I sometimes eat family-sized bags of Lays potato chips alone. It’s not the best chip. But it’s a chip. I know I should stop about a third of the way through, but the bag is still sitting there next to the cat, and one chip keeps going in after the other. It ceases to be a decision; I become a snack food dippy bird, mechanically scooping chip from bag to mouth. I never ask if it was worth it, because eating a large bag of potato chips alone occurs in times when value judgements have been suspended and will be for the foreseeable future.

This is what it’s like to read The Wheel of Time. At four books in, I know I should probably stop, but the bag is still there, not quite bad enough to make me stop, but slowly forcing me to suspend my value system to find out what happens.

I think I’m the only person of my generation that both hasn’t read it and will probably finish it, so my experience of getting the whole thing at once at an advanced age is close to unique. Read over the twenty-three years it took to write them and at the appropriate ages, I suspect I would have been in love with them, and they probably do get better, enough to keep up with the ever-evolving judgmentalism of unsuccessful aspiring writers. They’re certainly better than the Dragonlance Chronicles, which I thought were a masterpiece of fantasy literature when I was eleven, and reevaluated at thirty-two with mounting dismay. If I’d started The Wheel of Time at ten years old, and they gradually improved, I’d have a much better impression of them, mixed with years of mounting anticipation.

Talking to people who grew up reading them, I haven’t met many who finished, suggesting neither the anticipation nor the quality mounted rapidly enough. That’s the case with my appreciation of Game of Thrones. Reading Game of Thrones is like watching 28 Days Later stuffed into Willow stuffed into all seven seasons of The West Wing. Yes, I appreciate your cleverly written political maneuvering, but can we get back to the bit where none of it matters because you’re all going to die screaming unless you deal with the zombies?

So I gave up on the famously periodic installments of Game of Utz, yet now find myself about a third of the way through The Bag of Lays. I can’t seem to stop. But I haven’t completely given up on my value system, so I have some complaints.

Shai’tan

Little on the nose there, buddy.

Moraine

I like Moraine, but with all her mystic wisdom and smooth skin, she could probably disseminate enough information to not utterly alienate everyone around her. She’s basically Gandalf, and Gandalf went out of his way to explain things to the innocent blue-collar workers he was dragging across half the continent, because that’s what you do. Moraine seems to want everyone to hate her, and most of them do even more than they should hate Nynaeve, who I guess gets some kind of pass because she was always horrible and everyone’s used to it.

Nynaeve

Does she ever stop being a bitch? Come. On. Nobody could reasonably be this continuously awful to everyone unless they had a severe mental disorder. I know horrible people with severe mental disorders, and even the ones whose names I am unwilling to speak aloud weren’t as bad the unending periodontal appointment that is Nynaeve’s personality.

And though she’s the worst, she has company. Throughout the books so far, virtually everyone seems to be acting on the belief that being strong means being nasty to people.

Men and women in general

I know it was 90s and nobody was woke yet, but the incessant ranking of every single female character’s approximate attractiveness gets old halfway through the first book. There is at least a little fairness in the male characters getting a roughly similar treatment, but that’s pretty boring too. Also the men are all attractive in some brooding way that speaks of how many battles they’ve fought, while the women just get something between 8.5 and 10 on HotOrNot.

The differences between men and women are constant conversation points, and by points I mean full stops. Whenever the sexes talk to each other they give up before communicating anything and blame it on men being stubborn dweebs or women being incomprehensible mysteries. But I suppose they have to be for the love stories to work out, because everyone falls in love instantaneously. You could blink and miss it. In fact, I don’t know how to catch it, because I find myself blinking constantly as relationships go from antagonistic flirting to star-crossed toxic miscommunication with no intermediate steps. I guess it makes sense because they’re all about sixteen years old.

Seriously, sixteen

And drinking and smoking like they’re a hard-sailing thirty. Medieval times, I guess, or maybe they’re all from Downeast Maine, but seems like Jordan wants all the bad decisions of teenagers (and boy does he get them) with all the atmospheric habits of middle-aged mercenaries.

Dreams

I imagine Robert Jordan told a lot of people about his dreams. I don’t mind chatting about dreams, but I also imagine Jordan as someone who turned a lot of people off the subject. Dreams figure big in The Wheel of Time: They can kill you, they exist in a kind of sub-dimension, dead wolves hang out in them, and, most importantly, everybody is having them all the time. Sometimes it’s cool, but it also floods the plot with possibly important, possibly not important symbolism, which sometimes isn’t symbolism and in a world that is already covered in magic it feels a little like somebody just didn’t want any rules at all in his fantasy epic so he could write literally anything down and stick it somewhere. This is exacerbated by the constant appearance of people who can do things that sound an awful lot like magic but it’s not the real magic it’s just something this person can do.

Ta’veren

But that’s all okay because ta’veren. Definitely gets the “Why these people?” question out of the way. They’re ta’veren. Super special. Weird things happen around them. All the time. Not a single one of them can do so much as have a drink without something happening. So things keep happening. It they weren’t ta’veren, it might seem like an endless string of random dramatic events barely bound together by a common enemy.

The common enemy

I really don’t think I need to say spoiler here. My girlfriend knew who Luke’s father was without even seeing the movies. But I have to admit I don’t know what’s going to happen in The Wheel of Time, so if there are any other generation bytes out there who intend to commit themselves to 4.4 million words of so-so fantasy, spoiler alert.

Turns out the enemy that the heroish protagonist fights and seems to kill at the end of each of the first three books wasn’t the Big Bad, which is good, because he sucked. Maybe someone told Jordan it was weird to have The Evil be a whiney expository jerk who shows up in person in the first 1/100th of the epic. The Evil was also hilariously bad at his job. So he’s dead now. Hopefully we get something better. Lanfear seems like a good upgrade, but pretty sure she’s second fiddle to the Bigger Bad. If it turns out Jordan was playing a long game, bravo, but, come on, if people were even capable of planning twenty years out we wouldn’t keep getting into the kind of messes we always end up in. For that matter, if the first bad guy had planned anything, say, two weeks in advance, he might still be alive. Evil is supposed to have plans. That’s what evil does. Good is supposed to struggle to discover the plans, not just make sure their sword is out so evil can trip and impale itself.









But I’m still reading. And I’ll probably keep reading. Mostly because it’s already open on my Kindle.