First time reading fantasy?
The Wandering Inn is currently over 12 million words long.
The Wheel of Time is 4.4 million words long.
Apologize to OP, or I’ll sic some goblins on you.
Holy crap, I had no idea Wandering Inn is that ridiculously long. I take it all back
It’s all good. It’s really crazy and most of the chapters are free on their website.
And the author makes a metric fucknton of updates per month. At one point I thought there might be ghost writers…but the author streams for patreon which is wild. So yeah no funny business.
You could probably make the Wheel of Time series 20% shorter if you removed the fashion descriptions and all instances of people conveying moderate annoyance through body language.
Wheel of time is one series I wanted to like but just couldn’t get through after a certain point.
Like the author wasn’t quite sure where he wanted to go so just didn’t go anywhere at all for a long time…
I was told books 1-4 and then the last few were amazing. I wasn’t enraptured by the first few, so I put it down as well. I didn’t want to slog through 5 more books in the hopes I’d potentially enjoy 4 more.
Sounds about right, I think I got too bored to continue on 5. I seem to recall 4 was a bit slow too but it just dropped right off after.
Life is too short for a slog.
Só did I. Two stars for book one, couldn’t even rate book 2, DNF book 3 and never touched it again. It actually made me second guess other books. “If you like TWoT you’ll love X” always make me think twice about reading something
And cut the length of what seems like 70% of fantasy books in half by only describing food with one sentence
I’d love to see Brandon Sanderson versions of the earlier novels. Sure, he did end up turning what was supposed to be one more book into 3 more that are each thicker than the rest, but I suspect Jordan himself would have made more than 3.
I didn’t stop reading over this, but I was annoyed when one book ends in (big event that can be felt over the entire world) and then the next book doesn’t really advance time at all, but just describes what pretty much every single other character was doing at that moment. Fine, it was kinda cool to see that, but I really just wanted to see the results of that big event instead of having to wait some more years for the next book to come out.
I consider Jordan kinda like Tolkien. Amazing world and story building combined with ok writing. Not bad (way better than I could do) but not amazing either.
Though I do still need to do another read through as an adult, since I read like half of them as a teen and probably missed a lot. Maybe I’ll enjoy the lengthy descriptions of tapestry patterns second time around.
