Re-Reading Bricks

Looking back at the Wheel of Time

Books, with crap on my desk for scale.

I’ve had a horrible case of “reader’s block” regarding fiction for a good while now. I suspect this is partly due to the pandemic, in that one of the principal ways I’ve learned about new books I’d like to read is by browsing the physical shelves in our local big-box store, which I haven’t been doing regularly for the last year and a half. I haven’t really found any sources of genre fiction reviews online that align with my tastes; what generates buzz in the parts of SF fandom I’m still in contact with these days mostly has very little appeal for me.

Anyway, a few weeks back, Amazon dropped a trailer for its forthcoming series based on the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan (finished by the ultra-prolific Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death):

I saw that, and immediately had two thoughts: 1) “Yeah, I’ll watch that,” and 2) “Ooh, maybe I should re-read those…”

Well, OK, not all of them, because they’re enormous, and there’s a really slow patch in the middle— books 6-10 or so. But I remember the start of the series very fondly, and those are what will be covered in the Amazon series, so I took down the hardcovers from the shelf, and dug in.

(As an aside, I’m also making an effort to do more of my reading on paper these days, after years of being almost exclusively ebooks. It’s just a little too easy when reading electronically to pop over to check on social-media, and then never come back to the book.)

These books were enormously important to me back in the day; in fact, Kate and I originally met through our participation in a Usenet group devoted to the Jordan series. They were comfort reads for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve looked at them since the series wrapped up in 2013 (Sanderson came pretty close to sticking the landing, as I recall…) So, how do they hold up?

Pretty well, on the whole, though I can’t really say how they’d come off to someone who hadn’t imprinted on them a couple of decades ago. The writing isn’t all that exceptional— Jordan is not what you’d call an elite prose stylist— but there’s something compulsively readable about these early books. They already have early versions of all the signature writing tics people would rag on later— braid-tugging, sniffing, arm-crossing— but they also maintain a pretty good narrative momentum, for the most part.

The first book is pretty much a chase narrative, and works very well; it establishes Rand and Perrin as core point-of-view characters when the group gets split up for a bit, and they both work from the get-go. There’s a bit of a swerve late in the book, when they suddenly change their destination to go after the titular Eye of the World, but it makes enough sense to not lose the reader.

The second book was always my least favorite of the early set, and mostly remains so— it kind of meanders for a long time, and then a lot of stuff happens very rapidly in the last handful of chapters. There’s some good stuff, and just enough action to keep me engaged, but it definitely drags in the middle. It really starts the trend of plots in and around the White Tower being kind of tedious.

The third might be my favorite of the whole series, because it’s probably the most tightly plotted of the lot, with three groups of characters on the move all converging for the big climax. It mostly sidelines Rand, but this is maybe the book where Mat is the most fun, discovering his uncanny luck and repeatedly protesting that he’s not a hero while engaged in acts of heroism.

The fourth is a little uneven, really fully establishing the trend of having one plotline focused on some grouping of the women in the story that really drags and/or grates (in this case, Nynaeve and Elayne in Tanchico), while others are more rewarding. Rand and Mat in Rhuidean is still really good, though the climax of the Aiel Waste plotline is weirdly anticlimactic. The real highlight here is Perrin battling Trollocs in the Two Rivers, which is probably the high point for his character. I’m a sucker for the classic High Noon “a-man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do” storyline, and this is full of that. It gets me every time.

Broadly speaking, the male characters all still play pretty well, and the three boys at the center of the story all feel believable. The women… less so. A lot of the scenes between the girls are kind of cringe-y, particularly when Egwene and Elayne are discussing Rand. The interactions between the genders were better than I remembered/expected (with one glaring exception), though I think that gets worse in coming books.

Anyway, this turned out to be a pleasant diversion. I’m probably going to at least pause here, though; partly because I’m traveling this week, and don’t want to lug giant heavy books with me, but mostly because I don’t remember then next handful of books anywhere near as fondly. I may pick up the Sanderson ones when I get back from my trip, though, to see how the ending holds up…

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This will also serve as a program note: I’m on the road for the next little while, back late Friday, and I may or may not have time to post anything. If you want to find out as soon as I have writing time again, here are some buttons:

and if you want to make fun of my déclassé taste in reading material, the comments are open.