This post does not answer the question in its title. If I had true commitment to doing a bit, I'd make this a 30-post series of essays where nothing much happened and then a different blog writes the final two posts and gives a really trite answer.
I'm happy to dunk on Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books because I too read them, each and every one. I bought some of them as big chunky trade paperbacks as well *AND* I thought they were badly written at the time *AND* realised that the story was going nowhere somewhere around the middle. So really I could rephrase this question as "Why did I read the Wheel of Time?"
Was it simply because it was there? I liked reading fantasy epics. I think when I started reading them, there were several books already and I guess I assumed that it couldn't be that far from being over. With that in mind, The Wheel of Time because a 1990s phenomenon, for all that its impact lasted into the 2010s. I read it because it was there in bookshops at a time in my life when I was wandering and lived in multiple countries. It's not just about what you could get in bookshops but also with a book series, whether you could get book 1. I recall seeing Peter F. Hamilton's The Neutronium Alchemist in a Kinokunyia and thinking it looked appealing but...it was book 2 of a series and they didn't have book 1 (The Reality Dysfunction) so I didn't buy it. Eventually, I did read the whole series after a visit to the UK.
Was The Wheel of Time very much the epic fantasy novelisation of the sunk cost fallacy? Maybe, but I think that ignores that it had many good components...sort of but...well that is hard to pin down isn't it?
- The writing on a sentence by sentence level had irritating quirks.
- The characters were often one-note
- The plot...OK it started with something fun if derivative but the most notable feature of the series was the plot somehow stalling despite a whole bunch of stuff happening.
- The world building was derivative...the high-tech past aspect of it was good but not that new and also was under-explored.
But I read the whole thing. I don't know why.
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