End of the Visit, End of the Reread

This morning, Colin and Carol are going to head off on their trip back to the coast. I’d like to say that it’s been a good visit, and parts of it definitely were, but let’s face it: for a good chunk of it, I was completely out of it. The good news was that I recovered yesterday, and we had a nice dinner and visit afterwards. We went to Mittillini’s for supper.

With us either at work or down and out, Colin and Carol did manage to go exploring on their own, even going to a casino yesterday that I didn’t know existed. The weather has behaved since those first couple of days. A big thunderstorm rolled through north of Calgary last night, dropping golf ball sized hail on Airdrie and Carstairs. It was close enough to see the towering thunderhead, but not close enough to have a good lightning show.

I know I’m disappointed that we got sick. Oh well, we can look forward to our visit to see them again in August.

In other news, being laid up allowed me to do some reading, and I finished my reread of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (and finished by Brandon Sanderson). At fourteen books in the series, with each weighing in between 750 and 1,000 pages, it wasn’t quick. A Memory of Light was the last book in the series, and until now, I had only read it once, aloud with Tammy.
I started reading the series when I was living in Ucluelet and working at Pacific Rim National Park. I saw the books at the library (there were four published at the time) and borrowed them one at a time over the summer. I don’t know exactly how many times I’ve read the earlier books: when later ones came out, I would frequently re-read some of the previous books so that I would recall the setup for the new one.

This was the first time that I was reading with the full knowledge of how the series ended, and I tried to read quickly and critically, keeping all of the many, many story threads in my head at once. It was interesting to do so: there were lots of little details in earlier books that had payoffs later.

The books aren’t even. Some are definitely better than others. I don’t know exactly what Robert Jordan was thinking as he wrote, but he did state on the record that there were supposed to be twelve books, but when Brandon Sanderson took over after his death, he wrote three full-length books that were just packed with action and scenes that wrapped up long-running threads. I know that at the time when I was originally reading the ninth and tenth books I was frustrated with the author as he was still creating new threads of conflict and introducing rafts of new characters when I felt he should have been steering the ship towards the end. On the reread, I commented to Tammy a number of times that those two books were the nadir of the series. They were uninteresting and long. Then, like a light switch was turned on, the eleventh book was much better, and then Robert Jordan died.

Having a different author finish the series was both a blessing and a curse. It was a curse because Brandon’s writing style is much more modern than Robert Jordan’s, and his characters have a more cynical, sarcastic edge. He did his best to moderate that and blend his writing with Jordan’s, but there were definitely some characters in the twelfth book that were just wrong in tone. He pulled it together as he completed the last two books, though.  It was a blessing in that Brandon Sanderson is a very focused writer, and after waiting up to four years between books from Robert Jordan, he pushed out all three remaining books in three years.

Reading A Memory of Light not aloud for the first time, gave it a pace that really emphasized all of the action and tempo of the book. The bulk of it is about the battle for the end of the world, with a single chapter called The Last Battle, which was 190 pages. A lot of the book is brutal war, and reaches for that concept put forth long ago by J.R.R. Tolkien of “eucatastrophe“. It worked, because I know that I had tears and laughter at the right points late in the book.

I don’t know how many of the plot twists in the final three books were Jordan’s, and which were Sanderson’s. Sanderson is a brilliant author, whose Mistborn trilogy laid out all of the elements of its resolution in plain sight of the reader, but managed to surprise me completely. Some parts of these books had a sense like that, but neither Sanderson nor Jordan’s estate have ever broken down what parts of the books were written by Jordan, blocked out by Jordan, just based on notes or completely original by Sanderson.

In the end, it was completely satisfying.