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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

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Something I’m not a huge fan of in this series is the transformation of Rand (the dragon reborn) into this great general with a huge level of arrogance.  In the beginning he is a humble farm boy…but his attitude to the world and how to manage his “subjects” changes so rapidly.  In all of Jordan’s over explaining, this is something that I don’t feel is explored enough.  We hear from all the characters how much Rand has changed, and how he is more and more arrogant, but we don’t get a feeling of where that change is coming from.  He has this grand plan he’s trying to work to battle the forces of evil…but we get no real foundation for this plan or what makes him think it will work.  Given the way things are setting up for them, we could understand if these thoughts and these strategic moves are coming from the voices of the past…but we never really get that much.  It’s just farm boy one day, General the next.  It seems like there is far more time spent developing the other characters and not enough developing the main character.

I found out recently that what was suppose to be the final book was split into three more volumes.  Hopefully that will be the “end” of this series.  While I doubt this series will really end, it would be nice if there was some resolution to the current plot.  This series as well as the sword of truth series are the reasons I will never start reading/listening to a book series that isn’t “completed” again.

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I’ve been searching a bit for a few books to take up with me.  The problem with that is I don’t know exactly what I like.  I’m a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, but it’s nice to break out of the mold a bit.  I’ll go bum around Barnes and Noble this weekend and see if I find anything interesting.  I’m not terribly optimistic though.  Something that would work quite well IMO is audio books.  If I try reading in the field, there is an obvious problem with that…but if I have a head set on the only sense I’m affecting is my hearing.  I’m not sure what it is about sitting in the bush, but when I do my ears start ringing something fierce.  I’m not sure if it’s the lack of sound, strain on my ears or a combination of both.  Beyond that, anything you do hear seems so magnified…squirrels playing in the leaves is ridiculously loud.  Listening to something might actually help out a bit with my comfort level and will surely alleviate my boredom.

I was listening to the WoT books at work, and from the looks of the reviews from this blog I got quit after book 5 due to extreme boredom with the series.  One of the issues not related to the book is that I listen to the previous days Lex and Terry podcast and that is far more interesting to me as it’s designed for a short attention span and some quick hit humor.  In the bush I won’t have access to these downloads so I should be able to get back into the books.  I started up with this series again for a couple of reasons.  They are suppose to be pretty good, and I thought that me being a fantasy geek was off my rocker for not being interested in them.  Also, the author dying brought me back into the series.  I had read that he had notes for the final book and some writing done.  I read that they brought in Brandon Sanderson to finish the series.  What pissed me off to no end is that the final battle which was envisioned by Jordan to be one book has now been broken up into 3 volumes.  IMO this is a new guy coming in, seeing a cash cow and making some money off of it.  It takes a series that I looked forward to having an ending in 2009 out to having an ending in 2011…unless it goes longer.  I hate reading a series that doesn’t have an ending.  I like a complete story and this is the fiasco that has made me decide to never pick up a series until the final chapter in the overall arc is written.

I have the audio books for this up through book 11.  The remaining books I have to listen to (6-11) take up about 10 gigs.  My walkman only holds 8 gig…you see my problem.  I’m not sure how many hours each book would take to listen to, but it is conceivable that I would have enough free time to listen to them all.  I’m going to have to bring a laptop with that has the books loaded on it the way it looks.  I should be able to bring the t21 along for this task, but I’ll need to reload that before I go (fun with beta os’s!).  It’s for cases like this that I would like to have a larger mp3 player.  Looks like 30 gig would be the optimal spot for me.  I should have thought about things like this before I bought this one.  That might have been enough to push me towards an iPod.

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The book tells the story of a character after the “end of the world”.  The man is trying to survive the end of the world with his son in tow.  The book picks up with them heading down “the road” towards the coast.  I got the impression it was south, but it might have been just to the coast.  They encounter all sorts of gruesome stuff as the remaining people have regressed to a tribal/cannibalistic society.  The man is carrying a pistol with two rounds that are meant to be used for himself and the boy if necessary.  You never hear about the event that, in effect, ended the world…I believe it’s alluded to that there were some explosions of some sort, but it is never explained.  The man might not actually know exactly what ended the world as there was one point where they ran in to another old man on the road and he is quizzing him about things, one of the questions was what happened to the world.  The boy was born after the end of the world and has never known anything other than what is currently around him.  He hears stories from the man, but it seems like he brushes them off as just stories as they are so far from the world in which he currently lives.

The best part about this book is what it leaves to your imagination or to actually think about.  At one point it was the man, his woman and the child in the world.  The woman decides to “leave” them and just goes away.  The boy wakes up the next morning and says “she’s gone isn’t she?” and the man answers “yes”.  From what I’ve read online about this part of the book, people seem to think the woman committed suicide in some way.  Many think that she shot herself, as it says he had 3 bullets in his gun at the time and from an earlier description in the book we find that he now has 2 bullets.  The implication is that she shot herself (or was shot).  It doesn’t say she did, but it seems that everyone who read the book thinks she did.  I didn’t get that impression at all.  Maybe I am just ignorant about things like that.  It seems like the logical conclusion, but you have to take that step on your own…the book doesn’t connect the dots for you.  It does that sort of thing in various places.  You have to connect the dots on your own.  One of the biggest question marks for me is the part about a bomb shelter.  They come across a fully stocked bomb shelter, food, fuel and all the survivalist things they could possibly need for what seemed like the next decade.  They stay there for a few days and then just leave.  Why wouldn’t they stay there longer?  Are they any more likely to be over taken there than in the open of the road?  This is the only part of the book that didn’t jive with me.

The book is extremely detailed about just how bad the world sucks.  There is ash everywhere, over everything.  At the beginning of the story it’s just like every other “this sucks” scene that any movie or book has ever set for you.  Towards the middle it starts to really drag you down…you begin to actually feel just how bad things are.  Towards the end it got kind of old for me.  I get the world sucks, lets hear some story.

I wanted to get this book read before the movie comes out the end of November.  I am going to catch the flick in theaters, but I don’t think it will hold a candle to the book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone.  I am not going to go into any details that would potentially spoil this read for the few people that catch this blog.  The paperback is about 280 pages and it’s a quick read.  The idea behind it and the imagery that it conveys will stick with you for quite awhile though.  After reading this, I’m going to stock up on shells and canned goods.  Toilet paper too I think.

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I’ve got nothing good to say about this book.  The only intrigue came in the final chapter, up to that point it was a yawn fest.

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The production quality wasn’t that bad.  There was one chapter that sounded like a scratched CD at the end.  I wonder what recourse people have when they buy something like that?

At this rate, I should have the last book I have finished up by the time the final book in the series is released to audio book.

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Book 4 was where I fell out of the series last time.  I’m hoping it was just a mental block and I’m able to get through it…I’m quite interested to see how this series turns out.

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