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Comment by pacaro | Hacker News Reader

Someone should inform Brandon Sanderson of this trend

I haven't read any of his, but I know he co-wrote the final 3 books of Wheel of Time, so presumably his mentor was Robert Jordan.

As I begin book 6 of Wheel of Time, I wonder if I'll have the perseverance to finish.

You know what they say happens when you assume? It's true of presuming too.

> In December 2007 Brandon was chosen by Harriet McDougal Rigney to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series after his untimely passing.

Ah, it didn't happen the way I thought it might have. So perhaps he was selected for having a similar style of long-winded writing?

Uh... why would they do that? He was selected because of his love and appreciation for the source material, as well as being a brilliant and capable fantasy writer himself.

He was selected (reported by him) for the eulogy he wrote for Robert Jordan on his blog. At the time he hadn't published "thousand pages" books. Though he later did, concurrently with writing the final Wheel of Time books (themselves thousand pages tomes).

And having read both of those authors, I really couldn't accuse Sanderson of being as long winded as Jordan. Sanderson's chapters (even in his long books) are bite sized and very comfortable for me, since that means I only remember the chapter number and don't use a bookmark. (often upward of 70 chapters for his Stormlight Archives series, which means less than 15 pages per chapters)

It should also be noted that Sanderson writes taking into account that readers can probably use a wiki to remember things, while Jordan keeps repeating things. Those books (while only a few months apart) weren't written for the same iternet era.

You could just skip the bulk of books 7-10 and put yourself on track to finishing. I just skimmed the eventful parts of them and I didn't miss much after starting Knife of Dreams.

While I don't avoid long books I would take the "life's too short" mentality when it comes to the entire Wheel of Time series.

I've heard 7-10 referred to as "the slog." It definitely slows down a bit, but I still enjoyed them. There's a lot of character development that you don't really recognize is even happening until later.

Finish it. You'll be sad when it's over.

After the weird and constant describing of women in flowery dresses admiring themselves in dreamscapes and book of weird lady attempting to drug and rape one of the main characters "as a joke!" I realized that this guy was way too horny and not nearly as interested in writing a good book series as everyone had told me.

Robert Jordan was notoriously bad at writing women and the... physical descriptions are pretty bad, but to his credit, women in his books are not second class citizens. Some of the most interesting, influential and powerful characters are women.

Oof, Wheel of Time really drags in the middle there! I almost threw in the towel several times. Fortunately, though, when Brandon takes over the pacing really picks up and it does have a satisfying conclusion!

That was my introduction to Brandon Sanderson as well, and since then I've now read the original Mistborn trilogy and what's published so far of Stormlight Archive. If you've made it through 5 books of Wheel of Time - whether or not you finish it - I think you might appreciate those.

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