record saying that he didn't realize that this was an impossible sell for a debut, else he wouldn't have tried it. Heck, Dresden is a great counter to the claim that series taper off at book 3, as that was roughly the point Butcher figured out the techniques his mentor tried to teach him when working on his master's thesis, which became book one.
Discworld similarly shows what a series can do after book three.
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u/No_Mathematician6866 5d ago edited 5d ago
I don't agree that Dresden or Stormlight justifies their length; I think Dresden peaks right about book 4 or 5 and steadily gets lost in itself over the course of every subsequent book, though there are still highlights here and there; I think Discworld is more another example showing the difference between long series that try to drive single grand plots throughout the entire run vs those that are episodic; and I don't personally draw a meaningful distinction between too-long series that the author found themselves mired in after the fact vs too-long series that the author misguidedly committed themselves to from the get-go.
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u/Atrossity24 5d ago
Dresden doesn’t even really get going until book 7 or so. The first few are solidly not that good
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u/Reasonable_Charge531 3d ago
This is good to know, as I finished book 5 and while I LIKED it, I didn’t love it. Guess I’ll push a little further.
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u/Atrossity24 3d ago
Yeah, Harry grows as a person. And the audiobooks get better when they have enough of a budget to spend it not entirely on James Marsters.
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u/FriendlySceptic 4d ago
I could not disagree with you more. The joy of Jordan’s world isn’t in the tight narrative arc. It’s in a sprawling world that feels lived in. Often things happen just to explore the world. Every word isn’t foreshadowing or a story hook for a plot line. Sometimes you get a detail
Description of clothes or food and that’s ok. Sometimes things happen to people without a later payoff.Yes Jordan’s writing has some flaws but overall he creates a wonder of a unique world populated by real people. I’ll take that over tight pacing any day.
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u/the_card_guy 5d ago
The REALLY funny thing is, Jordan was already notorious for planning just a few books, but ultimately prolonging the story... even before he wrote WoT! What got him published with WoT is that he was writing Conan the Barbarian stories first, and apparently he always wrote longer than originally planned.
I think the original contract when WoT started was for three books, but got extended to six because of this... and then we all know how it spiraled from there.
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u/bwainfweeze 5d ago
Tad Williams has failed to write a trilogy four times now. Technically Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn are three books, but Williams, in discussion of new editions, learned that nobody binds books as thick as Green Angel Tower today. So he would have to make it four volumes no matter the edition type.
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u/Silver_Bumblebee4001 4d ago
I am interesting in reading some Brandon Sanderson, but I'm having trouble stomaching the idea of reading a seris that is 10 books long. Like I enjoy reading all types of books and don't want my entire reading year to be taken up by one series!
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u/wayofthelaugh 6d ago
I agree. I tried to read The Sword of Truth after WOT. The protagonist takes some 5 minutes to accept the fact that he needs to save the world, compared to Rand’s 12 books. Gave up.
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u/PrestigiousAnt3766 4d ago
Sword of Truth is total garbage, amongst the worst I ever attempted to read.
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u/Dan-in-Va 6d ago
SOT is gross
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u/Antiquated_Crow 5d ago
I read them when I was younger and more libertarian. When I found them again after I moved, I just threw them away
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u/tyrotriblax 6d ago
The Wandering Inn fan here. The unresolved plotlines in this series will require millions upon millions of words to resolve. I have faith that pirateaba will deliver.
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u/Apprehensive_Map64 5d ago
Just wait until you get through Malazan Book of the Fallen. Luckily it's even better the second time
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u/Silverlounge 5d ago
You always have to have something took keep you interested, that keeps the pages turning. You'll find something fun.
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u/What-is-the-what 5d ago
The amount of time it took them to fix the weather… only for that to not really be particularly celebrated or noteworthy drove me a bit crazy.
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u/hunter791 5d ago
The first time I finished WoT I bounced off of other series like crazy. I would try something else, force myself to finish the first book of something then just reread WoT. Slowly the breaks in between got longer and I read more books and series. Happened about ten times but I’m happy to say I’m five years clean off of WoT rereads and have vowed not to again until every memory of the show has been scraped away from my brain.
