Category: WOT

Getting Deeper into The Wheel of Time

I finished reading The Eye of the World yesterday. I liked it a lot, and got through it fairly quickly, considering the length of the book and how slowly I usually read. Here’s my Goodreads review.  I noticed yesterday that the books has almost half a million ratings and 20,000 reviews, so I’m pretty sure no one is ever going to stumble across mine on the site, so I might as well link it here.

Per my last post on WoT, this series has activated that part of my brain that likes to go down rabbit holes researching a thing, shopping for stuff, and spending more time on that than actually reading the books. But I did finish the first book, so I’m patting myself on the back for that! Meanwhile, Amazon sent me $5 off coupons for most of the series, so I went ahead and bought the Kindle versions of books one through eleven. I find it hard to imagine myself actually reading my way that far into the series, but, well, I’ve got them in my “official” Kindle library now, at least.

I also paid $7.50 for the “Audible narration” add-on for the first book, in case I want to re-read it at some point, in audiobook format. I assumed that would get me the newer Rosamund Pike version, but instead it got me the older Kate Reading and Michael Kramer version. (Which is fine, since that one is also supposed to be pretty good. Though Pike won an Audie for her version, so maybe I should pick up that version too, and listen to them both… You see how quickly I spiral out of control with these things?)

I may start reading the second book, The Great Hunt, today, since it looks to be a quiet Sunday, and I have nothing much else to do. And I’m interested to see where the story goes. As I’ve said before, I expect that I’ll lose interest in this stuff at some point, but I’m not there yet.

As I read the first book, I followed along with the Reading The Wheel of Time blog post series at tor.com. I’ll likely continue that habit with the next book. It’s fun to connect with other people’s opinions and enthusiasm for a series like this, and there’s quite a community around WoT.

And, as usual with these things, I’ve gotten side-tracked on a couple of fiddly little technical things. First, I started reading Eye of the World from the EPUB file that I got from Tor a long time ago (as mentioned in the previous post). But then I bought the “official” Kindle store version, and switched to that, at about the halfway point in the book. That got me thinking about whether or not I could transfer my highlights from the EPUB to the Kindle store version. Short answer: probably not. But I might hook my Kindle up to my PC via USB today and see if I can copy all of the highlights into a text file and then stick them in Evernote, just for yuks. I could go off on a tangent here about a couple of services I found that automate (or semi-automate) pulling your notes & highlights from the Kindle into other systems, but I’m going to avoid going down that hole right now.

Second, I’ve been thinking about better ways to deal with the tor.com blog post series. The first book had twenty posts, usually covering 2 or 3 chapters each. To read them, I was simply keeping a tab open in Firefox on my MacBook, and never closing Firefox. (That’s unusual for me. I always close Firefox when I’m done, and I don’t have it set to reopen previous tabs on launch.) Then, I would just go back and forth from the series page into the individual posts. And I was keeping a note in Drafts to keep track of how far I had to read in the book before reading the next post. So it was a workable system, but a little weird.

For the next book, I was thinking I could open all of the articles, send them all to Instapaper, in a new folder, and then read them from Instapaper, deleting them as I finished them. If I did that, I’d probably read them on my iPad, so I’d be switching back and forth between the Kindle and iPad. Or, there’s an RSS feed on the series page, so I could subscribe to that in my RSS service, The Old Reader, and then read them from Reeder on my iPad. Or, I could put the RSS feed into Calibre and send the articles from there directly to my Kindle. Or… there are a bunch of things I could screw around with here. You see where things start spiraling out of control for me when I go down these rabbit holes… But I guess it keeps me out of trouble, mostly.

Wheel of Time

My Pathfinder fixation is on hold for now. I haven’t quite given up on it, but my brother still hasn’t started our campaign up, and I’m a bit tired of reading the rulebook. So now I’m on a Wheel of Time kick. It started out as an offshoot of the Pathfinder kick. You see, I’d read the Pathfinder comics that I had in my collection, and that led me to reading the Wheel of Time comics I had, since both were published by Dynamite and part of the same Humble bundle from a long time ago.

And now I’ve finished reading those, which serve as an adaptation of the first Wheel of Time novel, The Eye of the World. Then, I remembered that Amazon has a Wheel of Time TV show that I hadn’t watched yet. So I watched that.

And then I remembered that I have an ebook for the first novel that tor.com gave away for free some years ago. So now I’m reading that. It’s not a short book, and will likely take me a while to finish.

I also have an ebook of the complete Wheel of Time series, all fifteen books, that I got as part of the Hugo packet from 2014. I’m not sure if it’s morally OK for me to read that now, though. The purpose of it was to let Hugo voters read all the nominated works, and I didn’t get around to reading it then. So, if I want to read it all now, I should probably buy the books.

There’s a Complete Wheel of Time ebook available for the Kindle, but it costs $163, which is more than buying the 15 books separately, so that’s kind of weird. Well, it’s going to take me a while to read the first one, and I don’t know if I’ll really want to keep going, so best not to worry about that until I’ve finished the first book. I think a lot of the ebooks are available from my library, so I can always go that route.

I’ve also been enjoying dipping my feet into some of the nerdery surrounding the Wheel of Time. There’s a ton of stuff at the Tor site about it, including this series from someone who is reading the series for the first time, and this series from a different writer, who did a re-read of all the books. I’ve also listened to a number of episodes from the Dragonmount podcast, which were fun.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to give this series a try. I guess I used to be more of a snob about certain kinds of books, particularly “epic fantasy” books. But I’m kind of OK with this stuff now. I enjoyed the comics and the TV show, and I’m liking what I’ve read of the first book so far.

Speaking of snobbery about epic fantasy, Wired published a profile of Brandon Sanderson recently, and it’s gotten a lot of negative feedback from Sanderson fans. (Sanderson wrote the last few Wheel of Time books, after Robert Jordan died.) I’m not sure how I feel about Sanderson, since I haven’t read anything from him, and don’t know much about him, but the profile makes it seem like he’s a pretty decent, down to earth, guy. (Which seemed to be a problem for the guy who wrote the profile…) Sanderson responded to the kerfuffle on Reddit, and his response reinforces my impression that he’s probably a decent guy. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it far enough into the Wheel of Time series to read that ones that Sanderson co-wrote, but I’m curious.