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The Wheel of Time is over!

With the turning of the New Year I hadn’t noticed that The Wheel of Time is finally over, as Brandon Sanderson’s A Memory of Light was published. Is it a spoiler to divulge that apparently “the Good Guys” won? You can read a fun review at io9. Like many people I lost interest in the books back in the mid-1990s, but I’ve kept track of the series as a cultural phenomenon. In case you don’t get why this is interesting or of note, this enormous fantasy series spanned 14 books. The original author, Robert Jordan, died in 2007, leaving the series unfinished. A younger author, Brandon Sanderson, was commissioned to complete it. At that point it was a total narrative disaster area, so it was almost more interesting to see if Sanderson could revive the series from its somnolence. From the reviews it seems he did, though he could never rewind it back to to the verve of its early books. I feel that the reality that many people kept slogging through the series despite the fact that came to detest the characters (especially the “braid-tugging” ones) and become exhausted by the lack of plot development a classic illustration of a sunk cost fallacy.

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