I’m On That Light-Blasted Road To Caemlyn… Again.
Like most of the other Robert Jordan lemmings on the planet, I went out the other day and picked up the new novel, Crossroads of Twillight, in the seemingly never-ending Wheel of Time series.
I’ve started reading it with a lot less enthusiasm than I had five or six books ago, but what I’ve read so far has been enjoyable, albeit in the pedantic and plodding fashion that Jordan is so fond of. One would hope that maybe, just maybe, his royal Jordan-ness would get to the point for once and not elaborate on the infintesimal minutia of every single character in the world. No such luck however.
Actually it’s not all that bad so far. I just like to complain about it like every other fanboy on the planet. At least there’s not that horribly plodding trek to Caemlyn from the first book… at least not yet *knocks on wood*.
I’m only fifteen or so chapters in – which, for those of you who haven’t read Jordan’s works, means I’ve got just a little ways past the descriptions of the main characters clothing *grin* – but already it’s a thousand times better than Terry Goodkind’s last novel, The Pillars of Creation, which infuriated me beyond words with it’s inability to tell a decent story and for the fact that the main characters in the series only appear in the last few chapters and then only in a cardboard cutout, deus ex machina capacity.
Anyways, back to Crossroads. It’s a good book and I’m not dissapointed that I bought it. I’ll probably get the rest of the series whenever Jordan gets around to writing them (my best bet is 2014 at the very earliest), but I am currently looking forward to the release of a couple of other novels with a bit more enthusiasm. Among them, the overly-mass marketed but still thoroughly enjoyable Harry Potter & The Order of The Phoenix which is due out in June, George R. R. Martin’s A Feast For Crows, the latest in his A Song Of Ice And Fire series, and Neil Gaiman’s short story about his American Gods’ protagonist, Shadow, that will appear in the Legends 2 collection.
And so I return to my cocoon of books. After I finish this one, I think I’m going to tackle Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en which was a very intriguing (and heavy) present my wife got me for my birthday. It’s apparently the (re)telling of some classic chinese fables/stories and I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s like.