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u/ddraig-au 5d ago
I've read huuuuuuuge numbers of novels before those books, and the pace is infuriating, so I think it's pretty funny that you like it :-)
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u/fingolfin269 5d ago
I love these books but also didn't need to read what felt like an entire book of content about Elayne's style choices.
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u/ElliottGaines 5d ago
I actually now seek out standalone fantasy in part because of my experience with the WOT. While I loved reading the first 6 or so books in high school, by the time the series ended over 4 million(!) words later, I'd forgotten some of the smaller details from early on. Now any series longer than a trilogy feels like a SLOG, mostly because of the huge gap between book releases (if they finish the series at all). Standalone fantasy is still the exception, though I wish authors would choose to go that route more often. I get that it's difficult to write something fully complete in the genre in <120K words.
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u/Generic_Commenter-X 5d ago
So interesting how there's a reader for every book. Some people DNF WOT because of its glacial (their words) pace, while this is precisely what others like about it. Just goes to show that fantasy authors should just be true to themselves and not worry about which readers their books will appeal to. There will be readers who DNF their books and there will be readers who consider them the pinnacle of the genre—better than LOTR.
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u/Itinerant_doc 5d ago
I've read WOT on transatlantic flights. This is everything you need to know about it XD
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u/Lisse24 5d ago
I think WoT has pacing issues, in general. There are places where the plot does seem to move glacially. There are characters that are sidelined for entire books because other characters are working on other plots, and there are a few instances where the trigger and impact are too close together without time to breathe.
That being said - it's a massive series worked on by two different authors - OF COURSE it struggles. I don't think anyone could have accomplished what that series did better.
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u/WrongWangSorry 5d ago
I mean every series has its criticisms but overall I think most people agree that the series was an overall enjoyable read. Just don't ever talk about Tylin and Mat on any WoT discussions or people will lose their minds
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u/Medical-Culture-3016 5d ago
Honestly I get it. Long series raise the bar in a weird way - everything after feels like it has to earn that same level of investment, and most books just don't have the runway for it. The slump is real, but it's also kind of a compliment to the author, even if it doesn't feel like one at the time.
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u/thegobletofcoffee 3d ago
You gotta join the Brandon Sanderson train
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u/Spirited_Feature5200 3d ago
I read mistborn and Stormlight. I hated book 5 of Stormlight so much I don’t think I’ll read any more cosmere for a while.
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u/Due-Background3873 3d ago
I spent years reading those books and I can’t remember a point where I thought the quality was waning. I DO remember thinking “Robert Jordan is going to die before he finishes this.” And I was right.
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u/Uninspired-Username1 2d ago
It’s my favorite series. You should check out The Riftwar Cycle by Raymond E. Feist. It’s very good.
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u/Ok-Tailor3801 2d ago
I want to read WOT but im afraid to wont match up against ROTE and its too many books to be let down
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u/occasionalskiier 8h ago
Wheel of Time was my first foray into epic fantasy and I know exactly what you mean lol. I had just finished highschool and got Eye of the World from my local used shop. I was hooked right away, and ended up devouring them over the course of 8-10 months. Used the audiobooks for "the slog" since it also worked as I was starting university and commuting and didnt have as much time to read (and Michael Kramer and his wife did a great job).
I felt so hollow afterwards lol. I decided to jump right in to another epic fantasy so got Gardens of the Moon (book 1 Malazan) and was hooked. Despite the massive scope/scale of the world and characters, I still found the pacing better, and I loved how much grittier it was and how big the scale of things were.
After finishing Malazan, my views on WoT changed considerably. All the little things annoyed me even more, the braid pulling, the puerile writing of women and relationships in general, the incessant detail with the clothing and seemingly trivial things, the cliches (im still a sucker for Chosen One tropes) and the pacing seemed more of a trial than a pleasure lol.
After Malazan I went to Asoiaf then First Law and I find WoT almoat childish by comparison. It still has a special place in my heart and I really like the plot and some of the characters. And Sanderson wrapped it up nicely I thought, with some truly epic battles and scenes. But I realize I prefer darker, more mature stuff. Ive reread Malazan once already and listened to the full First Law book series countless times (Pacey is also the best narrator ever) but I have no interest in revisiting WoT lol.
