The 2013 January publication comes as a little bit of surprise to many of the fans waiting for the book cause most of us expected it to be released this year’s fall. But as Brandon explains the stuff here this was a necessary prolongation considering the 360,000-word book which’s first draft was submitted to the publisher for review in the end of December 2011. Also the 360,000-words are 20% more than Harriet, late Robert Jordan’s wife, and the publisher expected the book to be so the publication date needs to be adjusted for them to be able to review/edit the book. According to Brandon January 8th is actually the latest possible publication date of the book – it’s the last month of the year of the Dragon.

Also another thing of note is that Brandon’s sounds a little bit pessimistic about the date. I won’t be surprised if the release is delayed by a small amount of time.

The release of the book on January 8, 2013 will mean that there are 23 years from the publication of the first book to the publication of the final 14th volume.

The book is not yet available for preorder on Amazon but I expect it to appear there shortly. Also for the readers living outside of US – I’m sure Brandon Sanderson will organize selling through Sam Weller’s bookstore  of a small number of signed and numbered books form the first edition. So subscribe to his official blog here and wait for news.

Meanwhile if you haven’t read Mistborn or The Way of Kings by Brandon I strongly recommend them to ease the wait till aMoL’s publishication date.

This is sort of unbelievable but it really did happen. On 3rd of March George R.R. Martin posted in his blog that the fifth book of Song of Ice and Fire series named “A Dance with Dragons” is going to be in the bookstores on 12th of July 2011. You can preorder the book on amazon by clicking the button on the left.

Mr. Martin is still in the process of finalizing the book but promises that this date is not a release date like most of the previous given dates were ( he missed them by several years ) but it’s a rather real and final date. Completing this book took 6 years and it’s going to be the longest of the series’s. Its manuscript is 30 pages longer than Storm of Sword’s one.

Also let me remind you that the first book of the cycle was published in 1996 and knowing that the 4th and 5th books have taken accordingly five and six years to finish we can assume that we’ll see the final 7th book in 10 years. And that’s pretty optimistic cause there’s a chance that we’ll get an 8th book cause the plot won’t fit in 7. I know that Song of Ice and Fire is one of the best or even the single best book of the gender and that writing it the way it is requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. So I understand why we, readers, can’t be having a book a year in this case. But still I hope we’ll see the end sooner than 10 years cause I’m sure many of the fans and most importantly the author himself may not live that long.

P.S.

I’m burning to read some more of my favorite Jon Snow and Arya Stark chapters!

The general storyline of a book from Sword of Truth series is like this:

1. something bad happens, the world is in danger
2. Turns out Richard is the only one able to fix it
3. the evil guy behind the happened bad thing tries to kill Richard and Kahlan
4. somewhere in the book a new wizard rule is introduced (i’ll write about this later in this post)
5. Richard kills the evil guy
6. everyone is happy. end of book.
7. start of next book. turns out that during fixing the world in the previous book Richard or Kahlan unknowingly fucked up something and now the world is in danger.
8. repeat everything from point 2

Goodkind tends to philosophize a lot on in his books. One of his favorite topics is communism vs democracy & freedom wrapped in a fantasy cover. Sometimes commonplace dialogs between characters seem to be prepared speeches of some kind of world leaders preaching their philosophy. The worst thing is though that Mr. Goodkind sucks at philosophy. Sometimes he presents something as an obvious truth yet the topic is debatable or he is even obviously wrong (at least from my point of view).

Most of the characters are idiots. There are a couple who are fun to read about and are not that dumb but most are. Characters are plain and it’s always obvious what will happen next. Each book is ending with a happy end but the next book reveals that the end of the previous one wasn’t really that happy and the heroes did something wrong and it caused something terrible. I wouldn’t be complaining about this simplistic feel if the book was targeted towards a younger audience but there’s a lot of sex in it and it’s obviously not for children.

All the books feel the same. In nearly each book Richard or Kahlan get captured. If the captured one is Richard he ends up rescuing himself, if it’s Kahlan then Richard comes and saves her. All the other characters of the book are terribly dumber than Mr. Superman and his woman. Each time something is wrong no one is able to fix it but Richard. He comes, does some preaching and killing, fixes everything and goes away in a hurry. Also there’s usually some great problem in the book and Richard finds a great solution to it in the end. Most of the solutions are very simple and plain but that would have been okay if they weren’t so artificial or most of the time stupid as well.

In each book for some reason Mr. Goodkind feels himself obligated to present the reader with a new wizard rule and write a lot of philosophy based on it . The rules and their philosophy tend to become dumber with each book. Here are the rules as of the 8th book:

1. People are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want it to be true; or they’re afraid it’s true.
2. The greatest harm can result from the best intentions.
3. Passion rules reason, For better or for worse.
4. There is magic in sincere forgiveness; in the forgiveness you give, but more so in the forgiveness you receive.
5. Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie.
6. The only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason.
7. Life is the future, not the past.
8. Deserve Victory.
   

I’d say that all this writing of Terry Goodkind seems to me very forced out. Like the guy is doing his best to write a new book each year to earn himself some money.

Overall reading Sword of Truth is like reading episodes of a terribly dumber and without any humor version of House M.D. each spanning  about 600 pages.

Summary: don’t read this series, it’s not worth the time spent.

