Lord of Chaos was a long book to read. In size, it was as long as Shadow Rising, the longest book in the series so far, but it felt more packed. After all, Rand and Egwene can use portals and they go where the action goes, the Tower is divided, the Aiel are divided, a force of channelling men is created, Cairhien and Tear soldiers fight along Rand, there is action in Ebou Dar, Tear, Cairhien, Salidar, Andor, Two Rivers, Amadicia, The Forsaken are executing a plan of the Dark Lord and so on and so on.

There is a problem with consistency again, at least as I see it. If this was a strategy game, imagine more players playing in the same team, but each of them doing whatever they feel like. They are all friends, they even have one central character they can rally with, but they continue to do things their way. If the other team would have even a modicum of coordination, they would easily win. Also, the series has succumbed to levelitis, the disease that causes all main characters in a story to level up continuously, until it becomes unmaintainable. Rand and Eqwene can Travel or enter Tel'aran'rhiod in the flesh, Elayne can make ter'angreal, Nynaeve can heal stilling and gentling, Mat has the memories of countless heroes and has a talisman against saidar, Perrin is a lord, Loial can fight, Min can read auras and fight with knives, etc. It is getting so grand, that I fear for the books to come.

Even so, I've enjoyed the book and at the end I could barely stop reading to see where all the tension accumulated in the last hundred pages would explode, and how. The grandness and action packing of the book also led to a kind of split, where the stories started now have not ended yet and I must continue to read the series to see what is going to happen. The name of the book is also strange, as the Lord of Chaos is somehow related to the Dark One, but we don't really learn who he is; only hints are left here and there. Finally, Shai'tan seems to be more than just the cardboard evil destroyer of life and gains some complexity.

Sigh! There are 14 books in the series, I have just started the 7th and they seem to be growing in size as I go along... this is going to take a while.

I am already inside the story and it is getting harder and harder to analyse individual books. All I can say is that, again, there are a lot of incredibly condescending and arrogant people, mostly women, which are presented as indomitable based on looks or appearance or prestige, yet with not a shred of usefulness. I was reading this book and I was finding myself daydreaming of what I would say to such an annoying individual. What I find even more disturbing is that a lot of times the superiority of one's opinion was demonstrated via violence. Educational violence, mind you, switching, bottom beatings or pinches, meaningless and hard chores, but still violence and hardly acceptable to me.

Rand and Mat go together in The Fires of Heaven, but their contact is almost not existent and Mat is always trying to get away. What happened to their long time friendship? It evaporated in Jordan's writings. Perrin has saved the Two Rivers, but then married and stayed there, as if the world was saved and there was nothing to be done about it. Eqwene is with Rand as well, but more Aes Sedai and more arrogant by the minute, her relationship with Rand abandoned since subjected to the conscriptionary methods of both Aes Sedai and Wise Ones. A horrid character, if you ask me. Morraine is even more mysterious and useless as in the previous books, except for the end, where she does something heroic, but kind of dumb. Rand is getting "hard", but still suffers the people around him as he could do nothing about them. A prisoner of his own small village upbringing, he seems a sad sorry character, as remote from heroism as a dung beetle is from a professional dancer.

Interestingly enough, I found the Elayne and Nynaeve story arch a lot more satisfying. Complex, reasonable and thrilling. That until they voluntarily return to the Aes Sedai, where they have to again suffer all the humiliations an Accepted is supposed to suffer to gain "character". A new female Forsaken appears, Moghedien, but not nearly as interesting as Lanfear, who is present in this book, but terribly inconsistent. The ending of the book also annoyed the hell out of me, since I believe her outburst was completely out of character.

All and all, as interesting and captivating as the others in the Wheel of Time series, but suffering from a kind of character sublimation, in which the story is being carried by people that don't act like themselves. Book 6 is on the way.

It seems that Robert Jordan is balancing the odd books of the Wheel of Time series series with the even ones. The first and the third books were kind of black and white, little grey in between, all good characters fighting the evil. Now, the second and the fourth seem to be more ambivalent. Does that mean that the fifth will be again a bipolar epic battle? I'm ready to find out! [grin]

In The Shadow Rising there are four different main stories that have little to do with one another, all happening simultaneously. There is the Rand arch, going to Rhuidean to fulfil the prophecies, accompanied by Mat, Eqwene, Moraine and the Aiel; there is Perrin, going back to Two Rivers to protect it from Ordeith, Whitecloaks and hordes of Trollocs; Elayne and Nynaeve are hunting Black Ajah; finally, the White Tower itself has some major problems.