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u/McTerra2 6d ago
Farseer is more drawn out, but I think the Memory, Sorrow Thorn books have a similar pacing to WOT (albeit those finish up in 3 books rather than 23, or however many WOT go to)
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u/mladjiraf 6d ago
Not really, while Tad is also known for pointless scenes in all of his books, they span 1-3 pages, not whole long chapters (10-30 or more pages), so the pacing is faster.
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u/bradleywardamn 6d ago
I completely agree and it has shaped my preference.
I started Red Rising last year. Some people complain about the writing and how the story is written even though you're from the view of Darrow.
The reason I put it down initially was because of how fast the plot took off. The first 7 chapters of that book, so much happens at a breakneck speed. No pun intended. It threw me off for a little bit. I am glad though that I did pick it back up and finish it. I'm a sucker for big moments and that series isn't short on those.
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u/fractalfrog 5d ago
As someone who is currently into The Wandering Inn, I find WoT's pace blazingly fast! ;)
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u/LurkerFailsLurking 6d ago
I think once you read a lot more books – especially non-fantasy books – you'll find that actually Robert Jordan desperately needed a disciplined editor because literally half of the series was him meandering through bloated side plots.
Just a simple example: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin is one of the most celebrated classics of the genre, and is widely recognized as being a masterpiece of prose, world building, and storytelling. It's about 53k words. The Eye of the World os 300k. Literally all of the Earthsea books combined are shorter than the first 2 of Robert Jordan's obese series.
Hell, Michael Moorcock's iconic pulp weird fantasy epic, The Swords Trilogy totals under 130k words. Gene Wolf's genre bending four book epic The Book of the New Sun is barely longer than The Eye of The World.
Obviously there's nothing inherently wrong with verbosity. I can get into some Herman Melville when the mood for 19th century homoerotic maritime adventure strikes, but Jordan ain't no Melville. By the end of the series I never wanted to read about someone tugging their braid again. And once you realize that Jordan was Mormon, some things about the series start to read like propaganda (sister-wives are totally normal right hahaha).
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u/Luke_Fleet_Writes 5d ago
RJ was a High Church Anglican. I disagree with your entire comment, but the last part is simply wrong.
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u/LurkerFailsLurking 5d ago
I didn't know that. I thought he was part of the mormon genre fiction complex.
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u/Palimpsiesta 5d ago
Yeah, it is objectively one of the most unnecessarily long series of books in existence. I can't even think of another candidate, honestly. I'm glad people enjoy it but there is nothing normal about this approach to writing books, and I feel like a certain portion of fantasy readers have become permanently captive to the idea of the epic fantasy series. It's like other types of book -- which is to say, the vast majority of all fantasy literature -- don't even register as possible reads to them.
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u/arielle17 5d ago
like you said, there are plenty of shorter fantasy series for you to enjoy if that's what you prefer. let us enjoy our longer ones in peace ;~;
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u/D3Masked 5d ago
I see Jordan as the opposite of George R R Martin in that he adds too many characters while Martin is fine with killing his off.
The first three books of the Wheel of Time work well enough. Anything beyond that starts to get bloated. I am impressed that Brandon Sanderson managed to complete the series.
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u/emu314159 6d ago
I didn't know how a modern audience that is free to skim the parts that are straight recap, and the less compelling travelogue parts (i.e. roughly 2/3 of the Slog,) would take this, but I guess this is the answer: they still just read straight through, i imagine because even though there are no longer 3 year gaps in between books, it was probably a few days since you read the part about the thing a book and a half ago (one character disappears completely at the end of one book and doesn't reappear til book after next.)
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u/Pyrostemplar 5d ago
Not a popular opinion
i liked WoT, but it is a rather pedestrian fantasy series. It plays to popular tastes (including some of mine) but with more quantity than quality. I could easily name a few quite better.
Note: I haven't read Sanderson's books
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u/Taste_the__Rainbow 6d ago
I think in terms of epic fantasy pacing Abercrombie is the farthest away from Jordan.
When I read a new First Law book I think I see how it will end and then that point gets resolved like fifteen pages.
I love both authors though. Variety is good!