The year was 1995 and I was a miserable high-school student. I was flirting with failing 9th grade English, because grades are more about motivation than aptitude, and I did not like the teacher. But I didn’t care, because I was plowing through The Shadow Rising, and it was a ridiculously large volume. Never before had I seen a paperback book that was trying so hard to be a cube — just a little thicker, just a little wider.
I had become aware of Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time series years earlier when I was browsing the sci-fi/fantasy section at my local bookstore, B. Dalton Bookseller. I somehow got into conversation with the clerk working at the store. I was telling him how much I enjoyed the Redwall series by Brian Jaques, calling particular attention to how I enjoyed the plot device of having characters become geographically dispersed while remaining a part of a larger, cohesive story, and the clerk cheerfully said, “Oh, The Eye of the World has that too! It’s really good.” So I bought the massive paperback and set to work on it. Several months later, I had mixed feelings upon reaching the end. On one hand, I felt cheated: you mean to tell me that the big baddie in this book was just a Foresaken? Not like the actual Dark One? On the other hand, I had come too far to turn back, so I kept going. The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, The Shadow Rising. But my progress was not quick. I had barely made a dent in The Fires of Heaven before I graduated high school, and by the time I got halfway through college, I realized that I had put that book down for long enough that there was no way I could pick it back up again.
Still, I enjoyed reading Usenet posts in the early days of the Internet where people would speculate on who would be cast as which characters if the books were to be made into a TV series. Patrick Stewart would, of course, play Thom Merrilin, and somehow Matthew Broderick had always seemed like a shoo-in for Mat. Twenty years later, Robert Jordan was dead, Brian Sanderson had taken the last couple books to the finish line, and there really was a TV series. Perhaps the casting choices were in some cases extremely suspect, but in any case, there was still interest in the series. Something of substance was there.
So why did I never finish the series? What went wrong? Bless Robert Jordan’s heart, he had a certain way of writing, and I used to be way more OCD than I am now. When I would read about Nynaeve tugging on her braid (just to take one example) for the 283rd time in The Fires of Heaven, that constituted such a major distraction that I simply could not go on! And the puritanical sensibilities of almost every single “good” character was more wholesomeness than I could stand. And the descriptions, the long descriptions of wind blowing over mountains and the Wheel weaving as the Wheel wills… it was too much to take! I finally realized that if I wasn’t prepared to read these stories at a skimming pace and then poke fun at their idiosyncrasies, I would never reach the Last Battle.
So maybe it’s a mistake. It’s probably a mistake. But let’s read Wheel of Time.