Re: The wheel of time and other fantasy books
@khomus, as regards WoT, I'd suggest starting with eye of the world and only reading new spring around book 5 or so. It's well worth reading, indeed it was reading new spring in the legends collection that first got my lady into the series, but it isn't the easiest place to start, plus Jordan was fairly good at introducing the world slowly.
As I said in This article, the problem I find in formulaeic writing is predictability killing story tension. If you know that a certain character is always safe because they are a main character, or that the good guys are going to get out of a situation because they're the good guys, then tension has gone out of the window.
Eddings, even though he was writing very much in the standard good guys heroes journey mold, did have a very nice habit of having character who did not necessarily know they were going to get out of a given situation, so you could empathise with what they were feeling, while even though conan basically is a massive succeedinator who wins at everything, Robert E Howard had a gift for language and poetry that shines through (Indeed I love several of his poems), though in Conan particularly, the rants about women needing to be submissive and obedient (along with the amount of slave girls), and about how great white people are do make me wince a lot since the books are unquestionably preachy, and what they are preaching in places is a pretty nasty mindset, albeit one with a historical context.
Eddings tended to avoid as much preaching in his main series even if he did have certain assumptions about men and women that grate on occasion, though in certain of his prequal novels (especially Polgara the sorceress), the times when we're openly told about the big dumb brutish men being overseen by the strident cunning little women, it did get a bit urcsome.
Then again with any author, modern ones included, I'd much rather read a good story than just get an opinion preached to me, and much rather have complex 3 dimensional characters than cardboard props for the author's opinions.
As to Pern, well McCaffery is very hit and miss, when she's on she's on, when she's off she isn't. I'm doing a slow reread of her dragon riders series putting the reviews on fantasybookreview.co.uk. I tend to find ironically that those books which are character focused, like the harper hall trilogy, tend to be much more fun than those which try to be political stories, like the main series.
McCaffery also suffer rather badly from a kind of idealism found to a lesser extent in authors like Mercedes lackey, where you hear about someone doing something bad, the good guys get together, and the person doing the bad thing is just politically talked out of it before you actually see the bad thing happen, or likewise, on the rare occasions you see something bad happen to someone, well usually they go and tell the authorities who are unquestionably good, and someone puts a stop to it.
it's actually sort of refreshing, MCCaffery has problems like mismanagement, abuse of power and bullying dealt with in the way that we would hope they could be dealt with in reality, rather than what actually happens .
This unfortunately makes a lot of her books less than tense to read, and means she's generally better when dealing with individual character experiences, hence why the harper hall trilogy, which are basically just the story of one girl's attempts to be accepted as a musician in the heavily sexist hidebound medieval culture of pern, actually work far better than when she's trying to show political plots or power plays.
As to the immortality question, mostly I've seen that occur in science fiction or urban fantasy rather than in epic WoT style fantasy myself, although it's a question even Tolkien deals with with the elves.
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