The Wheel of Time; Endless, almost literally

[Valarya]

I rebelled against the Wheel of Time series for almost a decade.. refusing to read it for one reason or another. But after a few friends convinced me, I finally started reading it Oct or Nov of last year. I finished all 14 books within 2 months.

That should say something right there, since each book consists of ~1,000 pages. Now, I love fantasy novels/series, but one of the reasons I like GRRM so much is because his characters aren't black & white and I found that refreshing. So I wasn't sure how I'd feel about going back to a series (especially one this long) about mostly black/white characters. But one of my favorite things about getting lost in other worlds through text is the detail... and Robert Jordan certainly knows how to detail at length. That just gets me more sucked in, actually - which is the point. I can tell you that as much as I love RotE (consider it one of my all time favs), and aSoIaF and LotR... the WoT characters were the first ones I ever dreamt about. I was so sucked in to that story that I actually had dreams that I was Egwene. Almost every night.

I got in to the history, the wiki, the theories, the battles. And I think it's definitely worth it. I know it's a bit hard to consider reading such a long series where the last few books are finished by someone else... and I'll admit Sanderson (the guy who took over) messed up a character or two in book 12... but not only does Sanderson fix his character-mess-up for books 13 and 14, he writes one of the most incredible series-ending books I've ever read. And I've read a lot.

If you've never read Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy, you're missing out too - he's just a wonderful author and probably the only person anyone could think of finishing WoT. And you know he was a fan of the series from boyhood, so he'd been in love with these characters for over a decade himself.

I think I'm rambling, but I just love this series - and shocked myself by loving it so much after rejecting it for years.