The Wheel of Time stops turning

Recently I've been engaged in a Wheel of Time re-read group on reddit (here's a link) that will read all 13 of the WOT books over the next few months, culminating in finishing about the time that the final Wheel of Time book comes out. It's a pretty illuminating experience. I've had mixed feelings about the sprawling, unwieldy series for a long time and it's kind of nice to look at some of these works over 20 years later.

For those not in the know, Robert Jordan started this series in 1990. I was fourteen then, and this series really captured my young imagination. The wiki page says it was planned to be a six novel series, though I'm skeptical of this. It was put out during a time when trilogies were the standard and I suspect it might have been a two trilogy situation.

Anyhow, what matters is that somewhere along the line, Jordan got lost in his world. Six books turned into eight, then ten, then twelve. This would be forgivable, but then Jordan got caught up in the minutia. He would spend pages describing a scene, down to the clothing and styles and history of styles and how each character interpreted the styles and how their style of clothing was meant to disrespect this style and so on, and then each character would leave the scene immediately after he finished describing it.

Also, there were NO throw away characters. In the Knife of Dreams, the last Jordan book, there are 685 characters! Jordan is constantly making random characters integral to the plot so you have to remember them all. Here's a short list of  some of the characters with a name that begins with "E" that are mind numbingly similar that Jordan will simply throw out as if he expects you to know them like you had coffee the other day:

Edin, Eben, Edessina, Elfraim, Ehvin, Elayne, Eldrin, Eldrith, Elenna, Elaida, Elienda, Ella, Elvaine, Elza, Enaila, Ethin, Eyndel.

Honestly, I'm not even doing the meandering nature of it justice. Here's a link to the Amazon page of one of the books. Scroll down to the reviews and bask in the sarcastic brilliance.

For me, I think it was after reading book six or seven where after about 900 pages the main plot has not advanced AT ALL that I gave up. It was hard. It had been a part of my life for 12 years by that point but the series was a dysfunctional relationship; leading me on but always letting me down. I was convinced it would never end and in 2007 I believed I was proved right. Robert Jordan had died and, at the time, the hope of closure on this series died with him.

Note how there are absolutely no similarities
between Robert Jordan and George RR Martin.

Thankfully this series would get a second life. Brandon Sanderson, a new favorite author of mine (if you haven't read Mistborn, you need to!) was commissioned by the publisher and Robert Jordan's widow Harriet McDougal, who provided RJ's notes to Sanderson, to finish the series. In 2009 he started a finishing trilogy. He promptly spent the first part of his first book killing off minor characters and tying up loose ends of minor storylines. He then dragged the spotlight back to the five or six characters that really mattered and moved things forward. It became fun to read again! And yet... some of the plot lines remain murky to me because I skipped so many books.

So here I am, reading the books one by one as we move towards A Memory of Light. I plan on posting my impression of each book as I finish and move forward to the next!