Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

An amazing transformation came over me while reading this book. No, I did not turn into a lizard or a bird. Never before have I experienced such an enormous swing in my state of mind while reading a book. No classic has moved me so much. No works of Hume, nor Kant, nor even Harry Potter's chambermaid have driven in me such a force of wild-eyed realization as compared with this amazing collection of words. I will do my best to describe the story, without boxing your ears or tugging my braid. The story starts like all of Jordan's stories do, which is to say that an avalanche of words were used to describe such mundane things as grass and horse eye lashes. Nevertheless, Jordan's indispensable and uncanny knack for stringing words together kept me in the game. I had read the first seven books in the series and knew what I was up against. This was nothing. A hundred, two hundred, or even fifty thousand words to describe yet another immature dialog between a pair of immature people wedged in an altogether immature scenario would never get me down. But as time wore on, it started to wear on me. Like water over a rock, my meddle started to wan, slowly washing away with the sands of the wheel of time. I began zoning out, unable to focus on the words on the page before me, finding myself having read an entire paragraph with no recollection of having done so. I wondered, am I really taking an SAT test? All my previous training seemed to have left me. My eyes were failing me, my brain quitting. I was aghast. This series of books that had heretofore been as straight in it's narrative as a pentangle was bogging down more than I thought even possible. I was losing interest. The flame was going out. But I dug deep. I concentrated on the void, the endless void, the taint of Boredom making the void sickly sweet and palpable in my veins. I could taste it, it's sickening blackened bleary broken bleakness trying to take over my mind, my body, my soul. I controlled it. And with that control, Jordan's world of Boredom coursed through my veins like a pat of hot butter on a toasted English muffin on a hot summer day in Florida when the air conditioner is broken. Shortly I had discovered the long lost Talent of Skimming. What had previously taken hours to read now took minutes! Pages down in seconds, chapters in no time at all. Boredom? Shredded to bits. Single words picked here and there, dialog grasped in an instant when the words "boxed" or "grasped" sprung from the page. I was alive, I was being tainted by Boredom! The lost Talent of Skimming, an astoundingly rare yet miraculously rediscovered Talent much like others I came across while reading this book, made me feel more alive than ever. Not to be outdone, Skimming was joined by Sleeping, Ignoring, Laughing, Putting Down, and Reading Something Else. All amazing powers in their own right, but nothing to hold a candle to Skimming. In no time, Jordan's 8th book came to a close, and the narrative was no closer to being resolved than if all the characters had jumped into a blender and pressed the puree button, using the One Power of course. I mean, how else would they press the puree button if they were *in* the blender? I dare say that it would be improbable. In any event, this book was so bad that the time invested in all 8 can't keep me coming back for a 9th. Fool me 8 times, shame on you. Fool me 9, shame on me.