The Gathering Storm (part 1)

Around 15 years ago* I was waiting for a friend; they were running late so to occupy my time I indulged in one of my favourite hobbies of browsing a second hand book stall. Because I'm something of a fast reader, I always tend to be drawn towards chunky books, in the hope that they'll last a bit longer than usual, and my eye was caught by a pair that were book one and two in a series. They weren't particularly cheap considering I was a skint student at the time (one of them still has the £2.25 price sticker on so the pair were probably the equivalent of about 4 pints) but I decided to get them anyway. Little did I know that that spur of the moment purchase would lead me down a long, at times tortuous, and expensive road, and one that still hasn't ended.

If you've been down that road with me, then you'll know exactly what books I'm talking about from the post title, but for those who haven't, they were the first two books in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. My imagination was well and truly caught by the immense world he had created, and by the time I finished the second I was incredibly keen to find the next. It took some time, but I eventually managed to get hold of cheap copies of books 3, 4 and 5 and a christmas book token got me a shiny new hardback copy of number 6. And then I had to wait. Which pretty much covered the next few years. Sadly things started to lose their way around about book number 8 (it felt to me like something of a filler, just something to keep people occupied while the next 'proper' book came out and nothing much happened in it), but I continued buying and reading and things picked up a little - besides, by this point I'd invested too much time and money in it to stop, plus I *really* wanted to know what happened at the end.

Number eleven came out and was the first book I didn't buy straight away, but borrowed from the library. I was kind of hoping that it was going to be the last one, but no. Some threads in the story were beginning to be wrapped up, but new ones were still being introduced. Then tragically, in 2007, Robert Jordan passed away, leaving the story unfinished. Which brings me to where I am now - looking at book twelve, the Gathering Storm which was already in progress back in 2007, but has been completed with the aid of notes left behind by RJ by an author called Brandon Sanderson (who I had never heard of previously). Originally this was intended to be titled A Memory of Light, and be the final book in the series, but has got too long and is being split into three installments. Which will take us to a grand total of 14 books (15 if you include the prequel), an epic tale if ever there was one.

I think this new book is the largest out of all of the WoT books on my bookcase, and having just finished re-reading the previous 11 for the first time in quite a while in preparation (I did buy #11 eventually, can't do with having an incomplete set) I remembered how much I'd loved reading them the very first time. Which makes me slightly nervous about starting on this one. Hopefully this Brandon Sanderson will stay true to the characters we've grown to know so well over the years, and manage to tie up all the hundreds of loose ends that have emerged in the story so far. I am disappointed that this will not be the last, and I'll have to wait a couple more years to read the ending, but I'm grateful that at least they're being written.

* writing that just made me feel incredibly old