Tag: wheel of time

One left

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I finished Towers of Midnight last night, which after a promising start to Sanderson’s concluding trilogy spent most of its length spinning its wheels. I’ve been doing a book a month pretty religiously since I started this, but I may go ahead and knock out A Memory of Light soon just to be finished. There’s a new John Gwynne book to get to first, though, and that’s much more important. I will almost certainly do a wrap-up post once I’m finished, but nobody wants to read that and you all know what it’s going to say by now.

One of my high school teachers passed away in the last few days at the ripe old age of 95, and while I’m not certain I’m going to write about her, I may attend the service on Monday and I’m a little twisted about it at the moment. I’d looked her up a few times over the past several years and just assumed that either there was no obituary to be found or it was eluding my Google-fu; no, turns out she was just nearly immortal, and I suspect she’d been running mostly on spite for the last couple of decades. I say that with deep affection, of course.

For now, though, the last week has been emotionally exhausting on a whole lot of levels, and I came home and immediately fell asleep in my chair for an hour or so, and I think the proper method of recovering from my week is to go hit a bunch of monsters with a giant fuck-off hammer. So I’m off to do that. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.

Can’t blog, reading

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Bound and determined to finish the penultimate Wheel of Time book tonight. Less than 150 pages.

The Gathering Sanderlanche

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading3 Comments

I have not been secretive about the fact that I am finishing the Wheel of Time books mostly out of spite. Okay, entirely out of spite. While it would be a huge exaggeration to claim that I haven’t enjoyed a single minute of this series, I have enjoyed a much lower percentage of minutes than I would generally be willing to put up with from my reading, particularly something of this massive scope.

According to my Kindle, I’m about 45 minutes of reading from the end of The Gathering Storm, the first book co-authored by Brandon Sanderson after Robert Jordan’s death and the twelfth book in the series, or the thirteenth if you count the prologue book.

And I’m … enjoying it? Quite a lot, actually? Which has made me really curious about what the general reception of the Sanderson books was from the broader Jordan fanbase, a group I don’t really consider myself a part of. Now, it’s probably worth pointing out that Sanderson wasn’t hired to write these books, he was hired to finish them, which is a subtly different beast; his job was never anything other than to bring the story to a close and so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s going after dangling plot threads with a broadax and shoving the whole thing forward as fast as he can– which, as it turns out, was still three books and probably 2500 pages at least. But it’s kind of fascinating to me that when you actually have things happen in these books, they’re pretty good! Sanderson has done a good enough job of mimicking Jordan’s style, including his weird ideas about gender and his creepy spanking fetish, that I don’t think I would ever have realized that Jordan was no longer writing the books were someone else’s name not on the cover. And it’s probably worth pointing out that on a sentence-to-sentence level, I have no idea how much Jordan actually wrote; for all I know, Sanderson’s role, especially on this first book, was more of an assembler and an editor than an actual co-writer. I assume his contribution grows as his trilogy continues.

But damn. There’s a bit midway through Storm where (spoiler alert for something you’ll never remember reading about if you haven’t read the books yet) Rand gets an a’dam put on him by one of the Forsaken. Had Jordan been writing, he would have been stuck in that fucking thing for three more books. Sanderson wraps up the whole thing in like five pages. I genuinely rolled my eyes and set my Kindle down for a minute when it happened, unwilling to believe what I had just read and extremely disinterested in reading Rand having even more reasons to be miserable for, surely, at least the rest of this book and most of the next one. But no! Five pages. Almost like it didn’t even happen. And then he kills the fuck out of Semirhage and another one of the Forsaken? In the same book? The same book that mentions all of the core characters except for Elayne, and moves everyone’s stories forward? Is that even legal?

Turns out it is. I’m not going to go straight into the next book when I finish this one; I need a hell of a palate-cleanser after my last two books being over two thousand pages long, so I’m going to read a bunch of short stuff for a while, but I probably won’t wait until the end of the month to pick up the next one.

Bookish braindump

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

You, uh, might have heard that Sarah J. Maas had a couple of announcements today.

I got a text from The Friend I Talk About Books With around 1:00 in the afternoon, which I can only assume was milliseconds after the titles and covers for ACOTAR 6 and 7 were released. I had to ignore said texts until I got home, at which point our conversation reminded me that I probably need to reread this whole fucking series before I read the new books, and I also very much need to wait for both of them to come out and then read both of them back-to-back. And apparently the spider on the cover of ACOFM is hinting to people that the Throne of Glass series, my favorite of Maas’ work, is being folded into the ACOTAR universe somehow?

Y’all, I don’t have time to reread ACOTAR, and I definitely don’t have time to reread ToG, which is 5,000 pages all on its own. I’ve got four more Wheel of Time books, probably right around 4K pages all by themselves. I’ve got four more Temeraire books. I have fourteen fucking Realm of the Elderlings books that I was going to dive into once I got WoT and Temeraire knocked out. I do not have time for this. I need y’all– and by y’all I mean every writer in the world, and yes, I’m looking directly at you, Adrian Tchaikovsky– to just … stop, for a while, while I get caught up. Either that or I need my job to agree to keep paying me for doing my job without me actually doing my job, so that I can just sit at home and read.

