My reading life this year has mostly been dominated by the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson. Honestly, I should have finished this series by now. I blame Netflix. Anyway, 14 books with around 700+ pages in each, it’s a long haul. I considered reviewing each book individually but there so much that happens in each book that I just couldn’t. My brain couldn’t handle it.

I first started reading this series about 10 or so years ago. I finished book ten long long before book eleven (Knife of Dreams) was published. As many of you may or may not know, not long after Knife of Dreams was published, Robert Jordan became very ill. Sadly, he passed away without finishing the series. However, Brandon Sanderson stepped in and, using the notes Jordan had left behind, wrote the last 4 books in the series. When I discovered all this and what it would mean for publishing time, I set the series aside and moved on to other books. I certainly didn’t lack for anything to read.

At the beginning of this year, I decided that I would finally go back to the Wheel of Time and finish it off. All of the books had been published and were sitting on my shelf gathering dust, waiting for me to read them.  Since it had been so long since I first read the books, and the series is so detailed, I went right back to the beginning and started again with the Eye of the World. It was almost like reading it all for the very first time all over again. There were only a few little things that I could remember, and those things were spread out across 10 books.

I was interested to see how my opinion of the books might have changed from the first reading. As has happened before, when I’ve reread a series years after initially reading it, I find my opinion and enjoyment have it has usually changed. (This was certainly the case with the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind). I remember thinking the Eye of the World was slowed paced, but not much else about the other books. As I’ve matured as a reader and a person, I see things I’m sure I didn’t notice before. For one, the female characters are nearly all the same. They’re haughty, snobbish, arrogant and usually have bad tempers. At one point, the female characters were getting very irritating, which may be a factor in why it has taken me so long to get through the series.

Today, I will be starting on book 10, Crossroads of Twilight, which was the last book I read before the earlier publishing hiatus.  I hope to finish the entire series by the end of this year, but with the way things are going, that my not happen.

Have you read the Wheel of Time? Please post any comments on the series you may have, but please keep in mind that as of the time of this writing, I have only read to the end of book 9, Winter’s Heart, so I would appreciate if there were no spoilers about the last five books posted. Thanks!