Is anybody else other than me and Chewie reading this right now? It's the first book in the Wheel of Time series to be published since Jordan's death in 2007 (Brandon Sanderson wrote it with extensive help from Jordan's brother, widow, and notes), and it's actually very good - while I wouldn't say it's the best out of them (either Shadow Rising or Lord of Chaos has that), it's much better than most of the other Jordan books (and miles above Crossroads of Twilight).

In particular,

While it's been too long since I've read any of other WoT books for me to notice most of the stylistic differences between Sanderson and Jordan, he did manage to avoid most of Jordan's irritating tendency to go into over-description and braid-tugging.

There was really only one thing that felt off, and that was

It was definitely worth the reading. I might try re-reading the series again just because of it.

---

"One Mamluk can hold two Frenchmen at bay; 100 Mamluks are equal to 150 French soldiers; three hundred Frenchmen do not fear the same number of Mamluks; a thousand Frenchmen will beat 1500 Mamluks." -Napoleon

"Because ten billion years' time is so fragile, so ephemeral...
it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness."

"If you owe the bank $100,000, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100,000,000, you own the bank."

Well, that's encouraging. One of the main problems was that the series got too long winded and dragged on and on with very little of consequence happening.

That said, there's no way I'm forcing myself through the last several books to get to this one- The Wheel of Time was entertaining enough at the start, but I find the series past book five increasingly unreadable. Maybe I'll read the Wikipedia plot summaries and skip to the new one.

If you remember the basic jist of the earlier books, then you'll be fine. In fact, you'll probably be better than fine - you'll enjoy the book more because you won't be constantly noticing differences between Jordan's and Sanderson's writing styles, etc.

---

"One Mamluk can hold two Frenchmen at bay; 100 Mamluks are equal to 150 French soldiers; three hundred Frenchmen do not fear the same number of Mamluks; a thousand Frenchmen will beat 1500 Mamluks." -Napoleon

"Because ten billion years' time is so fragile, so ephemeral...
it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness."

"If you owe the bank $100,000, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100,000,000, you own the bank."

So Sanderson's writing is less long winded

I didn't even realise this had come out yet, however wiki gives a lengthy summary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gather ... %28book%29

Which is good because I wasn't planning to buy it. However it looks like Rand is more bad ass instead of emo in this book. I am not sure about this part though.



It seems strategically stupid, unless there is something more to the text that the wiki article isn't saying.

---

Avatar : British chef Gordon Ramsay. Say what you like about him, but the man is hell entertaining.

What would Gordon Ramsay do?
If you sautee scallops in a non stick pan, they won't stick. Thats why they're called NON STICK.

Imagine the worst qualities of North Melbourne supporters and Collingwood supporters combined into one huge thug, except with added boganness. That's Port for you. Except Port supporters are even worse.
"Lusankya" describing the Port Adelaide football club and their supporters.

I hadn't realized it was out yet, I'll be heading to my local bookstore to pick this up sometime today then.

---

Evil will always triumph over good, because good, is dumb

RE writing styles: I was impressed by Sanderson. There was enough of Jordan in his style that it wasn't distracting to read it(especially since I'd reread the series on a bet from someone that I couldn't before the book was released). But there was also little enough of Jordan that you don't get lost in pointless descriptions.

It's definitely far better than Jordans writing had been, it feels a lot more tightly paced, so even though the book is fairly large (I believe larger than any other of the books so far) it doesn't drag out or feel long like for example books 8,9 and 10 did.
It ties up a lot of the story threads rather succintly as well, the only one that felt kind of odd was Rand's ending, but thats forgiven by how well written his abrupt descent was:


I agree that Mat, while still well written and funny, felt like Sanderson had a lot more hand writing his parts than he did in the others, in most of the book you can still spot what Jordan had written and what influence Sanderson had, but the Mat parts feel almost entirely his creation.



It very probably is stupid, but the female version had already melted, and while powerful, as pointed out it scared him and IIRC he could barely control the power when he channeled everything from it, not just the small amounts he was using in TGS.

---

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary. “
- James Nicoll

Well yeah, but what happens if

---

Avatar : British chef Gordon Ramsay. Say what you like about him, but the man is hell entertaining.

What would Gordon Ramsay do?
If you sautee scallops in a non stick pan, they won't stick. Thats why they're called NON STICK.

Imagine the worst qualities of North Melbourne supporters and Collingwood supporters combined into one huge thug, except with added boganness. That's Port for you. Except Port supporters are even worse.
"Lusankya" describing the Port Adelaide football club and their supporters.

The Taint is a moot point as he needs the Choedan Kal level of Saidar to make the filter to push Saidin through, and the female Choedan Kal exploded when they did that. The catch with Shaidar Haran though is he has only done that to people that serve the DO.

I'm enjoying the book very much so far. Matt and Cadsuane aren't quite as compelling as Jordan wrote them (though with Caddy that may just be familiarity and seeing her thwarted in various ways), but every other major character I can think of seems as good or better. Perrin and Egwene especially shine brighter than I expected.

edit: it's also nice to see Nynaeve being effectual beyond simple power.

I dare not click on the spoiler boxes yet, but in a few days I'll be glad to offer my take on things.

I have not read this yet, but I did read some of the previous bricks (er, books) in high school, and I recently found Sanderson's original work - "Warbreaker" was the first, then "Mistborn" - and I'm quite enjoying his writing style. I may check this out.

---

"Yup, because when we make a landing beacon for an airport or such, the first thing we do is dump 5 million tonnes of rock on the runway." - wjs7744 (talking about the Egyptian pyramids as alien landing sites)

Oh, and by the way - Brazil thinks you're cute.