And regarding the piracy issues. Surely delaying the eBook publication date will delay the day the book will appear on pirate torrent sites. But someone will eventually scan it and upload somewhere. My guess is it’ll take them a week or two at most. However the audio-book version is already available on some pirate sites and reading the comments there made me laugh aloud. One would expect those “pirates” to be some outlaw  people who’re just looking for free book version. Well it turned out that most of them are hardcore fans who have already ordered/preordered the book and just can’t wait till it reaches them

My status at the moment: Waiting for my version of WoT 13 and the Way of Kings to arrive.  BTW the Way of Kings is the fist volume of a must read epic fantasy series started by Brandon Sanderson just this year. Here’s an amazon link.

You can preorder the book on amazon but there’s also a way to get the book numbered and signed by Brandon Sanderson even if you’re living not in US. See my post here for more details.

I believe that Tor.com will also be releasing chapter two, possibly this week.

Chapter 1, 8 and prologue of the book are released for more than 15 days already.

Wheel of Time book #13 Towers of Midnight will be released on November 2. For preordering options see my previous post here or go ahead and buy it from amazon.

UPDATE: Chapter 2 has been released and is available on Tor website. See here for more details.

Now for the really hardcore fans there’s a way to get Towers of Midnight signed and numbered ( the number of the sold book ) without waiting in a line for hours or buying a ticket to fly to USA! Brandon & Sam Weller’s Bookstore have given us the opportunity to pre-order the book online (they did this last year as well, my signed and number copy of tGS is on the shelf beside me). The sad thing is that the price of international shipping has gone up to $45 (more details on shipping prices bellow) but you can actually fit 2 books in the package. I’m going to order a copy of “The Way of Kings” which will cost me additional $27.99 (see my note at the bottom) and in total that would be $96.98 (the Way of kings + the Towers of Midnight + international shipping).

Sam Weller’s Bookstore’s shipping rates:

UTAH:
In-store pick up, $25.63 per book
with shipping & handling, $37.63 per book. Shipping estimate, 2 – 4 business days

DOMESTIC, INCLUDING ALL 50 STATES AND ANY U.S. TERRITORIES
Shipping & handling will be $12.00 for a grand total of $35.99 per book
Shipping estimate, 2 – 5 business days.

CANADA & MEXICO
Shipping & handling will be $28.00 for a total of $51.99 per book.
Shipping estimate, 3 – 6 business days.

ALL OTHER INTERNATIONAL
Shipping & handling will cost $45.00 for a total of $68.99 per book.

So if you’re interested you need to read Brandon’s a lot more in depth description on what you have to do to get the book here.

A side note:

Looks like the prices on amazon are significantly cheaper so if absence of Brandon’s signature isn’t a deal breaker for you go ahead and  buy “Towers of Midnight” on amazon for $16.19. Also the Way of Kings (which is a MUST READ!) is just $18.47 on amazon. This is significantly cheaper than Sam Weller’s $25.63 ( tToM ) and $27.99 ( tWoK ).

UPDATE: Chapter 2 has been released and is available on Tor website. See here for more details.

You can also read the topic on Dragonmount for more details.

UPDATE: The book has been already released. You can by it on Amazon by clicking the following link.

I’ve personally have read both the prologue and the first chapter. There is certainly a difference between Robert Jordan’s voice & that of Brandon Sanderson. But the characters have the same feeling about them and the overall atmosphere of the book remains the same. So I’m looking forward to October 27th and don’t fear being disappointed in any way

BTW It’s been decided that the next(13th book) which will come out next year will be named “Towers of Midnight” and the last one will be “A Memory of Light” as RJ originally planned it.

UPDATE: The 12th book “the Gathering Storm” has been already released. You can by it on Amazon by clicking the following link.

One of the first things that attracted me in the book was the world itself, the way it has become and the way people live there. Everything there seems kind of apocalyptic, as if the world has already ended and what we see are only small remnants of it.

The story itself tells us about a small but very famous thieving crew which has really great goals to achieve. The main character is a girl from another thieving crew where she’s been thought all her life not to trust anyone. Somehow she ends up in an environment where everyone depends on trust. The reader will overcome all those new sensations and grow new affections to people with her. We will see many fierce battles and see some of our favorite characters die. Don’t read this to your kids Also the trilogy is not like usual fantasy. Most of the book is explained and has strong supporting logic behind it. Even the magic system stands out because of the limited set of rules it has to obey.

The magic here is called allomancy. One does allomancy by swallowing shavings of different metals. There’s a limited number of allomantic metals and each one of those does something specific. Also each metal has it’s pair which does the opposite of what the original one was doing. For example there’s a metal which allows to pull a metallic object towards you and also there’s another one which pushes metals from you. It’s surprising how many things you can do by just having these 2 metals.

Also I’d like to note that probably the thing that most impressed me about the book is the ending of the third part. It’s really mind blowing and very unexpected but it fits and feels very natural. It’s something i don’t even know how to describe you just have to read it Though i guess it may annoy some of the readers. (Honestly it annoys me as well but i still like it. It’s somehow beautiful)

One more thing that may interest you is that it’s possible that there will be more books after the trilogy. Brandon wrote on his website that he has some ideas but before writing those (if he decides to write a sequel) he has other projects to complete first. Those other projects include “The Wheel of Time” which will keep hism busy at least till 2011-2012 and some other projects of his own. So we have nothing to wait for in the nearest future.

In the end I’d like to say that i enjoyed reading “Mistborn” and am looking forward to reading the next book of the “Wheel of Time” series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. The book is titled “The Gathering Storm” and will come out  November 3, 2009.

For more information visit Brandon’s website & blog which he updates quite frequently (big thanks to him for this as well) here: http://www.brandonsanderson.com/

UPDATE:

Brandon is selling out signed copies:

Mistborn – The Well of Ascension – here

Mistborn – The Final Empire -  here