I finished Robert Jordan’s A Crown of Swords today, Book Seven of the Wheel of Time, which means I have finished eight of these dreadful books (there’s a prequel, technically book zero) and am either halfway through the series or over halfway depending on how you’re counting. I only have four of the actual Jordan books left and then the trilogy written by Brandon Sanderson. I am also about to enter what fans of the series refer to as “the slog,” which means that a book series that will regularly go five hundred pages without a single speck of advancement in the plot is going to get slower.

Seriously, Crown of Swords is eight hundred and fifty pages long and maybe three or four actual events happen in the book– someone dies abruptly in the prologue, someone else dies abruptly and more or less off-screen in the last chapter, someone fake-dies (I don’t believe it for a tiny shred of a second) a few chapters before the end, and some of the characters find something they’ve been supposedly looking for for like three books. They’ve been looking for it for so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s supposed to be for, and when they find it, it’s also off-screen. A character literally walks out of a room with a bundle wrapped in cloth and announces “Here’s the thing! We’ve got it!”

Oh, and two other characters, whose relationship has never made sense for a single second, get married. Off-screen.

I am going to finish this damned series this year, but I have always been reading it out of spite, and nothing has changed. The physical books still make me happy every time I walk past them, though. I have no regrets.