For Christmas Cath got me a gift voucher for bookdepository.co.uk, going through my list of what I wanted to purchase they were all books in trilogies or series’. So I grabbed 10 books, mostly the start in a series and would grab the rest of the series if they were worth it.

I had not read a book in a while so when I picked up my first one to start reading I was like a sponge, I just seemed to absorb the book, pages at a time.

Keeping It Real by Justina Robson. I read the whole book in a sitting and when I put it down I reflected on it. I liked it, it was not a bad book but something was off, something was out of place or off kilter and it was starting to get to me.

The story is about a female operative in Earth Security force. Years ago there was a massive disturbance that ripped open holes to connecting realities. Our main character, Lila Black, has become a cyborg of outstanding capabilities. She is strong, tough, sexy and has this amazing cyborg body to enable her to be an unstoppable force of nature.

Then it hit me. She wasn’t. Female author writing a novel where the main character is this incredibly strong female lead, who isn’t strong at all. Every interaction with new people she cannot control her emotions, she has trouble thinking her way around things. That’s fine, because the author has given her a powerful black motorbike! That’s tough right? Whenever our heroine gets into a fight one of three things happen. She loses, she wins because of someone else or her inbuilt AI in the cyborg body takes over and wins for her.

Throughout the book the author builds up how powerful our heroine is in her Cyborg body, Stronger, faster, equipped with more weapons than you can count all controlled either by her or assisted by an incredibly advanced AI system. So I spent the whole book waiting, waiting for the watershed moment where she is forced into a situation where she goes completely off the wall. No restrictions, no holding back just all out assualt.

Of course this never happens, she either runs away or someone else saves her. Everything about it seems like the character herself is fighting against the author.

That’s what got me. This well built, amazingly setup and fleshed out character, stupidly strong and self reliant and this author turned her into a weak-willed emotional female who is useless unless the strong manly, men come to save her.

Here’s hoping the rest of the books are better.

The 12^th book of the Wheel of Time (WoT) series. It came out on the 27^th of October, over a month ago. I finally bought it and I still have not read it. Why is this weird? I buy many books and sometimes it takes me years to get around to reading them. Well a bit of back story.

I have been following the Wheel of Time since 1994 when I got the first three books. As a ten year old these were astounding, the characters, the places were like nothing I had ever encountered. I was staggered by how these books made me feel. Also when the combined total was over 825,000 words, this was the most in depth story I had ever read.

So following this story for the next ten years, reading and re-reading this series I had grown to know the characters as much as I knew my family. So was this behind my trepidation of reading the 12^th book? Not wanting the story to end or because I had been following it for so long I did not want to be let down by it? I don’t think it is that.

To complicate matters, the author of the WoT series, Robert Jordan had passed away before writing this book. He was diagnosed with a rare form of heart disease and he informed his fans in 2006. Robert Jordan then started to get his notes down, to write out the major plot points and to write the ending. He ensured that when he passed away that the series would be finished and it would be finished according to his vision. When he did pass away in 2007 Robert Sanderson was chosen to take over and finish writing the series.

Again a strange author writing the book? Was this why I was avoiding it? No, when I found out it was Robert Sanderson I went and purchased his Mistborn trilogy (after some prodding from a friend, thanks Eamon). I enjoyed his writing and his characters so I have no reason to doubt that he can step up to the task.

I could go on about this series. I could show that through his world building I know the people of Illian as well as I know American’s, how the sentence of a character seeing a hawk hunting birds was actually foreshadowing of one of the characters and his wife, of how the revelation of the main characters transformation was so subtle I did not notice it until the second time I read the book. A lot of people complain about the series saying it is too long or too convoluted, his writing is too pompous or his characters unbelievable. I can understand these however it keeps coming back to this being so totally unique in the world, so utterly without apology for what it is and what it has achieved that even if you hate it you should at least respect it.

I think me avoiding it comes down to experiences. The first time I read The Dragon Reborn (the 3^rd book in the series) and the main character finally comes to grips of what he has become. It is a moving scene, filled with brutality and power and ultimately sacrifice. The emotional response from this was intense. I will not have the same response the next time I read it.

So after following the story for ten years, after reading at conservative estimate over 24 million words in this series, I don’t have unreasonable hopes for this book I just want to experience it. However the crux of the matter and what I am afraid of can be explained in the (paraphrased) words of A.A.Milne:

“The anticipation of future pleasure is better than the actual experience”