Turning the Wheel of Time

The movie section of “Morgan on Media” dominates the other sections, and that doesn’t bother me one iota. I spend more time being entertained by movies than by other media nowadays anyway. Well, with the exception of music; I almost always have music playing, but obtaining new albums to review is something of a rarity (I suppose I could review old albums that are new to me, just as I do with old movies, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite as appealing.) Still, I do want the other sections to be represented, if not regularly, at least occasionally.

Robert Jordan’s fantasy series The Wheel of Time was one of the earliest fantasy series I started reading, back in middle school. It’s still going. Robert Jordan himself is not, having passed away in 2007 from a rare blood disease. He had stated a year earlier that he had every intention of completing the series before his death, but as he was quite a ways from wrapping it up at the time and wasn’t exactly young as it was, that would have been just a bit questionable even without the illness. (George R.R. Martin fans, take note, and prepare for the possibility. Just saying.) Fortunately, he did complete the outline of the end of his story, and hand-picked a successor, Brandon Sanderson to take up where he left off.

I have never read the last few novels. My reading ended somewhere around book 10, before Jordan’s passing, simply because I was getting a little tired of the series being repeatedly extended instead of coming to a conclusion. But the final novel has finally been given a semi-firm release date of January 8, 2013. I’ve sometimes been asked by people who haven’t read it if they should give the series a try; my response has always been that it depends on how much time they have, as these are large books — about 800-900 pages per novel — and, at the time, I was a bit soured on them and wasn’t feeling they were high quality so much as just heavy. But this may be unfair to them. If nothing else, my impatience may have been coloring my judgment, and there’s also the fact that I’m trying to evaluate something I started reading twenty years ago.

In order to be fair, and in order to give myself the complete experience — for I have too much time invested in the series not to finish it once the opportunity is available — I will be re-reading the entire series, in chronological order, starting with the prequel novel, New Spring. (The actual first book is The Eye of the World, but around book 8 or 9, Jordan wrote a novella prequel which he then expanded into a full novel.) I’ve already finished New Spring, so this leaves me with 13 door-stoppers to finish in about 10 months in order to be ready at the release of A Memory of Light. I had considered posting an individual review of each novel, but while I want the Book Reviews section of the blog to be beefed up some, I don’t really want over a dozen blog entries all about the same book series. So what I will be doing is taking notes as I read the novels, and writing a single post at the end, reviewing the entire series, with notes about each volume and the series as a whole. I will likely try to read other books in between, but with somewhere over 10,000 pages to read in this series, I’m not sure how that will go.

If nothing else, I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say at the end of it all.