After finishing this book I was asking myself what the point of it was.  It didn’t seem to really advance the story at all IMO.  Maybe I completely missed something, but I waited and waited for something to happen…and nothing.  There was some movement in the white tower, but nothing of any real significance.  The only upside to this book was that it wasn’t near as long as the preceding books.  There was some new discoveries about magic and so forth…but nothing really interesting.  It zero’d in on a “new” villian…but that really doesn’t advance the story.  This book was totally a setup for things to come…without really setting anything up.  From reading about the development of this series on the wiki, this should have been the first book delivered after jordan decided to slow down his writing process.  This book took two years to complete…and from what I can see it was a waste of time.

From what I can tell, Jordan was either a misogynist or exactly the opposite.  He seems to always paint women as being in control and with an arrogance beyond imagination.  The constant bickering and infighting between the women is getting pretty old.  I do what I can to avoid hearing this crap in real life, I sure don’t want to read books chalk full of it.

I’m curious to see how this series ends, but at this point I’m wondering if I could just skip ahead and not miss anything.

I’ve been looking for something to do while I’m working out.  Music gets old to me after awhile, and there isn’t really enough Lex & Terry to take me through 2hrs worth of working out and 8hrs of work day.  A buddy came over one night and during the conversation mentioned something about a fantasy book HBO is adapting to the small screen…that reminded me I’ve got these WOT books to finish…

Book 6 was so ungodly boring…I can’t really put my finger on why, but it was just sickeningly boring.  Part of the problem may have been that I listen to the books mostly at work.  I am not able to really lose myself into the story and let the author build an immersive world with his words.  For most of this book I was on the elliptical and was able to focus on what is going on in the story.  It was…better, but I don’t think my attention span was entirely responsible for that.

This book featured more sex than the others…which is to say it eluded to sex.  During this story the boys have been growing in to men, and along with that their dealings with women are starting to change.  The book stops short of erotic, but it does lay out the scene leading up to them getting laid.  Jordan is just as descriptive with these situations as he has been in all the others.

This is also the first book where the descriptions of them feeding their faces hasn’t been enough to piss me off.  He mentions it a few times…but there is more story than there is description of them eating.  I really don’t understand all that…maybe Jordan was hungry when he was writing the first few and he’s moved on to horny now?  who knows.

Also this book is over 100 pages shorter than the previous.  Books 4, 5, and 6 are all around that 1k page mark.  Books 4 and 6 top 1k and book 5 comes in just 4 pages short.  Prior to that the books came in around 700-832 pages, book 7 is a little wordy at 896.  The next few books go back to that 700-864 range.  IMO that’s a good target for this story.  Looking back the books that I thought were boring were those longer ones.  The first couple that really draw you in to the story are the shorter books.  I’m not sure if he was aiming for more pages or what the deal was…but I think it was a mistake.

The story is starting to evolve and you see how the different factions are trying to work with each other but still keep things to themselves and try to come out on top in the end.  All this back stabbing and secrecy is pretty interesting to me.  It seems to work just like you would imagine the different branches of the US government to work.  I also think Jordan has some issues with women.  It’s interesting how the women in his book wield the most power…or seem to anyhow.  The men have to leverage and work hard to ever get the upper hand.

I’m still not happy with the development of Rand into the man he is now.  I don’t feel the psychological impact of what’s going on with him has been explored enough at all.  As I’ve said before, he goes from this boy to a general…sometimes crazy, occasionally brilliant and once in awhile he’s the boy he was in that first book.   Perrin and Matt have evolved a bit as well, but their evolution has been pretty well documented.  Maybe he’s trying to make the “going crazy” aspect of Rand more of a mystery and that’s why he doesn’t go into a lot of detail about his evolution.  It just seems really odd to me that the author would spend 3 pages describing a piece of cheese and not go in to some detail about who you assume is the main character.

I also expect fairly soon we will see someone we think is dead resurrected.  She’s mentioned far too many times to be left out of the rest of the story.

I got turned on to this book about a year ago via review on si.com.  I drug my feet a little bit and kinda forgot about it until football season was over and I was looking for something to fill some time.  I ordered a few books from amazon, the autobiography’s of both magic and bird, gang leader for a day and When March Went Mad.  I’ve only finished one so far.

WMWM is a telling of the events that lead up to magic and bird meeting in the ’79 NCAA national title game.  It tells some about how both players got there, the personalities of each, some about the teammates around them and a bit about the coaches and schools.  I thought the idea of this book was going to be an illustration of how this one game acted as a catapult for college basketball’s popularity.  After reading the book you gain an understanding of how this game was important, but it was just one of several things that helped boost college basketball’s popularity.  The thing that is difficult for us today to get our head around is how these guys remained hidden from the spot light for so long.  Today, we know about the stars damn near at conception.  It’s difficult for me to comprehend the lack of information that was available in the 80′s to mid 90′s.  Even growing up in that time I can’t get my head around what it was like before the information super highway.  I think if you remove Magic and Bird from college basketball it would have still gained popularity, but maybe it would have been delayed until the next superstar match-up (I don’t know when that was).  With how technology was delivering media to the masses though, the popularity explosion was inevitable.

I thought this book was very heavy on the Bird side of the story and rather light on the Magic side.  Maybe someone could look over it and say it was a pretty even mix, but that’s just the feeling I got while I was reading it.  Reading how both these guys moved up into their super-stardom was quit entertaining.  I can remember watching these two in the mid 80′s and idolizing Magic.  Being a young farm kid, I didn’t get to see any games besides what NBC televised on Sundays…and then whatever playoff games were on.  I didn’t read any stories about them or get any kind of feeling from their personality at all beyond what I saw on the basketball court.  Reading through this book has let me in on some things that were pretty interesting.  I never knew bird had a daughter from his first marriage…I didn’t know he was married and divorced before college.  I hadn’t realized he was drafted by the Celtics and delayed a year from entering the NBA.  Other things about his personality I found interesting as well. Magic, on the other hand, played out in the book just the way I thought he would.  He always seemed very up front about who he was and what kind of personality he has.  Unless the book is skewed…which I can’t possibly know.  Both, clearly, are winners.