Anyway, I’m going to hit Publish on this and then go see how much of the history of the Iranian monarchy I’m reading right now I can get finished by bed. Tomorrow I’m going to tell my students to stfu and leave me alone because I have books to finish.

Christ.

Wheel of Time fans can’t be real

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Come on, guys. It’s okay. It’s your old pal Luther, here. You can admit it. This is all one giant, decades-long piss-take, right?

I finished Book Eight of this nonsense last night, nearly seven hundred pages in which absolutely nothing happens until the last twenty pages and then not much happens in the climax. I am going to finish this series this year, powered by pure spite and nothing else, and you should all be very proud of me for how little whining I have done about it here. Even if you feel like I’ve complained about these books a lot, you have no idea how much I have held back. Book Eight begins what even fans of the series call “The Slog.” Or maybe it’s Book Seven! They can’t agree.

I owe the publishers of the book I’m reading now a review, and I’m really wondering if I’m not being fair to the new book by putting it after a WoT book. Because oh man did I go straight to I Bet It Would Be Fun to Annotate This and Rip It to Shreds mode.

Anyway. For the record, I genuinely don’t care if you’ve enjoyed these books or not, and there are multiple people I really respect (such as, for example, my actual wife) who are fans of them, I just … I don’t get it, and I don’t think I ever will at this point. I’m still finishing the God damned things one way or another, though.

Had a weird moment during my prep/lunch period at work today, where a whole bunch of shit all piled up on me at once and I damn near had a meltdown over a bizarre assortment of objectively minor inconveniences. I’m still not used to the new glasses. I made bad lunch decisions, and on top of that I was given a Diet Coke instead of a Coke, or maybe it was just super low on syrup. I’ve bitten my lower lip in the exact same spot roughly seventy times in the last few days. My classroom hasn’t been vacuumed in several days, and the cruft that is still on the floor is resistant to my broom. And the anxiety over this summer school thing continues to ramp up; I looked a little bit more closely at what little information I have and I’m now definitively convinced they’ve handed me two grades at the same time.(*) And probably a few other things that I’m not remembering at the moment. And … man. I managed to work my way out of it before the kids showed up, which was good, especially since I had to double up my advisory again. Nobody wants Mr. Siler to lose his mind and go home early during the last week of school, especially since I just remembered another one of those little inconveniences and it was being handed yet another piece of essential paperwork that I needed to do about taking the last day of school off– which, remember, I told my boss about in January.

One good thing is I do think I’ve actually convinced myself that next year’s eighth graders should be fine. There’s still a billion ways that could go wrong, and my partner teacher continues to stubbornly refuse to admit that she’s jumping to the high school next year.

I would appreciate knowing something about anything involving the next few months within the next couple of days, thanks.

(*) Does this mean that both groups are tiny, and I’ll have a tiny group? Or are both groups normal sized, and I’ll have a huge group? What even is a huge group in this context, since they’ve told us nothing about the kids we have coming? Am I doing math and reading for both groups– so four preps in three hours? Is anyone ever going to respond to any of my emails?

All right, let’s do this, damn it

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading3 Comments

Well, that was a fun little rabbit hole to fall into at 10:00 in the morning.

I posted these beauties not long after buying them, and they make me happy each and every time I walk past them, which was how I justified the $Jesusdon’task cost. The problem: despite their status as one of the non-negotiable canon series of fantasy literature, I haven’t finished the damn series. I’ve read the first … five? Six? and tried to reread/finish them a few years ago and had to tap out after the second book.

I’m doing this, damn it. I’ve spent a lot of money on this damn series and I’m stuffing it into my brain whether I want it there or not. I’m not stupid enough to try and read them straight through, though; I’ll commit to one a month (still over a year!) and try to go at least a little faster than that in practice.

(I plan to start with New Spring, the prologue, which I haven’t actually read yet. If you have strong feelings about whether I should hold off until later, let me know, but do keep in mind that I’ve read the first two books twice each already. You have, like, an hour or two until I’ve started it and can’t be stopped.)

I recognize that “I started a book!” maybe isn’t the most compelling blog content ever, but I wanted to mark the first date in something less ephemeral than Bluesky. So.

Anyway, that rabbit hole: I thought that I had posted about these books when I got them, and I couldn’t find the post at first. It took me a minute to track the post down, because the words “Wheel of Time” didn’t actually show up in the post title. I went to Google and searched “infinitefreetime wheel of time” and this bullshit happened:

Other than the first half-sentence of the second paragraph, none of that is fucking true. Those quotes? Not real. The AI made the whole thing the fuck up. I hate this fucking useless-ass, destructive-ass technology with every fiber of my being and I cannot wait for it to die, hopefully taking a large chunk of the stupider element of our tech sector along with it.

So, yeah. I’m starting up on Wheel of Time again, and fuck GenAI straight to Hell.

