To WoT or not to WoT?

I haven't talked much about books I've read recently here.  This is significantly because I've been reading the Wheel of Time.  The Wheel of Time is a fantasy series by Robert Jordan wherein the individual books all have ridiculously terrible names like "Path of Daggers" or "Lord of Chaos" or "Spirits of Darkness" or "Crown of Swords".  (3 of those are real, one is made of up.)  So, we just call them WoT1, WoT2, etc.

The Wheel of Time isn't so much a book series, as it is a way of life.  You don't casually read these books.  You can't even causally lift these books.  To put this in context for you, with some books you're probably familiar with, let's say one day you decided to read the entire Harry Potter series.  Then you followed it up with the Bible.  Then you decided that a good compare and contrast of those two works would make for an excellent dissertation, so you went back and read them both a second time.  *Yawn*  I'm not impressed, because you're still half a million words short of having read the Wheel of Time.  And that doesn't even include the prequel!  (You can read the OT one more time to make up that gap, and I'll even let you skip the Songs of Solomon.)  If a picture is worth a thousand words, it should take me 4194 pictures to express the length of the WoT.  But I'm only going to use 2.  (Made in google docs, so excuse the sloppiness.)

The labels don't all work out like I'd like, but you should get the idea.  In the top chart, the orange are scriptural books (Pearl of Great Price, Doctrine and Covenants, Book of Mormon and Bible, in that order), the red ones are the 7 Harry Potter novels, and the blue are the Wheel of Time.  Note how only one HP book (#5) manages to match even the shortest book from the Wheel of Time.  The chart below adds up the series.

I'm sure it seems like overkill (and irony) to spend a zillion words describing how long the books are, it has to be done, because the books are a serious commitment to make.  I've had pets that didn't last as long.

Essentially, this is your classic story of a young farmer boy who discovers that he is vitally important in order to battle evil and save the world.  Of course he'll discover he has some superpowers along the way, that maybe his parents didn't tell him the whole truth about their past and where he comes from.  Along the way he'll make friends (who turn out to have some pretty awesome super powers themselves), quite a few enemies, and will destroy about a million orcs/gobblins/stormtroopers/trollocks/monsters.

The first 4 or 5 books in the series are great.  Around book 6, it starts to drag.  Around book 8 you will wonder if anything interesting will ever happen again.  Somewhere in book 9, where the author introduces his 7th character that is named Sheriam/Sheram/Shimra/Semera/Seremia and then spends a full paragraph telling you what she is wearing* you will want to throw the books across the room.  Don't.  Because magically, starting in book 10, and certainly in book 11, the series gets a second wind, and is once again fabulous.  I went through books 11, 12 and 13 in about 6 weeks.  Book 14 (the last one!) is due out in January.

Perhaps part of the sudden pickup in the story is that the author was diagnosed with a fatal blood disease.  He died after the 11th book was published, and eventually, Brandon Sanderson was selected to finish the series.  I haven't read anything else by Sanderson (but I've heard many good things), but he's done a very good job in the two books he's published thus far.  I'm sure Jordan left many notes, and partially written chapters and stuff like that for him to work with.  Plus, Jordan's editor was his wife, so I'm sure she's a good resource too.

As I've contemplated writing this up, one interesting question I've had is "would I recommend these books to others"?  Honestly, I've struggled with the answer.  For about a year, I put all other recreational reading on hold, which is a big commitment.  You can only read so many books in your life, and I've devoted 1% of my lifetime recreational reading to this series.  Will I ever read the series again? Probably not. (I know multiple people who have.)  But am I glad I've read it? Absolutely.  For someone thinking about reading it, go ahead and start.  Read the first book, or two or three.  If you're not absolutely convinced, stop immediately!  But if you can't wait for more, read book 4, but know that after that you will be waiting for a few thousand pages!

In the end, reading the Wheel of Time is a lot like running a marathon.  It's really long.  It's exhilarating at times, but there are also times when you want to just give up.  When you get to the end, you're glad you've done it, but also, in the back of your mind, you can't help but think about how the first guy who ever tried to finish it died in the process.


*Despite what you might think, or what you have heard, Jordan doesn't spend paragraphs describing what everyone is wearing.  He describes only 2 things about each woman's dress: the material and the neckline.  (Everyone who has read this is nodding their heads knowingly.)