The wheel of time, a series of fantasy books by Robert Jordan,

I’m amazed writers haven’t complained about this guy and his books yet… If you’ve read, either Terry Goodkind’s books (The sword of truth series) or "The Lord Of The Rings," you will know what I’m talking about.
I read on the internet about someone who thought Terry Goodkind should be beaten with a bag of doorknobs (That in itself I find pretty weird…), when obviously it should be Jordan who should get a good beating.

To show some of the similarities on which I base all of this.
Robert obviously copied these from Tolkien, even Jordan fans can’t deny that:

http://www.members.tripod.com/~wotiscrap/comp.html

The one big difference between Tolkien and Robert Jordan is that Tolkien knew how to tell a story. Tolkien told his story in 4 books (including the hobbit. Not counting the Silmarillion). Jordan has now written, how many books? About 12… Tolkien could have done so too, he had more than enough material for that. Sadly, Robert Jordan made one more mistake (sigh...). After seeing the success of his first books, he saw that money could be made by just continuing to write sequels.
Result: Commercial shit.

Now what makes these books so popular?

Well, he has created a good fantasy world. And it also has an epic quality when you read it. It's a bit cliché, which I consider a good thing.
If you have not read Tolkien or Terry Goodkind, these books will be pretty good. If you have read Tolkien and Goodkind though, Jordan’s mistakes will not go unnoticed.


Frustrating parts

The following is my personal opinion (though I suppose the previous was my personal opinion too...):
He made his main character (Rand) much too strong and powerful. Rand is the dragon reborn, the most powerful person in the world. Yet he wrote a lot about the other characters adventures. When I stopped to think about it, I realized those adventures were pretty stupid and unnecessary (and very boring).
For example: Matt and Perrin went on their own adventures, struggling to destroy “the forces of darkness”. This was confusing, why would Rand send his “non-magical friends” on a mission to destroy an army? When he, the most powerful person on earth, could easily teleport himself (and a few of his apprentices), to that location, then blast the enemy to pieces, and teleport back home (and it would only take him several minutes to do all that).
So I came to the conclusion that, either Rand is a very lazy guy, or Robert Jordan just wanted to add a few hundred extra pages to his books…
Yet I can see that he had no choice. There would be no story if Rand just went around, solving everyone's problems. And that is just the complication, Rand is too strong (which, as I have said, has a big effect on the whole story, as it results in several long boring books).

I can understand why a person would like these books (or at least the first books). I thought them great too, at first. But if you have read Tolkien and Terry Goodkind, and have then read Jordan’s books critically, you just have to admit that it cannot be compared to the great fantasy authors of our time. It’s basically just copy and paste work. And the small parts that were his own contributions (like the dialogues) are mostly very superficial.