Reread: The Wheel of Time

Yes, no reviews or ramblings lately. So very sorry about that. Real life has once again kept me from blogging. That’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

The other reason I haven’t posted much is that I haven’t been reading much. Or rather, I’ve been rereading. In preparation for the impending November release of A Gathering Storm, the twelfth installment of the massively epic Wheel of Time series and the first to be co-written by Brandon Sanderson.

In my previous reading of the series, I only finished book seven, A Crown of Swords, before bogging down in the series’ slackening pace. But now I am determined to start from the beginning and read through book eleven, Knife of Dreams. In the past month I’ve completed the first three novels and am now working my way through the fourth, The Shadow Rising.

I was a teenager when I first read the books, and at that time I was primarily engaging them for their “cool” factor: battles, magic, and the like. While these elements still captivate me, I’m now equally fascinated by the subtler intricacies of mythology, culture, language, and other aspects of world-building, and how they work–or not–in the Wheel of Time setting.

Leigh Butler over at tor.com is in the midst of an extensively commentated Wheel of Time reread, which is definitely worth a look.