thepunktheory
Written on Oct 10, 2022
Wow, it took me approximately forever and 15 days to finish this book. In fact, at some point, I had to take a break from it and I ended up reading 3 other novels in between. And after that I still didn’t return to actually *reading* this book, instead, I listened to the audiobook on Youtube. That way I could play games while finishing this absolute behemoth of a novel. To be honest, I think otherwise I might not have finished it.
I’m sure Jordan is setting things up for later but damn this story is moving at a glacial pace. So few things actually happen when you consider just how many pages long this novel is. I think I might be able to deal with the story moving slowly if the characters were more likable/interesting or if the dialogue were better (these two things kind of go together).
Let’s talk about the characters first. I swear every single person in this story has become absolutely insufferable and supremely annoying by now. In the beginning, I quite liked everybody, sure they had their flaws but nothing insurmountably bad. By now I feel like all the worst traits have been amplified and I wouldn’t want to know anyone of them in real life. I was inclined to give Rand a bit of a pass because if I were in his position I’d probably be a little testy as well, but by now I’m less and less willing to let it slide. On top of that, we deal with Elayne and Nyneave who are both pretty stuck up and haughty but Nyneave takes the cake by being a judgy bitch all the time who apparently has never heard of the concept that other cultures have other customs and other ways of doing things. She looks down upon literally everybody, seems to think she has no flaws, and still hasn’t learned to control her temper. We spend a lot of time with the two of them in this book, which really didn’t help with my reading motivation. On top of that, Mat is now with them, and guess what? He’s insufferable as well. The way he talks about women tends to annoy me a lot and it’s the absolute worst when he’s interacting with Elayne and Nyneave – which, again, happens a lot in this book. Suffice to say, I was not happy.
One thing that particularly bothered me was how Jordan write women talking about men and men talking about women. I think he somehow managed to get all the clichés under the sun in there. There are so many sentences stereotyping and generalizing, and while I understand that it is supposed to go with characters (we already covered that they are annoying) but there was just a lot of that in the book and after I while these statements start to pile up. I’m sure there must have been a way to do a better job with this.
In terms of writing, I also noticed that Jordan has certain phrases he likes to use a lot. One that stuck out to me is that he constantly describes women as “handsome rather than beautiful”. First of all, what is that even supposed to mean. Second, irrespective of what exactly it is he was trying to say if you say that about every other woman you are describing, it loses all meaning anyways.
