The Path of Daggers

Somewhere along the way, the Wheel of Time books became comfort reads. I don't necessarily need anything to happen. There are 6 books left to tie up loose ends (and one prequel that details how two characters met). I know many of the big plot points that are yet to come. In the meantime, I'm content to sit back and hang out with these characters in this world. Some still bug me, but it's the sort of affectionate annoyance you get for younger siblings. Oh Perrin, I'll think as I shake my head, will you ever figure out this marriage thing?

Kudos to Robert Jordan for creating such an incredibly detailed and immersive world. With so many well-realized characters. Yes, I still have to look many of them up, especially the tertiary characters who only seem to show up once every other book. But a quick trip to the WoT wiki is enough to jog my memory. In the meantime, I'm learning more about the geography, history, and politics of this world than I think I ever knew about America. And I love watching things change. There are so many ripple effects at play here, so many contradicting agendas and unforeseen consequences and Jordan really does a fantastic job of juggling all of them.

So things are slow. But thanks to various subplots, there's still a lot happening. Especially at the end of this book which is largely transitional. The big battle comes 100 pages before the end, leaving Jordan with plenty of time to tie off some loose ends and transition into new subplots. It's still a whole lot of table-setting, but I'm excited for the back half of the series. People mostly have more power, and it'll be interesting to watch them try to hold on to it and to see what they decide to do with it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more