Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels discussion

Our October challenge

About to pick this up from the library and thinking I might not finish it this month…I’m having trouble reading one of these chunkers a month so I might slow the (personal) challenge down a bit. How are the rest of you faring?

I'm waiting to start, I was hoping somebody else would start as well so that I'm not talking to myself here.

I'm starting it either tomorrow or in two days.
Had a week of 0 pages per day in the beginning of the month

I plan to join but I have to catch up and read the 2nd volume first

I started it now - first impression: XD - I wish he would cut all of the dream scenes. They read so over dramatic and somehow always feel the same.

Starting today, I'm dreading the dream scenes. Got bored of them in book 1 as it were

Finished. This one was a quick one, as well from the number of pages as from the content. I guess it was a mix of slowly getting into setting and characters and very few Rand POVs that made this book the most enjoyable for me so far.
I'm still bugged by the many ominous dream scenes and the amateurish feeling writing as soon as it comes to f/m interactions. I have the feeling even my 13 year old son could write those in a more mature way.
But on the plus side I'm really enjoying the vast amount of female characters with their own agenda and the many scenes where women interact with women. I can't recall another Fantasy series with this large playfield for female characters. If Jordan only would have cut all the teenage marry swooning stuff.
I'm definitely looking forward to read on. Perhaps I'm lucky and there are other volumes in the series with so little Rand content XD.

ETA: what I find interesting is looking for the influences Brandon Sanderson took from this series for his Stormlight Archive. Rock is certainly shaped after Loial.

Gabi wrote: "Finished. This one was a quick one, as well from the number of pages as from the content. I guess it was a mix of slowly getting into setting and characters and very few Rand POVs that made this bo..."

I've read about 15% so far and I'm enjoying the overall pacing and direction of where the plot is going.
The writing itself is getting a bit repetitive and a lot of it is unnecessary. Constant repeating how one of the boys is insecure about his communicational skills towards females, while his friends are so good at it. Also there's a lot of inner monologue about the most obvious information.

Art wrote: "The writing itself is getting a bit repetitive and a lot of it is unnecessary. Constant repeating how one of the boys is insecure about his communicational skills towards females, while his friends are so good at it. Also there's a lot of inner monologue about the most obvious information...."

Oh yes, I physically winced each time that happened, because the more repetitions the more embarrassing it gets.
And look out for Nynaeve tucking at her braid ... I had inner visions of her wig coming off or her hair falling out from mid book on XD.

Oh boy, all the braid tugging!!!

Art wrote: "Oh boy, all the braid tugging!!!"

It's a global meme by this point. Welcome to the ranks of the replicators. :)

Well I waited too long to start this and my library hold ended. I’ll have to wait another few weeks. I’ll be traveling for three weeks for work so it’s probably best that I’ve pushed this back a bit. Off to stay at a few inns in Scotland. 🛖🧳

OOH, Inns in Scotland. Sounds great!

Watch out for dragons & knights errant!

Finally got this from the library and using the break to get some reading in!

Like Art, I like the pacing and I’m really enjoying the White Tower scenes. Learning more about the Aes Sedi is fascinating. Much better than the beginning of the book from the Perrin POV.

I still find myself skipping over some of the descriptions and internal monologues - they are either inconsequential (maybe?) or repetitive. Also slightly annoyed that men were the focal point for some of Nynaeve’s and all of Egwene’s Accepted trials.

I finished The Dragon Reborn while on vacation this week, the best in the series so far! Not perfect or without unnecessary paragraphs, but quite enjoyable.

While there are still other plots to follow, I feel like this book could have ended here - I really liked the story arcs and found the first half to be just as good if not better than the latter half. The ending was a bit rushed in my opinion. I wanted more of the everyone in a room together talking about what they did in the book and weaving all of the strands together. That is very satisfying to me as a reader. We got a bit of that but I still have SO MANY QUESTIONS! But still, if we didn't have (view spoiler)[all of the Forsaken running around and the Dark One about to escape, (hide spoiler)] it could have been a nice end to the trilogy.

I'm having a really hard time writing reviews of these books because they are so dense, very impressed with your ability to write down coherent thoughts throughout the series Gabi! 😂