What do you know… despite the recent setbacks, last week turned out fine after all.
There were a couple of pretty awesome internet finds earlier in the week that lifted my spirits, namely the cast photo of Neil Gaiman‘s Neverwhere radio series (Benedict Cumberbatch! James McAvoy! Anthony Stewart Head!) and the teaser trailer for the upcoming monsters vs. robots film Pacific Rim by director Guillermo del Toro. I felt that things were looking up and I should just focus on surviving the work week, so I can properly recuperate over the weekend.
Then, this.
I was working into the wee hours of pre-dawn Saturday to finish last week’s writing assignments when I noticed that author Brandon Sanderson posted a video made by publishing imprint Tor Books on Facebook. The video featured Brandon Sanderson, editor Harriet McDougal, Tor Books founder Tom Doherty, writer and Dragonmount founder Jason Denzel, and author Patrick Rothfuss talking about the upcoming A Memory of Light.
More than just a video to remind readers about the book’s release on January 8, 2013, the video featured commentaries about their experiences with The Wheel of Time series, both on the process of its creation (for Harriet McDougal and Tom Doherty) and how it made an impact on their lives, particularly for Brandon Sanderson, who became the series’s successor after the death of original author Oliver Rigney, Jr., more popularly known as Robert Jordan.
Anticipating the final installment of the massively epic The Wheel of Time series is a labor of love for its fans. It’s not just because of the twenty three years it took to get to the fourteenth and final book of the series since The Eye of the World was first published, but also because it meant that we can finally read that final scene that Robert Jordan wrote. There was a time when fans of the series thought that we would never see the end, since Robert Jordan was still in the midst of writing the final book when he succumbed to his battle with cardiac amyloidosis. Even after his wife Harriet McDougal announced that Brandon Sanderson would take over the series, and write based on the outline and notes left behind by Robert Jordan, there was still a sense of apprehension over how it would affect The Wheel of Time.
I remembered putting off reading the twelfth book, The Gathering Storm, even after my friend Jay gave me a copy for Christmas a couple of years back. The book was the twelfth in what would become a series of fourteen installments, stemming from Harriet and Brandon’s decision to split the original final book into three parts because of its sheer immensity. I was apprehensive, because of how important the series was to me as a fantasy fiction reader. I remember mentioning in one of my first posts about books on this blog that The Wheel of Time was the series that cemented my love for fantasy fiction, thus influencing the genre that would dominate my library.
When The Towers of Midnight was due to be released locally, I made the decision to finally get around to reading The Gathering Storm. Of course, I had to do something else first, which is my tradition to re-read the entire series to prepare myself every time a new book came out. This practice was my way of professing my love for the series and to help me get all the details sorted out, since the series does contain a large number of characters and major events. Re-reading helped refresh my memories and kept the backtracking to a minimum. So I re-read everything, starting with The Eye of the World and even threw in the prequel installment New Spring into the mix. Within two months, I was ready to open The Gathering Storm and started reading.
And I wasn’t disappointed.
Brandon Sanderson has a different storytelling voice. That much was apparent. But it also felt right. I realized then that what I wanted from the successor of the series wasn’t someone who would replicate Robert Jordan’s style. What I wanted was somebody who could actually continue the story, and that was very apparent in Brandon Sanderson’s work on The Gathering Storm and The Towers of Midnight. It was evident that he had a mastery of the material he was given, which was borne from his experience as a reader and as a fan of the series. It felt as if he really did love the world and characters created by Robert Jordan, which made me appreciate his storytelling voice and its stamp on the series. It turns out that my fears were unfounded and I couldn’t be any happier about that.
I became a fan of Brandon Sanderson’s work on The Wheel of Time. I would later appreciate his own work after reading his debut novel Elantris. I will soon be reading the Mistborn series, and will probably follow it immediately with The Way of the Kings (first book of The Stormlight Archive series).
But of course, re-reading The Wheel of Time series will be the priority on my reading list.
And so I patiently wait for A Memory of Light. Even if I do have to extend my patience beyond January 8, 2013, since I intend to wait until the paperback edition is released (my entire collection is in paperback). I do have to admit, though, that I can barely contain my excitement to own a copy that features the book cover artwork by artist Michael Whelan.
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| image from dragonmount |
Of course, there are things that are very much worth the wait. And I’m sure that every The Wheel of Time series fan will agree with me.
I don’t think I’m the only one who felt that the contents of the video above was the highlight of their week.
Happy reading!! 🙂
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