It’s always hard talking to someone about something you *love* when they don’t love it. It’s harder when they really don’t like it. As a general rule, I avoid really getting negative on things I don’t like to people I know like it. It’s why, despite my borderline psychotic hatred of Twilight, I generally don’t rant about it at work (we have at least 2 Twilight fans, so I rein it in).

Any time I get to talking about books, it always come up that I read Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. A great deal of the time the person’s face squishes up and they frown. Before they can even say anything else, I laugh and say, “That’s fair.” I love Wheel of Time, but that doesn’t make me blind to it’s faults. (I swear *every* *single* *woman* in that world “sniffs” when annoyed.) Anyone who read the series and made it past book 5 has shown they are incredibly patient and has perseverance. The man wrote tomes worth of description and got far too interested in minor characters. I understand why people wouldn’t like it.

The thing that always trips me up is when I get to talking about a book I like and the other person likes and we like it for two different, and occasionally conflicting, reasons. It always happens in such a fashion that I almost stop and ask, What book were you reading?!?

I always want to talk about certain books, but invariably no one has read them. I long to find someone who has read Dennis L. McKiernan as much as I have. Or Brandon Sanderson (though I am getting pretty close on my mom for him). The irony being, when I finally *found* someone who liked Dennis McKiernan the first words out of their mouth was “Well, I liked his early work. His later stuff is just terrible and cliche.” I caught myself right before very rudely saying “What the —- is wrong with you? It’s totally the other way around!” McKiernan’s first book was originally written as a sequel to Lord of the Rings. And when the publisher couldn’t get the rights they had him re-write it *just* enough to not be Lord of the Rings. It was terrible. Entire sections were inconsistent. Not to mention that as a whole it felt very derivative of LotR without anything good to differentiate it. The later Mithgar books, after he had a few years to really feel the world and branch out… they are exceptional. He shakes loose his Tolkien roots and sprouts wings of appealing and engaging fantasy tales.

The best thing, in my opinion, is that in every book he generally interweaves some philosophical idea that ties into the main story. The ever shifting nature of good and evil. The positives and negatives of organized religion. The protection and destruction of nature. Predestination versus free will. Kings and the balance of power. Immortality, mortality, and future generations. War, peace, and the necessity of battle. Generally these are scattered throughout the book and one doesn’t think about them until later, after they have put the book down. I love it, but apparently some people hate it. He tends to do this much more in his later works, with little or none in his early works.

Add to this his truly villainous villains, stalwart heroes, range of environments, detail in the world and cultures, and non conventional plots and you have a truly wonderful series. Best of all, each book stands alone, despite having an overarching chronology and overlapping characters. (Non conventional plots – Have you ever read a story all about chasing down a specific bad guy to keep him from doing some horrible thing, only to have the heroes *fail*? It’s great! And sets the stage for the rest of the series!)

Most of the Mithgar series is currently out of print. To me, this means a decrease in the already rare number of people I meet who have read his work.  Maybe this is a good thing, considering how attached I am to the series. It also makes me wonder, what books do I rave about that other people have the same reaction to?