The game itself wasn’t very interesting, the Spartans handled IU fairly easily.  Bird was way off his game, turning in his worse performance of the year.  He had a busted thumb through the tournament that affected him a bit and fatigue was a big factor.  Getting to the game was the interesting part of the book.  IU had an undefeated season going on while the Spartans struggled quite a bit.  Both Magic and Bird were mostly recognized as decent players but Bird wasn’t given credit till late in the year for how good he really was.  Things like that still happen today.  Sportscasters devalue a guy based on the school he attends and their perceived lack of a solid schedule.  The Spartans were hampered by their coach not handling them quite right and trying to dial in the proper game plan and lineup.

While the story of the players was very interesting, what really struck me in the book was the development of the NCAA T.V. deals after the game.  NBC pissed away their chance to be the dominate NCAA network.  They hired a president that didn’t value college sports, or sports at all, and basically insulted the NCAA with what he offered to pay them for the tournament.  That really opened the door for CBS who had the foresight to help the NCAA develop the tournament into what it has become today.  They promised them a dedicated set like what they had on their NFL program.  They offered to highly promote the tournament and televise a set number of games on the weekends and they even convinced the NCAA to do a selection show the Sunday before the tournament starts…all of which people still gobble up today.  Add to that, ESPN just getting fired up and planning to build itself largely on college basketball…and you have some pretty attractive T.V. deals.

If you’re interested in college basketball or Magic and Bird it’s worth reading.  You can pick it up for less than 10 bucks off Amazon.  It’s 275 pages of simplistic reading.

I have a couple other books to finish up, then I’ll be attacking “when the game was ours”.  It’s another Magic/Bird book that talks about their professional careers.

There is an interesting little app for the iPhone and Blackberry called Kobo (shortcovers).  It is apparently an ebook reader for the respective platforms.  I downloaded it but haven’t had any time to monkey with it yet.  Some of the books are free and it looks like a lot of the ones you have to pay for are around 10 bucks.  That seems a little high to me, if you can get a paper book for 5-7 bucks, shouldn’t digital be 3-4 bucks?

There was a review of it on the gadget lab site:

Kobo International E-Book Store Launches: Why Amazon Should Be Afraid

• By Charlie Sorrel
• December 16, 2009  |
• 10:52 am  |
• Categories: Media Players

There is little doubt that electronic books have gone mainstream. The question now is, in just which direction will the market go? It’s possible that the Kindle will do what Apple and the iPod did for music, essentially owning the market. Or things could split open, with many sellers competing on an open platform. Kobo is betting on the latter.

Kobo is a rebranded Shortcovers, which sells e-books that can be read on almost any device, from Macs and PCs to the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre and any e-reader that can work with EPUB-format books, such as the Barnes & Noble Nook or the Sony Reader. Notably, the Kindle is absent from the list.

Shortcovers has been selling e-books for a while, but the rebranding to Kobo marks the first serious alternative to the Kindle as a platform. Kobo has teamed up with Borders, REDgroup Retail and Instant Fame, which to you and me means that the books are available almost worldwide, in the United States, Canada, the EU, the U.K., Australia and the Asia Pacific region. In fact, Borders will be incorporating Kobo into its store later next year. Kobo is also adding 1.8 million public-domain books from the Internet Archive.

To accompany the launch, there are a slew of new applications. I tried out the new iPhone app, which is, like the Shortcovers app before it, free. You log in with your existing Shortcovers ID and from there you can browse, sample and buy books.

Apart from a name change, Kobo has some new features. Now you can browse by category, choose from a new Top-50 e-books list, New York Times bestsellers, Oprah’s book-club picks and more. The app also has recommended reading lists (right now there is a “Season’s Readings” section, and a splendid “Canadian, eh” list) and a better search function.

It’s very easy to browse, and the Kobo app puts Amazon’s rushed-out Kindle for iPhone application to shame. It’s all done with full artwork for covers, and usually you can read the first chapter of a book (although a lot of the time, you only get to read the end-matter and not any actual content). Reading books is equally elegant, and greatly cleaned-up since the original Shortcovers app. Page turning is animated and actually looks like paper pages flipping.

But when you come to make a purchase, things go slightly awry. By now, most of us are used to in-app purchases on the iPhone, so getting bounced out of Kobo and tossed into a credit card form in Safari is an annoying shock. Once you have laboriously input your details, you are sent back to the Kobo app where your book is waiting for you. It would be more convenient if Kobo took advantage of the iTunes App Store’s ability to complete purchases within the app, with billing handled by Apple.

Subsequent transactions go smoother, and you only need to input your password to buy (it still requires a round-trip to Safari, though).

This reliance on Safari is, we assume, both a way to get around Apple’s 30 percent cut and also to make the experience the same across platforms. And speaking of platforms, only the iPhone and Blackberry have the updated applications so far, with the rest “coming soon.”

Kobo is so far the best and most comprehensive service we have used to buy and read books, especially for non-U.S. residents. It is still flawed, and it is a royal pain that Kindle won’t support EPUB books. But with its platform-agnostic approach, huge catalog and new heavyweight partners, we expect to see Kobo grow fast.

In fact, I’m pretty certain that my next e-book reader will not be a Kindle.

World, Meet Kobo! [Kobo blog]

Kobo Product page [Kobo]

Kobo for iPhone [iTunes]