arguchik | robert jordan, aka james rigney, R.I.P.

well, shit. from

nihilistic_kid, who reports that robert jordan has died. i have been a reluctant fan of the wheel of time books since about 1995. someone i was working with at the time loaned me his copy of the eye of the world, and i was hooked. i guess there were 5 books in the series at that time, and i read all of them pretty quickly. i liked the first 3 or 4...and they started frustrating me somewhere around book 5 or 6. i kept reading as each new volume was released, every 2 years or so. i felt like i was too far in to give up on it, at that point. i honestly thought it would end at book 7 or 8...then 9...then 10...then 11. i guess it'll be an even dozen, when/if anyone picks up the half-finished "final" book and finishes it. i also kept hoping it would turn "back" into an interesting series, but it didn't. IMO, of course. particularly problematic to me: the fact that the female characters become completely idiotic as soon as they fall in love, along with the whole treatment of gender relations in the novels.

still, i'm sad to see jordan go. i'm especially sad that he didn't get to complete book 12 before he died--i know how much he wanted to accomplish that, and it's a bummer that he didn't. my heart goes out to his family.