> Indeed, I must confess that when I first looked
>at the map in EOTW, I wondered to myself who on
>earth, in their right mind, would give their
>land/world such depressing and forboding names?
>However, being merely Average Citizen Reader, and
>not being overly familiar with the genre, I
>accepted this as part of the formula or
>prerequisite ...
>

They are most certainly not "prerequisite", but they do fall well within the bounds of genre cliche.

> Please, keep us advised of your progress with
>EOTW and (if you choose to pursue it) the
>remaining novels - would be very interested in
>your opinion and thoughts ...

Well, since you asked, I'll share with you the thoughts I shared with Sam this afternoon about this very subject.

I'm about 100 or so pages into EOTW at this point, perhaps more (I can't rightly remember and the book isn't handy as I write this.)

The first fifty pages or so were dreadfully dull--but I'd been warned beforehand about this, so I stuck it out. I know that Jordan was trying to establish a feeling of normalcy before he plunged his characters and the readers headlong into all the fantastical elements he had in store. However, this could have easily been done in half the number of pages he used (which, generally speaking, could probably be said about everything he's ever written.)

Once things picked up, I had flashbacks to the beginning of Lord of the Rings--you know, the whole "good guys flee from the evil pursuers and barely escape in the nick of time whilst having several scary encounters with the emissaries of the Dark Lord (TM)." Again, I'd been warned about this, so I was ready for it and stuck it out. I've been told that most of the storyline similarities between Tolkien and Jordan disappear somewhere in the first book, but I'm still waiting for it.

That's basically as far as I am plotwise. Several other things stuck out at me, however. One was names. It seemed to me that a lot of the names were chosen at random without thought as to how they might fit together culturally and whatnot. For example, many of the people in Rand's village have surnames beginning with "al'", which I've been able to dicern means "son of." So, for instance, Rand's full name is "Rand al'Thor" (I believe). But only about half or so of the people mentioned have this type of name--the others have regular sounding names like Coplin. This isn't wrong (I'm no linguist or anthropologist) but it did strike me as funny.

Also, on a more personal level, the name "Aes Sedai" reminds me a lot of a certain Amy Grant song (ask Sam for the name of it--I can't even hazard a guess as to how it is spelled) and that bugged me to no end--I hate it when I am constantly reminded of "real world" things in a fantasy story. Also, several of the names seemed really convoluted to me. My least favorite is "Nynaeve". I can't for the life of me settle on a pronunciation, so I stumble over it at every occurance. Half the time I pronounce it "NYNA-eve" and the other half "NYN-aeve". Also, there is the doubling of letters, such as in "Myrddraal", that seemed pointless to me, and only for looks. Again, most of this stuff is more personal taste than anything, but it still bugs me.

I'll stick it out, though, because it is finally starting to get interesting, and I *am* still a sucker for a decent fantasy yarn.