WOT: A Memory of Light (Finish Tarmon Gai'don!)

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61

Amazon reviews:

2.5 out of 5 stars (165)
5 stars 56
4 stars 5
3 star 4
2 star 2
1 star 98

Of course, the 98 1 star reviews are people complaining about the lack of ebook release. Maybe Tor will learn their lesson, or will they ignore the review ratings?

Also: GODDAMN I’M FUCKING STUPID. I just clicked in another forum on what it seemed an innocuous spoiler of a character in the book, and baam, in 4 words I read, I think I know now something very important about the ending and who survives or dies.

62

Yeah, I quit reading anything a bit ago.

I took yesterday to read it. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. I said somewhere else that suitable and appropriate are the words I’d pick to describe the end. There were cool things and not so cool things, lots of big things were resolved, but many, many were left hanging. Perrin was much more interesting than Matt for this final ride, but Matt did get a whole lot of screen time. Some surprising minor characters showed up, others I would have expected didn’t. Other than I still don’t think Sanderson “got” Matt, my only real jarring problem was the tinker inclusion. That was just wrong.

Tinker section spoiler - only 3/4 of a page of the entire book

I can only assume Sanderson really disapproves of pacifists from his treatment of the tinkers. He has Raen questioning his life and he frames them very strongly by explicitly pointing out that the people working with the Tinkers are cowards. This construction is directly contrary to how Jordan portrayed this choice several times earlier in the series. I really don’t think Jordan would have approved.

63

I started it some hours ago!

Chapter 3 already. Androl is awesome, and it’s amusing seeing how the double bond works.

64

The books is good but… it’s going too fast, skipping lots of characters interactions.

Oh yes, feel the irony.

Several previous books were too slow and if anything else, included an excessive amount of secondary characters talking and doing stuff, and here finally in the last book, it’s all too fast and brief. 900 pages, but it feels a tad rushed, for everything it has to happen.
This happens because some big plot points have been delayed several books, and now they have to do it rushing, and the abundant war scenes subtract time of lots of characters interactions.

I mean, there are some specific meetings, talks and character interactions that I was waiting for them for years and years, and here they happen too fast or even “off camera”, or just don’t happen.

Little examples:

spoilers for first third

I wanted at least a full chapter of Moiraine talking with Rand and other people, after all these years waiting for her return, it was the mínimum I expected.

There are some important meetings of characters, with rulers and Aes Sedai and the rest, where some specific people don’t even open their mouth, and it doesn’t feel natural.

I had some expectatations of a scene with sparks flying between Moiraine and Cadsuane, but they don’t seem to interact.

Another scene it felt somewhat missing was Cadsuane presenting or talking to Egwene, her Amyirlin.

What face made Lan when he found Moiraine returned from the dead? How was their encounter? It happens offscreen.

Another war meeting, with characters that didn’t see in a lot of time, like Galad and Elayne, who are even half-brothers!, and Queen and Captain of the Light Children, and strangely they don’t exchange a word.

65

Finished it a bit earlier. Somewhat satisfying ending, though Sanderson’s prose is woefully pedestrian. And it does feel like Sanderson was playing a game of connecting the dots, following a template of X event connects to Y event to Z. . . .

66

I’m not sure he had much of a choice, considering the ending was already mostly written for him by Jordan. Anyhow, I’m about halfway through it and I must take breaks often, it’s quite tense, the culmination of such a long(and sometimes boring) journey.

67

Just read the scene of
Elayne’s battle

[spoiler]huge gateway connected the Dragonmount lava. I shouted a little fuck yeah :D.

Min as Truthspeaker have potential, also.
And the clash between Tuon and Egwene was memorable, I suppose that’s a thread that will left open at the end, a new big conflict that will go on and one after Rand’s story ends.[/spoiler]

68

Just my general thoughts overall on the series and Memory of Light which I just finished over 3 days.

I read up until book 8 when I started the series in the late 90s quite quickly, then after that I pretty much got turned off with having to wait and how much worse the books got. I still think at his best RJ beats Sanderson handidly but at his worse RJ was horrible (books ignoring the main characters practically, nothing happening, extremely repetitive, etc). Haven’t read any other Sanderson books but none of the WoT books he did approached how bad the last few RJ WoT books are. I pretty much hated books 9, 10 and 11 but I read them anyways. The first half of WoT rates up there with the best books I’ve read and after Sanderson took over it got better but not as good as it was at it’s best.

MoL

[spoiler]Now onto MoL which I’d probably rate 2.5 out of 5. There were a lot of good scenes in the book and I felt like Mat, Rand and Androl carried the book. Mat is definitely my favorite overall character, of the whole series and this book in particular. I ultimately just am dissatisfied with the book as it felt incomplete and pieced together sloppily. If I had to rate the book as a stand alone maybe I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5 but the problem is it’s a final book to a long epic series.

My dislikes of the book comes from a few things:

-There was at least a few hundred pages of things I expected which didn’t happen. I didn’t care particularly how they turned out but lots of stuff wasn’t there which I thought surely must be there!
-Past strong characters from previous books were brought back for a few paragraphs then never again (why bring them back then ignore them?).
-Related to the two above, even characters who did come back with a lot of action, like Moraine, didn’t interact with people or have scenes you’d expect.
-Too much combat, felt repetitive to me but it was quite well done I admit. Once Mat got involved the battle was even better.
-Random abrupt deaths of characters without much detail or weren’t explained well.
-It just doesn’t feel finished (LoTR - RoTK had a good ending in comparison).

