The Eye of the Toilet Bowl

I am confused. I just finished reading The Eye of the World. Did I enjoy it? Occasionally, but mostly no. What did I enjoy? Well, I'm a sucker for fantasy, so I like swords and magic and old wise men and such. The world is well-built, and Jordan's ideas regarding magic feel original and enthralling.

What didn't I enjoy?

Oh boy.

For one, his writing is frequently opaque. I had to re-read many sentences to reach comprehension. This was a simple word-order issue in most cases. As a general rule, one could improve half the book by rearranging his sentences. Move the last four or five words in a sentence to its beginning.

That's a pretty niggly complaint though. Worse than his writing, I couldn't stand his characters. It seems as though every single one of them is bigoted, closed minded, foolish, and full of mind-numbing stereotypes.

The reader virtually never gets the whole story on anything that matters, but we get paragraph after soul-less paragraph describing the most mundane aspects of surroundings and internal thought.

Normally I enjoy delving into character's minds. Here, this exercise became redundant, as none of the characters grow in any way, or think anything to themselves apart from "I don't trust the Aes Sedai, why is this happening to me, I want to go home, and I better not tell anyone anything that's happening to me because I don't want anything to get any worse." I'm sorry, but suddenly developing wolf powers is really cool. Why not give Perrin some kind of explicit internal conflict where part of him revels in his new abilities, and part of him worries about never fitting in again in the Two Rivers? Instead, anytime Perrin realizes he's communicating with wolves, all we hear from him is "Oh, wait, I don't want to think about that."

None of the characters have to do anything to get through their struggle, apart from Moraine. None of them get stronger through any work of their own. Even at the end, *SPOILER ALERT* Rand just suddenly gets fed up with his entire situation, grows a glowing cord of power to the male source for no discernible reason, other than the fact that he clearly needs to, and "defeats", in some very nebulous way, the dark one.

There is no growth in understanding among any of the characters regarding the nuances of the land's political situation (which, by the way, seems like would be quite interesting if only we could hear something substantial about it.)

We're constantly excluded from Moraine and Lan's discussions throughout the entire book. What is the point of that? Regardless of whether I accept that this is a reasonable way for these two to behave, it would have been far more interesting to give us a window into what they're discussing. Instead, it's always, "oh, we have a difficult decision to make." Moraine and Lan went to discuss. Egwene and Rand avoided each other's eyes. The Wisdom scowled. Mat clutched his bow. Moraine and Lan came back, Lan also scowling, and Moraine proclaimed what they were going to do.
Way to go. You just told us all the most boring things about that scene, and none of the most interesting.

Mat...oh gosh, Mat. Don't get me started on him. Dumbest character ever. Also the most obvious and predictable, yet no one around him seems to foresee or understand his problems.

I could go on, but I won't.

What I don't understand is how these books are possibly so successful and popular. Are there things to like? Yeah, a few. Like I said, the world itself hold so much promise. But it's torture actually reading them. There's just no soul. So why are the jackets just covered with praise? I don't understand...

Eragon has soul. The Hobbit has soul. Name of the Wind has soul. The Golden Compass has soul. Not Wheel of Time. Even The Magicians had soul, despite the fact that I didn't like it very much. It was still a good book, a good read, and well done. But this...