> How about a Wheel of Time update? It's not that
>bad....really.

Was this request aimed at me?

Well, even if it wasn't, I'm going to respond anyway, even though there isn't much to say. I've been working 60-80 hour weeks for the past month, making sure the computer systems in the three offices I take care of (one each in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) didn't all come to a halt this morning (1/1/99--the flavor of UNIX these machines run uses 99 as the end of file marker--strange things happen when the date is also 99, unless patches are loaded to prevent this).

Consequently, I haven't really had much time to read. Plus, I've also started several non-fiction books (I can read four or five non-fiction books at once, because I don't get them confused. I can actually read more than one fiction book at a time, too, but I prefer to have only one fiction book going at a time.)

I'm on page 250 or so of Eye of the World. Things are certainly happening, but since Jordan won't explain any of the stuff he throws out, I'm not sure why I should care. There are three basic things that a reader can care about in any novel: characters, plot, and surroundings. Most fantasy novels rely on plot, most mainstream novels rely on character, and many SF novels (the best example being Clarke's classic _Rendevous with Rama_) rely on surroundings.

Jordan hasn't detailed enough of what is going on yet to make me care a lick about the plot. All I know is these people are running away from evil things that want to capture them. The surroundings are classic fantasy towns and cities, so that's not interesting either. So Jordan is obviously counting on his characters carrying the reader along (at least to this point in the novel). The problem with that is that I really don't care a lick for any of his characters, and I actively hate one of them. Rand is a reletively interesting character, but he's not enough to keep me reading. Perrin, Lan, Moiraine, Egwene, and Nynaeve are just kind of there, for the most part. Nothing significant has really happened to them yet, at least nothing that I really cared much about.

(WARNING. MINOR SPOILERS.)

The gleeman Thom has me in fits--what the *heck* is he doing traveling with them? He had the motivation (*maybe*) to leave the Two Rivers with them. But after that, he should have just gone on his own. If he's going to turn out to be a bad guy, I'm going to scream because it should be obvious to everyone that he has no real reason to be tagging along.

And then there is Mat. I *hate* Mat. He's not naive, he's *stupid*. It seems that every plot point so far (the few there have been) have hinged on Mat's *stupidity*. If I were travelling with this guy, I'd have bound and gagged him long ago, and kept him tied to the back of his horse so he couldn't do any further stupid things. I just want to strangle the guy everytime he gets himself in trouble. It's wearing very thin, let me tell you.

Finally, I just love the way Jordan treats his horses. Even before they were imbued with magical endurance by the Aes Sedai, Jordan had them galloping all day long. Ok, sure. A gallop for a horse is analogous to a sprint for a human. How many humans do you know who can sprint all day long? I also love the part where Lan and his horse race out of the closing gates of Baerlon. By the time they make it through, the two doors are so close together that Lan brushes his wide shoulders on them as he rides his horse through them. That has to be the thinnest horse in the world. Every horse I've ever seen that was big enough to carry a full grown man on his back was also *way* wider than any man that I've ever known. If the doors were close enough together so that Lan would brush his shoulders, his horse would have stuck fast. Actually, the horse would have had sense enough to refuse to bolt through in the first place.

Anyway, I'm still trying to read it. But the going is slow. If Jordan doesn't let me in on a few of his secrets soon, I may have to just quit.