The Wheel of Time Book 8: The Path of Daggers

“It’s one of the things men are for, taking the blame. They usually deserve it, even if you don’t know exactly how.” (The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan)

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Here’s how you binge-read Wheel of Time: you develop a filler-filter and check each paragraph against it. If Jordan rambles about the cut of dresses, prickly women, men ‘cut of stone’, you speed-read the shit out of it. If he cuts to a villain POV, skip that too: the bad guys are plotting, it’s completely cryptic, it’s never going to work out anyway. Feel free to let your attention wander for any parts on horseback, anytime men complain they’ll never understand women, anytime women complain that they’ll never understand men, and when any of the women get miffed because they can’t get all the other women to obey them (this will allow you to breeze by whole chapters, sometimes).

The filler provides the some of the aesthetic, the tone, and the epic-ness of the work. There are times that I respect that. Other times, reading it just feels like work. There’s a lot of filler in book 8. It’s like the middle book of a YA trilogy; you read it and ask yourself: did anything just happen? And the answer is ‘no, no it did not’. Even books six and seven, which I considered slow, had climactic endings. The ending of book 8 has one near-death experience (to give credit where credit is due), and then closes on a series of compromises, beginnings, and set-ups for book nine.

If you’re trying to decide whether to read WOT, the description of the slog through these middle books might put you off. Don’t let it. Sure, it’s slow, but the benefits are innumerable. No choosing books for months, forming deep connections to the cast of characters, the excitement of watching plots spin out over thousands of pages.