We’re nearly at the end. The penultimate book of the Wheel of Time.

I have noted that Sanderson is a better writer than Jordan, but this book made me miss Jordan. The clunkiness of the language, after so many books, had become part of it. I miss his weird tics.

For example, Mat Cauthon has a sort of black staff with a blade on the end. Most of us might call it a spear or a halberd or a pole arm or (if we’re a real medieval geek) a glaive. But not Robert Jordan. He creates all sorts of permutations of ‘knive’ or ‘blade’ and ‘staff.’ At the time, it just seemed weird. you wanted to say, ‘a long piece of wood with a pointy knife on the end… you mean a spear?’ But now that Sanderson is using phrases like ‘pole arm,’ well, I just feel a little sad.

The page bloat continues (Towers of Midnight coming in at just over 1200 pages), but Sanderson does appear to be doing his best to wrap things up, moving everyone into place for the final battle.

The most exciting bit was a supernatural rescue mission featuring the most interesting character in the series, by far, Mat. Jordan had a tendency to forget about him, but Sanderson seems more inclined to the reader (at least, this reader) what he or she wants. An almost Dungeons &Dragons-ish dungeon crawl mystery in a creepy tower (one of the two midnight-y towers of the title; I’m assuming the other is the so-called Black Tower, where a lot of male magic wielding types hang out and train and, it also seems, plot terrible evil) was the big ending set piece. A character who was a big part of the story early but who has been missing for a while was rescued. Which is cool, but with an almost George R.R. Martin size cast, frankly, after having not seen her for something like 5-7 books, I was okay with not bringing her into the mix. Plus, I don’t feel like Sanderson got her quite right.

But anyway… I’ll be going back to Anthony Powell’s novels of Britain between the wars before finally finishing up the Wheel of Time. I might throw a party for myself when I do finish the series. Fourteen books. That’s ridiculous.

I had been hoping that the Belgariad was a trilogy when I started it. Now, I really wish it had been a trilogy, not in the least because the drop off between the first three books and the last two is pretty sharp.

The prophecy (or really, prophecies) driving the action end up making the whole thing seem too fated. It’s not so much a lack of tension as it is too many things coming across like a deux ex machina.

There is a great big battle which is very exciting and well done, but the long marches leading up to it get entirely too much detail.

Credit where credit is due. There is a bit where the hero (Garion) and the two most interesting characters (the wizard Belgarath and the sneaky spy, Silk) head off on their own. It reminds me of The Fellowship of the Ring, when Aragorn said he had intended to enter Mordor with just Frodo, Sam, himself, and Gimli and not to bring the whole troop. But ripping off too blatantly from Tolkien is another problem.

Anyway. Don’t think I’ll be reading more Eddings for a while.

Growing up, it was far easier to read the novelizations than to watch the actual episodes. The episodes were usually on well past my bed time and each complete story arc was typically broken up into something like 4-6 half hour installments on PBS. Very easy to miss episodes.

I read and re-read The Horns of Nimon over and over again. And again. It was one of my absolute favorites and it was recently rediscovered in my mother’s home. She mailed it to me and I read it again.

I liked it.

The story has also sorts of little references to the legend of Minotaur (Skonnos=Knossos; Seth=Theseus; Anethans=Athenans; Nimon=Minotaur).

The novelization, as is common, was written by the primary script writer for that season.

It’s not literature. It’s short. Everything is, at best, adequate. Unless you watch a lot of Doctor Who, because sometimes, when reading, a line that seemed dead on the page, suddenly came alive, because it was a line by the Doctor and I could hear Tom Baker, who played the Doctor for this episode and who, of course, was the greatest Doctor, deliver the line.

First of all, I had really been hoping that this whole Belgariad series would be a simple trilogy. Sure, a good google check would have told me otherwise, but for some reason, I just assumed it was three and done.

Not that I minded reading a fourth book (or a fifth, as it turns out to be a pentalogy, if that’s the right word), but, on principle, I wanted an antidote to the typically, bloatedly long fantasy series that infects the genre shelves of your neighborhood bookstore.

Castle of Wizardry is a silly name that doesn’t really relate to what happens in the stories contained (the other three, you could see how the title related to a theme or specific event within the books). There is some magic and a castle, but I just didn’t see the two to be sufficiently linked for this to be a good title. Also, it’s the worst kind of fantasy series novel, because it’s all about tying up enough loose ends and setting the characters in place for the climactic final book (think, Matrix Reloaded). And, more than in any of the prior books, this one is shamelessly ripping off The Lord of the Rings. There are even armies being massed for a big battle that’s just a distraction for the true hero to sneak into enemy territory.

But hey, I already bought the fifth book. I bought four and five simultaneously from Second Story Books, along with a nice collection of Robert Browning poems. So, the end, as they say, is nigh. I’ll be jumping into the last of the Belgariad very soon.

The most interesting bit of the book was, for me, the stub of a plane ticket that had been inserted between pages 218 and 219. It’s dated July 11 (though who knows what year). I finished the book on July 6, less than a week before the anniversary of that flight on which, one suspects, the prior owner had been reading it.

Economy. I’m going to keep using that word as I read through David Eddings’ multi-volume opus. It’s economical. In a good way. Usually. Not always. Economy of writing (and therefore, economy of reading). At $7.99 pop at the bookstore (assuming you can’t find a used copy of a particular edition), it’s also economical to purchase.

Now the bad. He’s starting to write about teen romance. No fantasy writer ever gets that right. Eddings, like most, understands that a fifteen year old is usually confused by their feelings and often don’t actually understand what would be perfectly obvious to an adult able to penetrate teen culture long enough to observe. What he doesn’t get, and neither do many others, is that fifteen year old are also horribly and frighteningly horny and prone to fingernail on chalkboard grating bouts of pseudo-romantic melodrama.

The hero, Garion (or sometimes Belgarion) starts getting very powerful, very fast. Too fast for me. Too much economy, perhaps? And some of his uniqueness has a certain deux ex machina quality that I don’t like. Maybe it’s that we’re on the third book and too many characters seem too roughly drawn considering all the time we’ve spent with them. Again, too much economy getting in the way.

The book, while not actually third person limited, does tend to focus on incidents where the young hero, Garion, is directly present. On the whole that’s fine and dandy but I did start to get a little disappointed at so much happening offstage, as it were. A lot of fun, tricksy, magical, violent stuff seems to be happening… elsewhere. I’d like to have seen some more of it.

The climax was… I don’t want to call it exciting, but perhaps… intense? Certainly, Eddings is more than capable of good fantasy writing and he accomplishes some here.