Woo, I just finished TGS last night!  Stayed up until 1:30 finishing it, and then for a bit longer thinking about it, absorbing it, and trying to calm down so I could go to sleep.  (And being quiet so I didn’t wake up Ben.  Gah.)

Aaaahhh, so much happens!  Burn me, I had no idea so much could happen in one volume.  As I read the last third last night, I kept stopping and swearing, either because wonderful things were happening or because horrible things were happening.  Sometimes I swore in English (damn it! piss it! holy shit!), and sometimes in Randlandese (Light! burn me! blood and bloody ashes!).  :p

I really don’t want to say much more, because it’s *way* too easy to get into spoiler-zone.  (Oh, and just wait until you read about x!)

I do want to comment about the writing style, since this one has a lot written by RJ and a lot written by BS^.  BS took what RJ had written and added to it, based on RJ’s notes and with the help of Harriet RJ’s widow and editor, and RJ’s two assistants.  (Who knew he had assistants?)  Right from the start I noticed the difference.  The prose felt flat to me, different words chosen than RJ would have used.  The characters spend a lot more time in their heads analyzing what’s going on, remembering what happened in previous books–or even previous scenes–and how they feel about it.  RJ never spent much time having characters think back over things.  Because of this, ideas that would’ve taken just a sentence or two as a thought instead took paragraphs, and were much more blatantly spelled out for the reader.  It got old.

On the other hand, the BS parts and the RJ parts flow seamlessly together.  It didn’t feel stilted or jolting or jarring.  Like I said, every so often I would think, “That character wouldn’t think that.  He’s not that self-aware.”  But the story flows, they’re the same characters, and we’re clearly moving towards the Last Battle.  Oh boy, are we ever.

Now I have to wait a whole year for the next one?  *cries*

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Incidentally, I’m trying a new thing: posting to my website and having it cross-post to LJ.  We’ll see how it does…

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* Usually I try to summarize the books I post about here… either for my future self, or for my (few) readers who may not know anything about this book.  But, well, I will assume everyone here knows that it’s the 12th book of the Wheel of Time, and that RJ died a couple of years ago leaving lots of notes and dictations about what was left to happen in the series, and his widow and Tor picked Brandon Sanderson to finish.  There was only supposed to be one more book.  But BS^ discovered that it was going to be a 750,000 word book.  Normal books are 100,000 words.  BFFs^^ may be 250,000 words.  750,000… they wouldn’t even be able to bind it.  So, they split it into thirds.  You could say that TGS is the first volume of the last book, A Memory of Light.

^ What unfortunate initials!

^^ Big Fat Fantasies

[Mirrored from intelligentlizard.com.]