Wheel of Time

So I promised a post about the Wheel of Time. If you aren't interested in hearing about a series of books I am reading then don't bother reading this post since I'm not sure how interesting you will find it :-)

The Wheel of Time series is a series of books written by Robert Jordan. I don't want to give too much away about the plot in case anyone decides to read them after this but the basic premise is that a group of country type people who lead normal lives suddenly find themselves thrown into many adventures involving "magic" and dark creatures etc.
I say "magic" in inverted commas because Robert Jordan hasn't just taken the usual fantasy sterotypes of magic, orcs, trolls, wizards etcetc and integrated them into his story. You won't find elves and dwarves and hobbits and such in Jordan's fantasy world - he has created something new and different and it is exceptional work.

Currently there are ten books in the series plus one prequel and one book which investigates the world he has created. The last announcement was that there are going to be two or three more books before the story ends and I look forward to reading them all. In addition there are going to be two more prequels.

The quote on the front of the book (all books have them - they are a recommendation from some well known newspaper or such) is "With the Wheel of Time Jordan has come to dominate the world Tolkien began to reveal" or something like that and I think it's quite true. Although Jordan does not use the Tolkien universe like almost every other fantasy novel/film out there.

I'll digress a second and mention that before the Lord of the Rings movies, some people who had read the books and were trying to be clever used to go around saying "I'm sure the films will be good but the book is better" and "you MUST read the books before watching the films" etcetc. Now that the movies have been and gone the same poeple are now going around still trying to be clever. Only now they can't preach about how great the books are because everyone knows about Tolkien now so they have started bashing Tolkien instead by saying "the story is ok but the books aren't very well written"
It really bugs me. If it is so badly written then why is it arguably the most popular fiction book in existance?

Anyway, I'm getting off track.

I can highly recommend Jordan's books to anyone who likes fantasy generally. They don't rehash what you have heard a hundred times before and even I don't usually read books at the rate I am doing at the moment.

So read them now but if you do, don't blame me if you are still reading Jordan years from now ;-)

Oh and a big thankyou to Russ who was the one who recommended The Wheel of Time series to me in the first place.

ttfn