You finished all 14 books?! I'm impressed, I tried to read it years ago and stalled out around book 5, too many unresolved plotlines and characters to keep track of.... I really loved the first book though.
Having finished it, was it worth the 10,000+ pages? I enjoy epic fantasy, but that's like half a dozen Lords of the Rings....
My father keeps trying to get me to start Terry Goodkind, but I can't get past the first few chapters. I just can't take his prose; too wooden, no sense of style.
Jordan was a smart guy, and the action and political motivation of his characters and their respective cultures, etc. were consistent and complex, But his powers of description are very limited--he returns to the same adjectives, motifs, and expressions over and over again. I am a guy who generally feels obligated to read every word of a book, but in this series I skimmed massively. Clearly he loved working on it, because he inserts a gazillion mundane details, which often do little to develop his world. The work has 100s of characters, and dozens of plot lines--and you're right, many just disappear. He died before he finished the series, and a guy named Brandon Sanderson wrote the last 3 books. Happily, Sanderson is a much more disciplined writer, with a better sense of pacing, sharper sense of irony, broader vocabulary, and better instincts about what can safely be skipped or elided. In other words, the series was stronger at the end than the middle. I guess that's why I couldn't stop. But, I'm very glad it's over.
And no, KEN, I will not be reading it again
