Oh Robert Jordan. I stopped reading this series in the 8th grade after they made Egwene head Aes Sedai (that was the breaking point--she was severely unqualified), but I do remember the good lunchtime conversations in the 7th grade about it. It was next step up the fantasy maturity ladder after Redwall, after all. It's funny to look back on the days of my youth (youth! I'm 20!) when I read fantasy all the time. I was also really into The Mists of Avalon. I then went through a period where I only read high literature (i.e. Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Woolf, Garcia Marquez) but I have recently been looking back at the genre. I like to think that in every genre, there is some great, some mediocre, and some bad. I do still have roots in Fantasy. I love the work of Miyazaki, I read folk tales and religious mythology, I'm exploring graphic novels, and texts like Le Petit Prince hold a special place in my heart. I (obviously) also love Harry Potter, Narnia, and His Dark Materials. I think that by accepting fantasy again in my life I have matured because I am opening myself to all sorts of literature that I might have turned my nose up at before.
However, I would classify Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time as bad fantasy. It suffers from the same thing that a lot of fantasy books suffer from: lack of creativity, lack of depth, lack of character development, lack of originality. I suppose on some level it works as an escapist text, but I have trouble escaping into such a trite world where I am annoyed with all of the characters. At any rate, Robert Jordan died earlier this year and it looked like his ludicrously long fantasy series would remain unfinished. Hilariously enough, his wife Harriet decided to choose another fantasy author to finish the work in Jordan's stead. Evidently he's got notes and such compiled for what he planned for the remainder of his bloated fiction. Read the ridiculous interview with the luck author here: Memory of Light Interview.
Will I read it? Probably not as mostly all I remember from the series is that they called people "woolheads" as an insult, the main character Rand winds up in a threesome, and there was some female character (Selene? Something to do with the moon, I think) that all my friends who had read more than me convinced me was a man in drag. This totally brings me back to when I was ten and Maddi and I made little felt tunics and clay swords and shields for rodent Beanie Babies and named them after Redwall characters. Good times.
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