A word to the wise, if you have yet to begin reading the Wheel of Time series, please don’t start now. I first started reading the series over fifteen years ago. The Gathering Storm is the twelfth book in the series and the first to be written by Brandon Sanderson following the death of the original author who wrote under the pen name Robert Jordan. The thirteenth book, Towers of Midnight, has recently been released but I’m waiting for the paperback edition. The current plan is that there will be one last book after this to finish the series.
The sheer volume of text alone certainly qualifies the series as being epic. While it’s a tragedy that Jordan died before he managed to complete his tale, there’s no faulting him for not trying his darnest, turning new manuscripts in like clockwork. Unfortunately, the prose is pretty uneven in quality. Some of the last few books that Jordan wrote himself were so forgettable that I actually bought one of them twice because I couldn’t remember whether or not I’d already read it! This is because the books were so full of foreshadowing and plotting that hardly anything of note actually happened and the story barely advanced at all.