Ultimately it seems like a rush job where Sanderson was forced to piece together too many cliff notes into a final book to finish it off. Granted, he probably didn’t have much choice in the matter either. However it was weird the book focused so much on combat and Androl (with his new ninja like ability with gateways) for instance than closing up past events or characters. A lot things were just bizarre such as Davram Bashere’s death which was just a sentence I think stating basically, he’s dead. I was expecting more things to be explored, explained or just plain wrapped up. I’m happy the series is over but I honestly expected a lot more than I got.[/spoiler]

69

And… finished. That was a end, all right.

Was it a good end? I would say yes, it was a good book, a good finale for this grand series. It wasn’t perfect, but after all these big fat books of a neverending series, it finished well enough. Big, epic battles, several moments of awesomeness, some surprises, sad moments, thrilling or haunting scenes, impossible magical fights, etc.

There are a few moments that felt with something “missing”, as I mentioned a few days ago
near the end of the Last Battle

giving an example more, like Hawking and Tuon speaking and we didn’t see it??!!!

, and even if this a huge series with lots of plots, not everything is perfectly closed, but it’s all right.

A particular detail: while it’s logical this being the last book of a long, epic series about the Last Battle, the books is 2/3 descriptions of battles. So in a way, judging the book at its own instead of being part of the series, it can be a bit dull, or monotonous, reading page after page after page of battle scenes.
At least, with it, get the feelings desperation, loss, hope for victory, etc well conveyed.

70

Sanderson took over a series that was almost completely out of control. On the trajectory the series was taking when Jordan passed away, it could have easily been twenty books. Beyond my endurance, anyway. The last book suffers from the need to bring things to a close in a reasonable time frame. It’s really not possible to deal in a completely satisfying way with everything that had been raised before. The cast of characters is gigantic and there are just not enough pages to do them all justice.

Still, I quite enjoyed it. The large-scale battles, the sense of exhaustion and desperation. There are quite a few scenes that I found pretty thrilling to visualize. No shortage of moving moments. In the end, I was really satisfied with the battles, even if they went on so long.

So overall, it was probably too compressed. Maybe he could have drawn things together a bit more slowly. But how long do you expect him to play in another guy’s world? It’s as good an ending as could be reasonably expected, under the circumstances.

71

That was interesting. I decided to read this, having skipped (I think) 11, 12 and 13, and it being more than 6 years. Yeah, I have no idea who anyone other than the main characters and their very close associates are anymore. Went reasonably despite that. Don’t have much to say otherwise (also completely unequipped to do so).

72

Finally got around to reading this in ebook form. Definitely felt rushed and even Sanderson said he could have easily filled a few books with material.

That said, it was very satisfying, and I even teared up a bit at times (I’ve always been a sucker for Logain) and missed my train stop more than once. No spoilers, but enough major characters die that it really amps up the tension - you really feel as if nobody is safe.

I can’t say that I’d recommend the series to someone who hasn’t already started it, but I’m glad I read them all - there were just some amazing moments nestled amongst all the braid pulling.

73

The biggest problem I had, apart from a lot of high profile meetings never happening, was the complete irrelevance of Fain/Mashadar. In all previous books it is set up as a third force, almost as powerful as Shaitan and Rand/“Light Forces”.

It only shows up in the final chapter and is swatted away like a fly.

74

Agree with the general consensus. Final book seems rushed and after all the unnecessary bloat of the previous books it seems such a shame and a waste. Still happy I read the series and persevered to finish it, but it doesn’t rank as the fantasy classic to me that it should have been.

75

After some months, looking back, I have to say the last book was weaker the Towers of Midnight and The Gathering Storm. The structure itself of the book wasn’t good, Rand vs Dark one was boring, and the battles were too long.

76

I finally got around to reading this, after having promised to read it immediately. I suppose, in my heart of hearts, I was still very attached to the series and didn’t want it to end. But end it did, and I think it did it in a satisfying enough way to make me glad that I read the whole thing. I can’t wait to see the HBO series, though ;)

Unresolved Stuff

One small thing: as far as I can tell, the Tinkers never learn the Song, right? Rand knows it, and the Ogier have a version of it, but there’s no evidence of the Tinkers ever learning it, as far as I can tell. Weird. That was a whole lot of buildup that went nowhere. Plus did we ever find out what happened to Asmodean? At one point, Demandred wonders if Lan is really Asmodean, so at least we know that he didn’t kill him.

77

That was spoilered in the glossary of the previous book, if I am not mistaken. Graendal did the deed.

78

Yeah, weird. I ended up searching Google and found that, but honestly, I have no clue how we as readers were supposed to have figured it out.

79

I had long since stopped checking the glossaries for that sort of thing. Jordan insisted for years it was obvious, but it wasn’t really.

80

He actually died without telling anyone who killed Asmodean. Brandon Sanderson just made it up.

(This may or may not be true, I just found the thought amusing.)