The Saga Still Continues

I'm taking a break from my Best of 2009 series to do an old-school regular review. Not that there's much difference these days, but regardless. After much toil, I have finished reading Book 12 of The Wheel of Time, The Gathering Storm.

I've been a fan of this series since I discovered Robert Jordan in high school. I've stuck with it through it's best moments of coherence and the thousands upon thousands of words dedicated to fantasy world fashions. When Jordan died, I didn't think the series would ever be completed. Thank you, Brandon Sanderson, for giving us all hope that something will come out of all this chaos!

The problem with labyrinthine fantasy works like The Wheel of Time is that each book takes so long to read, and the wait between new volumes is usually so long (especially with Jordan dead) that it's nearly impossible to remember every fact, character interaction, subplot and even the facets of the main plot between readings.

This is one of the biggest complaints fans and critics have against this series. In fact, there used to be jokes that Jordan would just keep coming up with new plots, new machinations and the story would never end. A Zeno's Paradox of literature. Brandon Sanderson seems determined to end each and every hanging plotline Jordan ever created.

The Gathering Storm has the swiftest-running plot of any other book in the series, excepting perhaps the first book The Eye of the World. And yet, it's amazing how much exposition Sanderson crams into this book. It felt like 90% of each chapter was individual characters gazing off into the distance, contemplating their situations. A lot of stuff happens, but it's really hard to tell how much time passes between events. This could be a limitation on my part, not reading slowly or carefully enough, but between chapters especially, there seemed to be big segments of time that are ignored. The previous books got bogged down with presenting every mile of every journey the characters made, which is why the change is so jarring.

In the end, it was a really enjoyable read. It was nice to get back to Randland once again, and it was even nicer to feel like events were moving again. Even though it felt a little bit roller coaster-like. The book gets bonus points for starting to resolve plots and having a sense of "the beginning of the end." The series, however, loses a few points for general incomprehensibility that required a trip to encyclopedia fan sites to try and work out what was going on. Overall grade: A-


Khatru update: Script writing is going well, and I'm going to shoot for having a comic done for Friday. Last week was kind of chaotic, though, and I didn't get everything done that I wanted to.