![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I've picked up quite a few new blog readers since the last post in this series, so to recap: I'm going back through the Wheel of Time, partly as a reader (so I can read the ending and know what the heck is going on), but partly as a writer, to look at it with a professional eye and see what works and what doesn't. This has particularly meant looking at the structure, to see what really happened to the narrative pacing as the books went along, but there are some content-level bits of analysis going on as well. I stopped reading after Crossroads of Twilight, so please, no spoilers for Knife of Dreams or The Gathering Storm. If you'd like to see and/or comment on previous posts, just follow the Wheel of Time tag.
So, The Fires of Heaven. In which we begin our journey into the swamp.
By that I mean, this is the book where I see the pacing consequences of Jordan's decisions in TDR and TSR coming home to roost. Once TFoH gets going, I enjoy it just fine . . . but it takes a while to get going. We're skirting the fringes of the swamp, bogging down occasionally, and if memory serves that problem will get worse before it gets better.
Let's step in a bit closer than usual, to show what I mean by this.
( In which we consider the effects of point of view. )
Aaaaand that's it for now. I've made it through a third of the series -- go me! Pretty soon I'll have to stop looking at Leigh Butler's recaps, because they'll have spoilers for The Gathering Storm. (They already have spoilers for KoD, which I also haven't read, but I try to go through carefully and avoid anything that looks like I don't want to hear about it. I've only gotten burned once, on a relatively small matter.) I'm vaguely tempted to hop ahead and read both of those books, just to simplify my life, but that would defeat the purpose of refreshing my memory before I get to them, so I probably won't. Easier to just avoid reading the Tor.com posts. Anyway, look for my LoC analysis next month, probably, at which point I will have completed a full year of this project.
So, The Fires of Heaven. In which we begin our journey into the swamp.
By that I mean, this is the book where I see the pacing consequences of Jordan's decisions in TDR and TSR coming home to roost. Once TFoH gets going, I enjoy it just fine . . . but it takes a while to get going. We're skirting the fringes of the swamp, bogging down occasionally, and if memory serves that problem will get worse before it gets better.
Let's step in a bit closer than usual, to show what I mean by this.
( In which we consider the effects of point of view. )
Aaaaand that's it for now. I've made it through a third of the series -- go me! Pretty soon I'll have to stop looking at Leigh Butler's recaps, because they'll have spoilers for The Gathering Storm. (They already have spoilers for KoD, which I also haven't read, but I try to go through carefully and avoid anything that looks like I don't want to hear about it. I've only gotten burned once, on a relatively small matter.) I'm vaguely tempted to hop ahead and read both of those books, just to simplify my life, but that would defeat the purpose of refreshing my memory before I get to them, so I probably won't. Easier to just avoid reading the Tor.com posts. Anyway, look for my LoC analysis next month, probably, at which point I will have completed a full year of this project.
