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I’ve been reading Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson, who has been chosen to write the final book of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This is a really really good book, I’m enjoying it tremendously.

Every time I look at Sandersons blog though, I can see that he gets these books in the same way i did. I had remarked earlier about how he agreed with one of my keys to being a WOT fan. And now I see another point of agreement. The person who first told me about the series recommended I read it years ago, before Path of Daggers came out. I never got around to it till right before the release of the 11th book Knife of Dreams. When I spoke to him after I started reading, he told me how its starting to get too much for him. Too long, and the pace has started to slack off. I loved the series all the way through(though I would have to say if books 7,8,9 and 10 were 2 books instead of 4 it would probably be even stronger). We have very similar reading tastes, so we tried to break it down. What we came up with is almost exactly what Mr. Sanderson talks about in his post on Crown of Swords:

I object to complaints about pacing.  I thing the pacing across the series has been even, and I certainly didn’t find this book to be any slower than previous volumes.  However, perhaps that’s because I’m able to read these all through without any wait in-between.  One thing that is happening is that as the series grows longer, the viewpoints per character grow less and less frequent.  There are enough main characters with important plots that we can’t spend an entire book focusing on just two or three of them like we did during the early books.

These books are so detailed, that it becomes difficult to enjoy that detail if your struggling to remember specific plot points while your reading. If the whole story is fresh it works better, and the details become something one savours.

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