I took a break from reading Wheel of Time books after finishing The Fires of Heaven in November. But I’m ready to dive back in now, I think. I made it through the first five books last year. I figure I can make it through the next five in 2024. Or maybe even finish out the series, though that may be a little too ambitious.
The next book up is Lord of Chaos, which is either the longest book in the series, or the second longest, depending on who you believe. This page seems to show LoC as slightly longer than The Shadow Rising, which other articles say is the longest. I may have gone down a “pointless analysis of WoT books” rabbit hole just now… Here’s a reddit post with some discussion of word counts, and a reddit page with links to a bunch of other weird little bits of analysis. Do you want a stacked bar chart analyzing Nynaeve’s braid tugging habit? It’s out there!
Anyway, what was I really going to talk about here? Oh yeah, so I have the book downloaded to my Kindle and ready to read. And I checked the audiobook out from my local library, and have that on my iPhone. I don’t know if I’m really going to listen to it at all, but maybe I can make it through the book faster if I switch back and forth between the ebook and audiobook. (Of course, that would be easier to do if I just paid the $7.50 for the Audible narration option from Amazon, but I’ll see how far I get with the library copy before shelling out for that.)
I also downloaded a handful of the Tor articles about the book to Instapaper. I had been reading all of those recap articles, for the first few books, but I gave up on it at some point, since I didn’t feel like I really needed to, and I didn’t want to slow myself down. But I want to try getting back into them again, at least at the start of this book.
(I mentioned in another post recently that the price of Instapaper Premium is doubling soon, so I spent a little time looking at alternatives. But I think I’m going to stick with Instapaper for now. I may be writing a blog post about that, and some related topics soon. Or not, depending on time.)