Book Review: A Crown of Swords

740 pages of book I've already read.

That's the jist of it really, I'd already read the book, turns out it was the last book I had read in the series, book 7, for the record, of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, all of which are approx. 750 pages.

It was good though, because it was really like reading it for the first time, but with the pleasure of having half an idea of what's going to happen, only not how and when. It was funny remembering quotes or certain events and waiting to see when they would happen.

I actually read the book pretty fast too, and I've started book 8 now and am 220 pages into it.

It's a good series, with time and age I have come to see more things in it than I did when I first started years ago. For example, political commentary. As well, how cheesy some of the ideas in the book are. For instance, well, the Dragon. I dunno, for me, the idea of Dragons as all powerful magical beings is really, well, played out. It just seems like an attempt to appeal to something which is distinctly not Western and ancient and something something, but whatever. I'm the reader and I can choose to ignore what I want to make the story better, so I will. I try not to equate the title Dragon with anything other than a character and his previous incarnation.

I like that the book shifts perspective. You get inside the head of so many characters throughout the course of the story, that you need 740 pages to cover just about anything, and when I think about it, not a lot actually HAPPENS in the course of a book, because it covers many of the same things from different perspectives, or things that are happening at the same time in different places. That, and Jordan is an incredibly environmentally descriptive writer. he creates entire worlds everytime any scene is introduced, and though it is at times verbose and somewhat unneccessary, it creates a sort of realism and depth that allows you to feel a lot more a part of this world, or at least the situation.