The Wheel of Time Midway Thoughts

Rand Al'Thor was just the son of a shepherd living in Emond's Field, the backwater of a backwater called the Two Rivers, known only for its tabac (Tobacco). That was what he was, until the day an Aes Sedai, the mysterious women sorcerers of legend, come to his village looking for the Dragon Reborn, the one that is destined to fight Shaitan, the Dark One, and save the world from destruction. Rand stays away from the Aes Sedai, but when Trollocs raid the village, the Aes Sedai chooses to save him, along with three of his friends, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, and the village Wise Woman, Nynaeve, from destruction. The Aes Sedai has her own reasons for this, but it is clear the Trollocs want only to kill Rand, and why, none but the Trollocs and the Aes Sedai now. 

The Wheel of Time is a big series, there's no other way to say it, with fourteen books to the main series plus a prequel making a total of fifteen books, most 800 pages long or so, the series is a commitment and sometimes a chore to read. It's so big, that its creator, Robert Jordan, was unable to finish it before his death, leaving his wife to appoint his successor, Brandon Sanderson, to complete the series. Despite this, the series remains a favorite if not the favorite of many readers, and for good reason. The Wheel of Time is a sweeping series, breathtaking in scale, and if isn't as beautiful and majestic as Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, it's certainly just as ambitious. It's respected for good reason. The books pit off a group of youngsters trying to unite a world that isn't interested in being united against the Dark One and his servants the Forsaken. The books are easy to get lost in, the kind that just let you drown in the depth and beauty of it. As for its messages - I don't want to say too much about those until I finish, the end of the story is the most important part after all - it can get all over the place. The series incorporates western and eastern philosophies in an interesting blend, and we get to see the positives and negatives of them and the cultures that made them as interpreted by Jordan. That's not to say the books don't have flaws. I'll just get right out and say it, Jordan was perhaps the worst romance writer I've ever seen. While The Wheel of Time is by no means a romance, you can't write an epic fantasy story and not have some romance thrown in, and Jordan tried. Sometimes, the way he writes it works, but the rest of the time it just makes me want to throw the book into a fire and watch it burn because it's so awful. That isn't the worst of it though. The aptly named "slog" is three or four books in the series in a row that just are plain outright bad. I seriously considered moving on while reading them, but I stuck with it, and I was glad I did because it definitely got better, but the slog, sadly, still exists. In the end, I can't wait to see how Jordan wraps up the story he spent ten years or so working on, and I'm nervous about how Sanderson did finishing it for him, but only time will tell.