The Wheel of Time

Finally; yesterday, I finished the Wheel of Time (WoT) high fantasy series. It was quite the commitment, running 14 books (12,456 pages). Weaving those into my reading plans, it took me 29 months (Oct. 2019- Mar. 2022) to get through them all. Click on a book cover to see my review of a given title: 

Here are charts with the page counts and my ratings, respectively, for each book:

Thoughts on the Series

Published between 1990-2013, WoT is a product of a recent yet bygone era. Everything about the series, to include the art for each cover, reminds me of the nineties. I like it.

This is a solid (if typical) 'hero's journey' story. Jordan weaves elements of Buddhism, Christianity, and literature or pop culture (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Arthurian lore) in a unique combination to deliver the tale. 

As is shown by my ratings, the series starts and ends well, but the middle is a mixed bag. My ratings for books 5-7 are probably generous, giving the author the benefit of the doubt and riding the wave of previous entries. But they're slow. By book 8, I was getting fed up, and remained so through book 11. Sadly, Jordan passed away before he could finish, leaving Brandon Sanderson to take over and do books 12-14. Those were much better and brought the series to a fitting conclusion. (I must say, I'm impressed with Brandon Sanderson. It is an achievement to take up another's story and finish it well.)

My impressions remain remarkably similar to what I felt when I was halfway through the series. Those thoughts reprinted here, with minor updates:

What I liked:

• Compelling story
• The overall world, with intriguing elements and the impression of depth
• To include ruins, lost knowledge, and strange artifacts
• Cool magic system
• Interesting characters with differing abilities or strengths
• Character development (of Rand and Perrin especially)
• You see these characters wrestle with self-doubt, responsibility, and the gifts they've been given, and there is notable maturation
• Variety of cultures and customs among the different peoples
• Multiple perspectives revealing the faults, doubts and internal struggles of the main characters (even some evil ones)
• Balanced power struggles and mysterious motives within and between the 'good guys' and 'bad guys'
• No graphic depictions of sex, violence, and language
• Limited knowledge. The characters (good and bad) don't know about events outside their immediate situation, and act with the best knowledge they have. I like that- some novels have heroes whose intuition is suspicuously complete and correct. You don't have that here.
• Rand's Christlike attributes. Especially towards the end [mild spoiler alert], you see him restoring things around him.

What I didn't:

• Uneven pacing. Especially true in the middle books, plots would plod along for hundreds of pages, then suddenly accelerate.
• Uneven development. Major characters or plotlines would 'disappear' from entire books. Several elements felt rushed, ignored, unsatisfactorily addressed, or insufficiently foreshadowed.
• Over-reliance on certain focus and phrases (in Jordan's books). I've gotten used to it, but it's mildly annoying that Jordan always focuses on the same aspects of clothing, same descriptions of characters, same phrases to describe certain things, etc. 
• Sheer number of characters combined with inadequate appendices to keep track of them all
• Wikipedia has a character listing. It claims there are 2784 distinctly-named characters.
• The appendix in each book is appreciated but not updated- nobody I looked up was in there. The main characters have entries, but they're the least necessary.
• Difficulty in understanding "the One Power" and the limits of those who use it. This is similar to the problem I have with the Force in Star Wars. The power-wielding characters alternate between shockingly strong abilities and standard weaknesses. They can move mountains, then get easily surprised or overpowered. It seems inconsistent.
• The handling of religion. They mention a 'Creator' and say things like "the Light willing" throughout, but the WoT's god is deistic- there is no participation in the world. The Dark One, however, is quite active, even while imprisoned. That bothered me.
• Overall length. One critic called this "the wheel of too much time." I agree.

Resources

WoT has its own wiki.

Dragonmount has nice book summaries.

Regular wikipedia has a series of pages, of course.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm glad I read this- but also glad it's over. It's a good story, just too long in the telling. Jordan originally planned for it to be 6 books . . . he died after book 11 and it took his successor three more to finish it off. The 14 books could be condensed to 10 easily- maybe fewer.