Working my way through WoT atm too...
And I do love the books, but hate alot of the ways it's written.

1. The super battles at the end of each book, is just to short. You read 600 pages building up to the fight, and it ends in 3 pages...some times it seems like he's just to excited about writing the fights, that he rushes through it.

2. Repetition! Every god damn book repeats every damn detail about every shitty little thing, like you hadnt read it 10 times allready.

3. He changes his writing style to much through the books. Understandable since a man has to change over 15 years, but some times he switches to a new story telling style for 100 pages, then goes off to another or his original :(

Other than that I'm loving the books..good story, good eye for detail (if you like that ^^) and the plain fact that you dont finish the books in 3 days and wish there was more :p

Also worth reading is the Icewind Dale saga, Raymond E. Feist's books like Riftwar saga, serpentwar saga etc, and Dune ofc.

edit:
While reaing the books, I thought about how cool it would be if someone made a mmorpg based on the WoT world. Sadly it would require a massive team to get all the details of the world and story into the game. There's loads of things in the story that woukld work excellent in a mmorpg, and a chance to make a more "diffuse" good vs evil setting.

Edit 2:
And 30 mins later I find there is a WoT game with multiplayer/inet support O.o
Prolly shit, but atleast gonna try it when i get home ^^

tell us how that goes ani, heh

Stop after 7 heh, save yourself the tragic waste of paper it's become.

Read Robin Hobb instead - all the realism of Martin without the constant slaughtering of every one of your favourite characters. Admittedly, seeing the heroes live through everything without a scratch apart from the one scripted, overdone death near the end(see Eddings, Feist if that's your sort of thing, it's all good fun to read) gets pretty freaking anonying after a while, but Martin takes it beyond the ridiculous from my point of view. Hobb is the only one to have found the balance I would like to see.

Bernard Cornwell is another whose historical fantasy are hugely realistic and gritty - the Warlord and Grail trilogies in particular.

There's been a lot of other good series listed so far in the thread, so I won't make this any longer by writing reviews of them all online. (I work in a library, so i've got the time heh :p)

Supposedly you need to play it multiplayer to get any value out of it. Its a poor fps where you use terangreal as weapons and can't channel without them for some reason even though you are an aes sedai

Yes...it sucked bawls..big time

Big hairy goat bawls?

You would have to ask Zak about that...not my area of expertice

I had stareted cataloging the books I had last year but my damn barcode scanner broke and i couldnt be arsed typing in ISBN numbers.

good god rip, thats ALOT of books.

hes old though, but yes thats a fucking TON of books :dead:

I wouldn't be surpised if Rip had an original copy of the Bible laying around on stone tablets somewhere in his house. Old bum. :p

I wrote the original, based on stories Tob told me of his younger years.

The women characters in the WoT series really piss me off.Every one of them is a 'stern woman' and all that crap.Saying that i still read the books even though the useless retard releases 1 book about every 20 years,if we are lucky.

GRRM beats all the competition around at the moment hands down in my opinion.

Yea lol, the women in WOT have to be the most annoying women ever.

Err btw i accidentally deleted my book list web page. I migt put it back up agian this weekend if i get aroudn to it.

Must admit, that WoT is seriously starting to cunt me off.

I've read them in sequence over the past 4 months and am now up to Book 9. At first I liked them and I was reading them in a few days, then they stretched out to a week each. I think Book 9 is going to take me a fucking month.

More like Waste of Time, seriously, hes dragging things on too much, and things that should be big events do not get the mention they deserve. The story is far too complex and it seems just about every character apart from a select few are the bad guys.

I must agree with you all that the latest WoT books has been bad.
When I read the first chapters of book 10 I knew what would happen inn the last chapter and thats real anoying when you got ~500 pages to go thru to get there. :-/
The "interlude" book New Spring I enjoyed thou.
I hope its true WoT is going to be no more then a 12 book series. Means Jordan have to make book 11 good and that there's light inn the end of the tunnel ;-)

If I were to recomend some books it would be:
-Glen Cook's Black Company series.
Its 10 books which got an ending (So you dont have to wory about the author dying on you without finnishing the plot :)
-Robyn Hoob's 9 books also are good althou I only read book 1-3 and 7-9.
Book 4-6 afterall is another story even thou related.
-Goerge R.R. Martins tale ofcourse must be included and thats suposed to be a 6 books series so hopefully inn the not so distant future we will see the end
And the greatest of them all atm:
-Steven Erikson's A tale of the Malazan Book of the fallen series.
Its not finnished yet but the 5 books written so far are great, and book 3 Memories of Ice is the best Fantasy book I ever read!!

I also got a soft spot for the Dragon Lance series by Weis and Hickman and the books written by Raymond E. Feist
Both the series are about ~10 books loong and got an end ;-)

ps. if any of you out there havent read The Hobbit and LOTR yet youre not ready to enter the world of fantasy so go and read those first ;-)

They're finally releasing the Erikson books in the US, so I started reading them. They're only to book 2 here though with 3 set for release in november, so I think they're carrying the others on Amazon now. Annoying as hell as the reason for delay is that they're americanizing the language. "Oh noes! They have extra U's in the originals!!!!" 8-O

Anyway, Robin Hobb, Steven Erikson, and George RR Martin are must reads. Jordan and Goodkind can be safely given a miss as they are both having a hard time keeping their storylines remotely interesting (or believable, for that matter). Anything Dragonlance or D&D are great...if you're 12. (Sorry, fans! Weiss/Hickman and even Salvatore are pretty shallow and unimpressive authors.)

Others that I like are Gene Wolfe, though he has a very literary style of writing that doesn't sit well with many fantasy readers, and a guy by the name of Matthew Woodring Stover. "Heroes Die" and "Blade of Tyshall" were wonderfully dark and extremely violent stories where the main character is more bad guy than good guy.