Reader Question Day #9 – Should You Start Reading THE WHEEL OF TIME?

Manwe writes:

A friend of mine has on several different occasions recommended Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, but I have always been a bit hesitant to pick them up. Have you read them and/or do you know if they are any good?

Short answer: I’ve read them all.

Now, to decide if you want to read them or not, read the first 200 pages of “Eye of the World”, the first book in the series. One of two things will happen. You will either get bored and put aside the book, or you will get hooked, and you’ll continue reading the story all the way to the end…no matter how much it frustrates or aggravates you in the interim, because you’ll just have to see how it ends.

Longer answer: The Wheel of Time possesses every virtue except that of brevity.

Let me explain.

I started reading the Wheel of Time in 1997 or 1998. Specifically, on a bench outside a Culver’s fast food restaurant in southeastern Wisconsin, while waiting for a ride. I thought at the time that the first 200 pages of “Eye of the World” were pretty boring…but, remember, I was stuck outside a Culver’s with nothing else to do. (This predated smartphones by a decade, and I would own my first laptop until 2003.) So I kept reading, past the 200 page mark…and I was hooked.

The rest of that year I tore through the rest of the Wheel of Time as fast as I could manage it. I don’t remember clearly, but at that time, the series only went up to book 7 or 8. So when I finished, I wanted more. I started poking around on the nascent Web, and figured out when book 9 would be released. When I came out, I walked three miles to the nearest bookstore to get it.

But after reading book 10, I had lost interest.

In the first five books, the plot advanced with vigorous speed. By book 10, the plot had become weighed down with many, many subplots. And none of those subplots ever received any resolution, but kept proliferating, like rabbits in the dark. Book 10 advanced some of the subplots, but none of the main plots moved forward. And some of those main plotlines had been going on for decades.

Then Robert Jordan died after book 11. And I thought that was that. I hadn’t been planning on reading any more Wheel of Time books (I had never gotten around to book 11), and that only solidified things. Even after I heard Brandon Sanderson had been hired to finish the series, I didn’t have any particular interest in continuing.

However, in 2010 I happened to pick up Sanderson’s “Mistborn”. I really liked it, along with its two sequels. And Sanderson showed good progress on turning out Wheel of Time books, with first “The Gathering Storm” and then “Towers of Midnight”. Since it seemed likely he would finish it, and I liked his writing, I decided to restart the Wheel of Time from the beginning.

So it’s fourteen years later, and now I have a new appreciation for the series. Jordan was an amazing writer – having written books myself, the amount of effort required to hold together a story that huge for that long just boggles my mind. As I said, the Wheel of Time possesses every virtue but brevity. There are some amazing, amazing scenes in the series, and when one of the subplots pays off, holy crap is it awesome. The worldbuilding is robust and realistic. The characters are vivid and engaging, even if you very frequently want to smack certain ones upside the head. Jordan had a solid grasp of human psychology, and the characters reflect that. The battle scenes and descriptions of military action were clearly written by a man who, to use the Civil War parlance, has seen the elephant. And looking at the series as a (nearly) unified whole, you can see that the plot arcs and subplot arcs do hold together. While the glacial pace of the plot in books 6, 8, and 10 was frustrating at the time, they do hold up very well as part of a unified whole. Nothing gets resolved in book 10, but that’s not nearly so annoying if you have books 11, 12, and 13 readily at hand.

Sanderson has done a good job with the two books he did, and I have every confidence the final volume, “A Memory of Light”, will be good. He also has a knack for bringing successful resolution to the various plotlines in the series – both “The Gathering Storm” and “Towers of Midnight” have some amazing climatic scenes. (In particular, I am thinking of Rand’s final scenes in “The Gathering Storm”, Egwene’s final chapters in “Gathering Storm”, and Mat’s final scenes in “Towers of Midnight.”) I feel bad for Jordan – he spent twenty years carefully setting up all these Chekov’s Guns, and Sanderson is the one who gets to fire them. (On the other hand, I suspect “The Gathering Storm” alone would have transmuted into another four or five books had Jordan written it.)

So, when the final book comes out, I will definitely be getting and reading it straightaway. It’s been 14 years, and I want to see how the story ends. As for whether or not someone else should start reading it…well, read the first 200 pages of the first book. If you’re bored, set it aside. If you’re hooked, you’ll plow through to the end, no matter how much the story’s meandering pace happens to frustrate you in the interim.

But it might not frustrate you if you start after the final volume is complete, since you can read the entire thing in one go.

(However, I recommend you skip the prequel book “New Spring” until you’ve read at least through book 6, since book 0 isn’t a good starting point, and “New Spring” only makes sense if you’ve read the other books first.)

-JM