- I'd argue 6 (Lord of Chaos I believe) along with 11 (as Jordan's final entry) are must reads Archived Message
Posted by SWK
on January 10, 2022, 8:15:08, in reply to "I theory, could someone read 1-5 &12-14 and just get filled in on the middle?*"
Just reading the prologues for the others would be sufficient, except maybe the ending of Winter's Heart (9?), which is excellent.  Previous MessagePrevious MessageThanks to those here who encouraged me to give it another chance. The end absolutely was worth it. The final book was about as good as I could imagine it being, given the huge scope and the sheer number of characters and plot lines, and all of the omens and prophecies given that foreshadowed events. There were a few things I didn’t care for—Logain didn’t really live up to his previous Billings with the viewings on him, and the introduction of a huge new army to fight in the final book seemed off to me. (Read a review that hypothesized Jordan had originally planned for Damodred to be Taim, but switched that up when everyone guessed it. Which sort of makes sense, but also sort of doesn’t because he made it way too obvious if he was trying to fool people. I think that was more likely an intentional red herring.) And at the end of the day, Perrin’s whole plot line and arc seemed a bit tangential and isolated from the rest. You could have eliminated his character from the whole series without too much trouble, which is not good for a supposedly central and critical character. Regardless, it was incredibly action packed over almost the entire 1000 pages, which is quite a trick. I was getting stressed out reading it, it was tense enough. The prior book (13) was not nearly as good as the finale or book 12, but was still pretty good. But the first half was awfully slow—that was back to Jordan’s bad old talk fest plotting. I feel like Sanderson was writing the conclusion and had enough for 2 and a half really jam packed books, and decided to plump up the middle with filler to get 3, rather than make hard cuts to get down to 2. Regardless, it’s utterly baffling that Jordan thought this was going to be 1 final volume, given how incapable he’d been of cutting things down and keeping the plot moving. At least twice as much happened in the final 3 books as had happened in the prior 6. Final series power ranking: Top tier: 4 14 12 3 5 Good: 2 1 13 Meh: 11 7 Bad: 8 9 6 Oof: 10 |