Yep, I just plowed through the entire Wheel of Time series in binge fashion. For the curious, which is YOU, since you are reading this tedious article, it comprises 4,410,036 words in 15 books. Not counting end matter (the books have glossary and other end matter that no one reads).
That would be a weighty pile of slices of dead trees if I read them that way. But that’s so 90s. I read them all on my Kindle. To be honest, though, I used to own them all on paper. The first 10 as a mass-market paperback and the last in hardback. No, I can’t explain why I sprung for the hardback edition. In any case, they are all gone now. Jess me that we both read WAY too much to continue to hang on to all the books we read. So two dozen paper boxes went away of just fiction books. Three or four years later, I am still slowly reeving my non-fiction collection. Paring it down to stuff I can’t part with yet.
I am not sure how many of these I will ever crack again except for the furniture and woodworking books that I reference or flip through often.
So, Kindle. That’s why we’re counting words, not pages. Some days I have spent too much time on the computer already, so I need to bump up the font a bit by the time I get to reading. Other days I am frankly too lazy to swipe pages and crank up the resolution. And, of course, paperback books have fewer words on the page than the hardback ones. So let’s stick to words.
The series has 14 books and one prequel. It’s safe to assume that had Jordan lived to finish the series, he’s still be writing prequels and post books. The man left no tangent unexplored.
This binge was inspired by the December 2021 debut of the Amazon series. After watching the first two episodes, I wanted to revisit the books to understand the changes.
Speaking of tangents, on the subject of the series:
I thought it was pretty good. It's a tall order to bring that world alive and make it understandable to folks that haven't invested in reading the series. I was OK with most of the casting choices. Except for the Ogier. OMG. That sucked.
Of course, there were going to be plot changes. First, some stuff won't translate to the screen, though others will be easier. For example, you won't have to read pages and pages describing the landscape when a nice panning shot takes care of that. Then, there is the sheer length. Even though The Eye of the World audiobook ranks 9th in the series for length, clocking in at (only) 122,150 words, the audiobook is 12-1/2 hours long. You do get value for your Audible credit here.
I wanted to know where it fell on the spectrum of adaptations where we have something like The Expanse, which, while pared for length, is reasonably close to the plot of the books. At the other end is Apple's adaptation of Foundation. The only thing that's the same is the name of some of the characters.
Watching that show's first season was very confusing. Since it had been at least 25 years since I read the series, it was vague. Watching shows with Jess when I have read the source material means I have to be ready to explain things. She knows I remember a lot of what I read and want's to peak ahead or understand why something is happening. I flipped through the book, and, yep, nothing we are seeing is part of it. /boggle.
Back to the primary tangent. It will be agonizing waiting between seasons, of course. But, I am hopeful so far. Not everything was great, but many of these shows pick up steam as they go. 
So, binging on the series. After watching the first two episodes, I started mid-December, and I finished on February 5th. I typically read from 20 to 120 minutes at night before going to sleep as a way to wind down. But I got sucked in and sometimes read for 3 or more hours at night. So, yes, that made it a late night. But I don’t sleep well anyway, so I don’t think I lost much net sleep time.
I read the first 4 or 5 books more or less back to back at the recommendation of my then housemate, who is a voracious reader. I got the pick of his books when he finished them as he views mass market paperbacks as disposable. That caught me up on the series, and I remember remarking at that time, “this dude better not die before he wraps this series up.” After all, we were on book 5 of a series pitched to the publisher as a trilogy. And it seemed like we had just reached the end of Act 1.
Well, of course, he died after completing book 10, which was basically the end of Act 2. I read the intervening books as they came out. But there was a five-year hiatus before Brandon Sanderson picked up the series and finished it using Jordan’s notes. So, I reread the first 10 books before cracking book 11 when it came out. The series wrapped in 2013 with A Memory of Light which, despite Sanderson’s penchant for really fucking long books, merely ranks 4th in Jordan’s canon at 353,906 words.
So, eight years is a long time. I had forgotten enough that it was still an enjoyable read. And how did the series hold up? Pretty well, I think. I still rank The Eye of the World as a top 5, maybe top 3 epic fantasy novel. It gets lost under the weight of the subsequent books, but it’s really good. Book 2 is probably top 10 as well.
The series takes a beating from detractors on its length, obviously. I knew that going in. Hell, I disparaged it on occasion myself. So one of my goals for this read-through was to see where it all went wrong and was it really that bad.
The series lost its way about 1/2 way through book 4, The Shadow Rising. What was new about this book was long (very long) stretches with one viewpoint character such that at the midway point, we still hadn’t checked in with half the primary cast.
It’s at that point where it becomes really noticeable that Jordan gets hyper descriptive. About everything. From then on, the first time you meet an existing character in a given book, you get a two to ten-page back story. Plus, the beginning of every scene receives an exhaustive description. All characters in the scene get their features, ancestry, clothing, and mannerisms described. Then we get down to the scene. I found myself skimming ahead past all the to get to the meat of the scene after this point.
Now, to be fair, there was typically more than a year of real-time between book releases, so it’s fair to touch upon some back story. But here’s where it goes over the top. Before Jordan got very far on book 4, he must have received some feedback or praise for how rich his world was and detailed. So, some are good, more is better!
Consequently, books 4, 5, and 6 rank first, third, and second, respectively, for word count. It’s also helpful to note that his wife was his editor for each book in the series. So, either she was an enabler or willing accomplice to this crime against trees or was lapsing into dementia and needed a lot of refresher text.
This is where the series lost my wife back in the day. And probably a lot of other people as well. Things slow WAY down unless you skim as I did. But I could only do that because I had read it before (twice), so it was easy to spot the transition from back story to action.
Things stay on this turgid pace until Sanderson picks up the series to finish it out. His first contribution, The Gathering Storm, is not noticeably better. I think Jordan had laid down a lot of that one before he died. However, the next two get progressively better. The final book, A Memory of Light, is positively enjoyable. If you get past the 300,000 words spilled on a single day (sort of, given divergent time flow rates).
So, at the end of the day, I enjoyed the reread. When I first read the series, I was a fan of Rand. An angst-ridden young man with, literally, the weight of the world on his shoulders. It sorted well with my somewhat angst-ridden outlook on life in the early 90s. During that first reread that I did in preparation for the final books, I favored Perrin more. But looking at the fullness of the series, I really think that Matt is the best character. He comes from a foil to Rand with not much depth in the first two books to really steal the show in the last two. He probably has the best, most complete character arc. And the best lines.
So there you have it. Six weeks of toil to revisit one of the best epic fantasy worlds out there. Give it a try. But you’re older now. So don’t strain yourself hefting those big dusty hardbacks; read it on the Kindle.
Addendum:
If you want to geek out a little bit on the series, here are two articles that go WAY down the rabbit hole:
- A Statistical Analysis of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time by Kevin Klein. The author dives in and slices and dices the series by analyzing: book length, chapter length, gender, viewpoint, culture, occupation, and ajah. Complete with pretty graphs.
- My Computer Reads ‘The Wheel of Time’ by Stephan Hermanides. The author is a data scientist and builds a machine learning model using the 4.4 million words of the series to train it. The model is able to distinguish character arcs and all kinds of super geeky stuff. He also links to a github repo with his code (in Python of course).