Back in November 2021 I stated I was worred about the upcoming TV Adaptation of "The Wheel of Time", as I've been burnt before around adaptations of books I love.
I decided at the time to start re-reading the books...a task I'd abandoned about 15 years ago as a sense of dread overcame me when the original author died, and the task of completing them was handed to someone else, who immediately split the last book into 3. Of course, actually reading them was a bit too much of a mountain to climb, I'd estimated it would take over a year at my normal reading pace. Instead, I leveraged my media server (a very posh name for a Pi4 with a USB HDD plugged into it) to listen to all the books. All 15 of them, all 461 hours of them (at normal pace). I started on the 14th November, and have been listening pretty much constantly for 3 months... (if you do the maths this is 3-4 hours a day on average)...
...while I work...
...while I play games...
...while I cycle...
...while I cook...
...sometimes, while I'm asleep...
I finished today. It's been a journey. It's been a constant background to my life for 3 months...honestly, it's going to be a little weird not listening to them. I do now feel I can start watching the TV show, and judge it against the books. I already know there are changes, and I can totally understand why...the books are just so....dense...with information.
Some random thoughts.
I have massive respect for the 2 narrators Kate Reading and Michael Kramer....not only for such a monstrous undertaking, but for taking on the accents, aflections and pronunciations of the entire thing. There are over 2,400 named characters in the books, and plenty of nations and accents to tackle, along with some weird words. Just the pre-planning of how each accent would be handled, how each name would be said etc. would have been huge. I should say that apart from the first book I listened at a 1.2 speed multiplier, so I may not actually recognise their normal voices (they soundd normal at this speed...any faster sounded awful, and I would say their natural reading pace was a little slow).
The replacement author Brandon Sanderson did, I think, a good job in adapting his style to match Robert Jordan. There was not much left incomplete...pretty much every story-arc was completed, and (at least to my memory) very few inconsistencies. He's definitely avoided the issue that the TV finish of "Game of Thones" had, with story arcs left open, character storylines never completed (or sometimes never really started, just a random high profile appearance followed by...nothing).
I would say his pacing was slightly different, with chapter length reducing slightly, with one notable outlier.
I didn't remember just how much detail was in the books. Robert Jordan was notoriously long-winded (I read an interview with his original publisher, who when told he was planning a trilogy signed him up for 6 books, as in his own words he "tended to go long". It ended up at 14 and a prequel), but he clearly had a huge amount of notes, information and plans, and while he can be accused of some padding, he has story arcs mentioned in the first couple of books that only really play out towards the very end. It's a really remarkable piece of work, and clearly his lifes work and love. He will detail individual rooms, describe towns, landscapes, smells, go into backstories of minor characters and give motivations. There are so many call backs to prior encounters, especially towards the end, and some are remarkably clever. By the same token, I would dread to even think about adapting it for TV...so much is going to have to be hacked out and re-shaped...I'm genuinely interested to see how the showrunners handle it. I do think some of the recurring themes (Jordan really liked women doing ceremonies nude, and most punishments were from Victorian schools) have not aged well into the 21st Century, and I have no doubt they will be removed and altered. The TV Show, if it gets completed, will be about 60-80 hours max, so thats a huge reduction.
Its remarkably derivative. Normally I wouldn't be aware of this, however one benefit of an audiobook is that you can do background reading while you listen. The series has a huge cult following, and lots of background information assembled, and it wasn't unusual for me to go down a rabbit hole around some areas of the story. What becomes apparent from this is that Robert Jordan was a huge fantasy and history geek. As one example (and I'll try not to put too much spoiler info in here) I had assumed one character (Matt) was based on a trickster god such as Loki or Anansi. Apparently he has much more in common with Odin...so I now know way more about that particualr set of legends. This sort of thing is repeated constantly throughout the various story arcs and characters, Jordan took on a huge amount of other inpirations into his epic. I don't consider this a negative, nearly all stories are derivative in some way or another, and I have massive respect for the amount of background reading and research that went into the entire thing.
One thing in particular brought a big grin to my face. There is a magic power called "Gateways"...basically think "Portal", only from anywhere to anywhere. This is very, very similar to a D&D Priest Spell from 2nd Edition called Dimensional Folding, which my favourite D&D character of all time (Bollax, the Warrior-Priest champion of the War-God Killian, a Lawful-Good tour-de-force of righeousness) abused in plenty. To the continual dismay of the DM, we charged armies across nations, redirected rivers, pointed volcanos at enemies and generally acted like dicks. Jordan and Sanderson outdo me, with my favourite being a cannon barrage pointed at a wizard at point-blank range. It's glorious, and definitely smells like a roleplay session gone wild. Generally, in the battles (there are many) they do a good job of portraying how advances in technology can completely sway results, akin to when your tanks in Civilisation meet the barbarians who haven't gotten past throwing rocks yet.
I said earlier that Sandersons pacing was maybe a bit faster, with chapter times reducing from about 50-60 minutes down to 30-40...however towards the end I got got caught out. In the last book, I thought I was progressing well, however then I hit chapter 37. It's over 9 hours long. 9 hours! To be fair, it's sorta important, but even so, I do think it could have been segmented. It took 3 days to get past it. Once that was done, it almost felt like a sprint to the end...barely another 10 hours in total.
Overall, it's been a great experience. I've not done audiobooks before, and for super-long form stories such as this I think it works really well. I definitely need a break now, and I have a backlog of actual books to read (and a TV series), but I'll definitely look for more audiobooks that grab my attention. I'm heading off to Spain for a week soon, and my plan is to watch the TV series while out there (flights and evenings, as the hotel we stay at doesn't get english TV)...I have all episodes loaded onto a tablet in preparation.