On my inner magpie, and other thoughts

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching1 Comment

So, um, these showed up today. They are hand-numbered, 41/199. When I die, my wife can sell them to pay for my funeral. They will make me happy every time I walk past my bookshelves for the rest of my life.

Have I read the books yet? Nope. Although now I kind of have to. We’ll make it a summer project.

Teachers complain a lot, right? The understatement of the decade, surely. Like, read the site for five minutes. Teachers complain a lot. But one thing I feel like doesn’t get discussed enough is how emotionally fucked up the end of the school year can be, and now that I’m down to the last three days I’m starting to really have to stare that in the face. This has, on the balance, not been a bad year– there have certainly been moments, there always are, but in the main it’s been a pretty good year. Top half, let’s say.

Some years aren’t all that bad– last year comes to mind. But this year there are a good half dozen kids who I really, really like, who I’ve grown pretty close to over the course of the year … and I get to see them three more times and that’s it. They’re gone. And because I teach 8th grade, it’s worse, because they’re not just no longer in my class, they’re gone entirely. Like, maybe I’ll see them when they do their grad walk in four years, but that barely counts? And even if they do stay in touch, and some of them do, of course, it’s not like this is the kind of relationship where I can drag somebody out to lunch or go see a movie or some shit like that. Like, not even in a “that’s kinda weird” sorta way! A “people are going to assume terrible crimes are happening!” sort of way!

I don’t want to commit crimes! I just think your kid is cool and I would like to keep them in my life after seeing them nearly every fucking day for a year.

Next Thursday is going to really suck, is what I’m saying.

Related, but not really: I had a parent email me about a concern over the final, which in and of itself is just fine, but in the middle of the message she threw in “as you know, he tried taking his life a little over a month ago,” and NO THE MERRY FUCK I DID NOT, MA’AM. I thought for a minute she had mentioned it and I had forgotten, somehow, and looked through every previous email I’ve gotten from her, and … NOPE. There very much was no message about it.

And, like, how do you respond to that? Do I just pretend she told me? I ended up not directly addressing it one way or another and answering the substance of the email, which feels … weirdly flippant, somehow? I feel like I’m yadda-yaddaing a suicide attempt, but I also really don’t want to correct her on it. I may contact our social worker and see if he knew about it, but that potentially opens up an entire different can of worms if he didn’t.

Mental note, don’t put the question in writing.

On TV and books and daylight savings time

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading, Television4 Comments

1912257_10152217545273926_821713658_oBut not in that order.

This has been… kind of a shitty day, though not in any way I can put my finger on.  I normally don’t notice the time change, and don’t remember ever having reason to gripe about it before, but I am messed up today for some reason.  I may just be getting sick, in which case that sickness can go straight to hell because this is ISTEP week and I do not have the goddamn time.

I took a nap this afternoon, for God’s sake, which I don’t do very often, and which just made everything worse– I woke up feeling sicker, tireder, and crabbier than I’d been when I went to sleep.  I’ve spent most of the rest of the day reading.  Ordinarily “read and then took a nap” would be a good Sunday, and it’s not like there’s any work hanging over my head or anything like that; I finished that huge pile of grading yesterday.

Item: I have to go on a complete internet blackout starting around eight or nine, because I’m not going to be able to catch the True Detective finale, to say nothing of Walking Dead, until tomorrow… this has been the case for the last several Sundays, of course, but I figure tonight it several times as important.  True Detective has been the best thing to happen to TV for years, as far as I’m concerned, and I ain’t going anywhere near the Web so y’all can screw it up for me.

Another item: I’m never pre-ordering anything from Amazon again.  Brandon Sanderson’s Words of Radiance will have been out for a solid week before it finally shows up at my house on Tuesday (it might be here tomorrow; I often find that I get things a day earlier than they project.)  Ordinarily this wouldn’t bother me except that I pre-ordered the motherfucker in July.  See, Amazon, I pre-order shit so that I can get it right away when it’s available.  That shit shoulda been shipped to be at my doorstep at the latest the day after release.

I finished a re-read of The Way of Kings– that’s the first book in the series– this afternoon, meaning that my last four or five books have all been fantasy epic doorstops.  It’s stunning to me just how much better the Sanderson book is than The Wheel of Time.  I know I’ve done two posts about that reread already, but… man, while I enjoy Jordan’s writing on a sentence-to-sentence level, going through the series again (I’ve finished the first three books) has convinced me that the books really aren’t any damn good.  They’re engaging, which is a good thing, but nothing fucking happens in the entire second book, which is like eight hundred goddamn pages long.  In the SECOND BOOK.  The characters are all literally in the exact same place at the end of the book as they are in the beginning.  In the third book, the main character barely shows up.

This is bullshit.  And I’m not making it to the end without a massive expenditure of willpower, as there are fourteen books in the series and I haven’t hit the long ones yet.  My wife is trying to finish the final book as we speak; she was about a third of the way through it when I started The Eye of the World and I finished the first three WoT books plus the first Sanderson book and she’s still not done with it, and I’m pretty sure nothing but bullheadedness and spite are keeping her reading at this point.  They’re just not very goddamned good, that’s all.