The Wheel of Time Reread Redux: Introductory Post

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the inaugural post of the Wheel of Time Reread Redux!

I know, right, some of y’all are probably all what the hell is this, Leigh, but fear not, O my Peeps, for I shall explain all in this handy-dandy introductory post right heah. Because I love you, even if I have not met you.

Therefore, click on to see what this crazy adventure is all about!

SO, Once Upon A Time, there was an epic fantasy series called the Wheel of Time, and it was pretty popular, and yours truly liked it enough to be shanghaied into maintaining a novel-length FAQ on it, and all was chugging along pretty fair when the author of the series died, and it really sucked, mostly because the author was an awesome person who deserved to have lived way longer than that, but also partly because he didn’t have a chance to finish his magnum opus, and that sucked too. It was all very sucky, is my point.

But then a new author was found to complete the series, and things looked to be getting unsucky, and to celebrate the general de-suckification going on, the Powers That Be at Tor.com decided to conduct a Reread of the series in preparation for what was at the time going to be the last book in the series, and for possibly masochistic reasons they chose me to do it. And the rest, as they say, is history, and the Wheel of Time Reread concluded with much fanfare and explosions of feels this past May.

The thing is, though, that the Wheel of Time Reread, as it was conducted, was never a full reread of the series, for two main reasons.

The first reason is that the vast majority of the Reread (in fact, ALL of it except for the reread of the actual last book) was written while I still didn’t know how the story ended, and so I was unable to take that ending into account when commenting on the earlier books. I can’t say for sure that knowing the ending will change all of my earlier thoughts on the series, but surely it will change some, and possibly it will change a lot of them.

The second reason is that because of the way things fell out, the earliest books in the series kind of got shafted in terms of the time and attention I was able to pay to them, because up until about (I think) the fourth book or thereabouts, I was still under the impression that I only had until November of 2009 to get through the entire series, because originally the plan had been for Brandon Sanderson to finish the series in one book.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA and here we are five years later.

It all worked out for the best in the end, of course, but there’s no denying that there’s probably a lot more room for thought in my earlier commentaries than I was originally able to provide.

Hence, for these reasons, the Reread of the Reread! Ta da!

*jazz hands*

So! Lemme tell you a little how this is gonna go. Or how I think it’s gonna go, because honestly, I’m kind of making this up as things progress, so I reserve the right to adjust things as I go, depending.

But how I think it’s gonna go is that rather than reproduce the original posts in their entirety and insert commentary on them, I will be linking back to whichever original Reread post I am talking about and then, er, talk about it, with appropriate quotage where necessary. How many original posts I will be covering per Redux post will depend entirely on how much new stuff I have to say about them. It’s possible, especially for the first few books, that I might take two or more Redux posts to discuss one original post, owing to how very quickly I was going at the time.

I should note at the outset that I have really not made much of a practice of rereading my own posts, especially the earlier ones, so there is an awful lot of the Reread that I myself haven’t looked at in literally years. I expect that this will lead to a fair amount of discombobulation and embarrassment on my part, and (probably) hilarity on yours. Or so I hope. I mean, if I have to squirm over whatever terrible joke or Very Deep Thought I totally thought was a good idea at the time which probably wasn’t, at least someone ought to get some entertainment out of it, yeah?

In addition to that, I will probably also be doing, here and there, some stand-alone posts dealing with specific, series-wide things. My plans for these are as of yet rather nebulous, but for instance I will probably be doing a post concentrating on the worldbuilding of WOT, and another concerning the various prophecies throughout the series and my thoughts on how they did (or did not) get fulfilled. And other things like that. Should be fun, regardless. More As It Develops.

All of the original posts are of course listed in The Wheel of Time Reread Index here, and all Redux posts will also be archived there going forward. (The Wheel of Time Master Index, as always, is here, which has links to news, reviews, interviews, and all manner of information about the Wheel of Time in general on Tor.com.) And of course don’t forget that The Wheel of Time Reread is also available as e-books, iffn’ ya wanna.

And this should go without saying, but just in case: all Reread Redux posts will contain massive spoilers for the entire Wheel of Time series, so if you haven’t finished all of the Wheel of Time yet, this is probably a good place to stop and go do that first before coming back to this blog. Don’t worry, it’ll still be here, I promise.

And that looks to be about the size of it, I think. So welcome, one and all, to the Reread of the Wheel of Time Reread! The fun begins next Tuesday, so see you there!

Leigh Butler is a writer, blogger, and opinionator for Tor.com, where in addition to all this fresh madness, she conducts A Read of Ice and Fire. She currently lives in New Orleans, and would like summer to stop now, please.