The book was certainly entertaining, although not particularly deep. A lot of complex characters are relegated to doing cliché work, like Thom, for example. A large part of the book is focused on Perrin, while Mat is all but ignored. My favourite character Lanfear appears from time to time, too. Rand does weird things, making us wonder if he has lost his mind or just has a plan, but neither his companion nor the readers know what that might be. I liked the Egeanin bit of the girls story, but I can't tell you more for fear of spoiling it. Some really flashy and important battles are being carried out by different characters, although they are more literary show than substance, as battles go.

All in all, a reasonable continuation of the series. I think I am safe by now in saying that Wheel of Time is addressed to adolescents and will probably not evolve to something further to the end of the saga. Still fun, though.

The Dragon Reborn relapses into the problems of the first book in the Wheel of Time series: there are good or bad characters, light and dark and the only true unknown (and most exciting as well) is Lanfear. The rest of the book is how all the characters level up dramatically to the point that none of them can pretend to cling to their small village roots. Rand is the Dragon, Perrin is a wolf, Mat is the reincarnation of a Manetheren hero, the girls are the most powerful girl power users in centuries, etc. If anything, the losers of this book are Loial and the Aes Sedai with their Warders, as it seems none of their long life, experience and training matter in the face of ta'veren-ness.

That doesn't mean that the book is not interesting, quite the opposite, it is certainly more epic, although in the same way the other two were (I am beginning to see a Pattern, heh heh) as the pressure builds and builds towards an ending that feels rushed. It's like sex after too much foreplay: is that it?

The bottom line is that Robert Jordan's series has captured my imagination, with all its clichés and great prophecies and noble heroes. I did hope for something more complex, but then again, life is not like a book and there are level-downs as well. There is still a chance the next book will be as intelligent as it is flamboyant, though.

I have to admit, the quality has increased dramatically in both writing and storyline in this second part of the Wheel of Time series. Robert Jordan's The Great Hunt follows our heroes in their quest to heal Mat, deliver the Horn of Valere and escape the endless machinations of the Aes Sedai.

I was saying in the review of the first book, The Eye of the World, that the story was ridiculously black and white, reminiscent of Lord of the Rings. The Great Hunt features good and evil Aes Sedai, sympathetic Darkfriends, political Cairhienians that see every action (or lack thereof) as a move in The Great Game of lords and not less than three new major threats, not counting the Black Aes Sedai, as well as parallel worlds, resurrected heroes and epic battles. So there is a good range of shades of grey, washing away the simplicity with which the series started. The characters gain volume, developing in their own unique ways.

There are some issues, though. Rand is exhibiting wonderful skill and ability exactly when needed, being pretty much clueless most of the time. Women again appear rather one sided: proud, intelligent, manipulative and always in some way of authority over men. The "The wheel spins as the wheel wills" quote is used way too much and the blatant logical hole ignored: if it does, then no one needs to get involved in anything, especially the Aes Sedai. Nynaeve find a new strength and acts more like a Wisdom and less like a scared little girl.

So I am caught up in this. Too interested to start reading the tech book I was planning and too much work at the office to really feel the need to. Let's see how the next book in the series will be.

The Eye of the World is the first book in the series called The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan. Written in 1983, it is very similar to Lord of the Rings. It features a complex world of nations and races with their own languages and cool sounding names, a battle of good light versus evil dark that is so ridiculously polarized that at first I thought I couldn't finish the book, a party of different people in which the main character is a poor country sheppard boy, a quest that has the goal of saving the world via a long trek of personal transformation.

Actually, if I think about it, it seems almost entirely inspired by Lord of the Rings, with none of the innovations that appeared since playing any effect except maybe The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, when describing the Blight. Something that is clearly different in the book is the role of women.

While Tolkien had them placed high on a pedestal, queens and princesses that were supposed to inspire men but not be touched, Jordan presents them as important members of the party, with Moraine, the "wizard", holding most of the authority. Actually, it goes further than that, giving all women characters an almost indomitable ability to influence men. Only one female in the entire book is evil, and that for a very brief period of time, and none of them are weak in any way. It doesn't even matter much that The One Power has two sides, one female and one male, and that the male is tainted by The Dark One. Even if they would have magical power, men are doomed to be ruled by women in The Eye of the World and probably the rest of the books.

The evil Shai'tan is a dark entity with burning eyes and eternal rage, imprisoned yet powerful, corrupting everything he touches, while the power that opposes him is white pure light that heals, purifies and avenges. The only shred of ambiguity comes in the shape of The Children of the Light, a warrior sect dedicated to fight evil, but that are nothing more than pompous gang members that define evil as anything they don't like.

All and all the book was pleasant enough and, being December, I plan on reading at least the next book in the series before I start with a technical one. However, it doesn't come close to most of the books I've read recently. The simple design and clear inspiration is probably the reason why they want to adapt the story to television, now that the likes of Game of Thrones have shown the model successful. If the quality of the books does not improve in time, it may be so that it would be more effective to wait for the films instead of reading the book. Then again, I will make up my mind after I've read more. I have hope.