I remember when they released a 100-page free teaser of the first WoT book, back in ... hell, the mid 90s? I was working at a bookstore and, well, free books. So I grabbed it. When the books started coming out in earnest, I picked up and read a few. I eventually got through, I don't know... six or seven of them.

Whatever else he was, Jordan/Rigney wasn't a great writer, but he did have a true storyteller's sense of scope and landscape.

But though it is absolutely true that these two-thousand-plus pages could’ve been compressed by an editor less kind than his own wife into a single book, it would be wrong to suggest Jordan dilated out of avarice...

I don't share his confidence.

My SO has a bunch of these books to give away. She didn't want to start reading an unfinished series, but still managed to accumulate a few volumes. Now they're taking up valuable shelf-space.

I dug up my copies of these books after moving into our new place, and thought about starting the series again, just in time for the series to end (fall of 2011, according to Wikipedia). I picked up the first book because a stranger recommended it to me in a book store. I enjoyed it, and read it fast enough to miss some key moments in the first book. Since then, I think I've read the first books a few times, but never made it through book 10 or 11. After reading that summary of the series, I want to diagram events as I read through, partially to understand the series and partially to see how ridiculously drawn out the whole thing gets at the end. Seriously, main characters disappear for huge chunks of the book, right when they were the most interesting thing going on.

Guess I'd better start on my George R. R. Martin eulogy.

Then I can steward the Wild Cards series!

The man had a vicious, unreasoning, hatred for trees. It's the only thing that can explain that series.

Whoa. Robert Jordan died? Where have I been?

I got through several of the books, and then asking whether he was getting paid by the word. Because seriously - in a couple of those books absolutely nothing happened. People camping in the woods and having threesomes. And that's it.

Book 7. Just checked the bookshelf.

If George R.R. Martin kicks over before finishing Song of Ice and Fire I will be seriously. put. out.