getting close to the end of the year...

[winterbadger]

33. For some reason, I got sucked into re-reading The Eye of the World, the first of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. I'm still exasperated with his writing (if I had a braid, I'd be tugging on it). I really do enjoy the pace, the description, and the places where he just lets his own storytelling talent show through. But his compulsive need to take pieces from other writers' books and insert them into his own, covered with a shallow veneer, is just as annoying, if not more, than the first time I read him. And his inability to drop something, to say or describe or depict something and then leave it alone, instead of constantly repeating it--as if he either thinks his readers are idiots or as if he's so pleased with his own little joke that he can't stop telling it over and over again--it's amazingly tiresome and childish.

He was tremendously successful. It's a pity he never had an editor who he would allow to really work with him. He could have been a very good writer as well.

Comments

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

I have lots of friends who are really into this series. I tried so hard to like it, and I confess to complete and utter failure. It was the twee linguistic puns that became unbearable for me. I made it to the fourth book, in which they encounter the Aiel who (being Native American cultural counterparts, I presume) harvest a sweet yellow grain that the traveling party has never seen before. Our intrepid hero talks at length about the oddness of the dish he's been served. The dish is called, and I shit you not, zemai.

At that point, I shut the book and said I was done. I was done in by the corn salad.

[winterbadger]

In the first book, the characters journey to what they think is the final showdown with Eeeeevul (little do they know they are in for more than a dozen volumes of "final showdowns") and they have to travel through the Mountains of Dhoom.

Dhoom. Really? That "h" is needed, why? Because "Doom" is too obvious and "Dhoom" is so much less so? *eyeroll*

The only thing that I can think of that I know that's like it is "General Hospital", which I used to watch in high school.

Or Diana Gabaldon, another writer who has achieved tremendous success despite tremendous mediocrity.

You bad writers, get out of my history!

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

Oh, I hate those Outlander books. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate! I mean, the whole plot of the first one hinges on, of all stupid things, clan tartans, which were not established until well into the Victorian Era. Really? His change of tartan is supposed to be this Big Dramatic Moment™ (cue swelling bagpipes in the background) in the plot? His clan tartan? Get. Out.

And her Gaelic is so, so bad that even I can tell how bad it is, and I only have a little Gaelic.

I had friends recommend those highly, too, and I was just plowed by the awfulness.

Re: You bad writers, get out of my history!

[winterbadger]

My favourite screw-up is the sly, designing, spiteful girl at the castle who tries to get Our Heroine in Trouble... the wee slip of a Scots Highland lassie with the *Irish* **man's** name.

P. S.

[winterbadger]

Love the icon. :-)