So full confession here, I’m on a podcast with a group of friends where we started off talking about the Wheel of Time TV show. We loved the TV show so much and it was such a disappointment when it was cancelled.
So we decided to to read the books and talk about them together. I’m going to split these posts up based on how many chapters we read before we get together to talk about them.
I picked up the whole series when it was on sale on Humble Bundle. I will warn you, most of my initial reading will be comparing the book to the show.
Link to Podcast
Chapters: Prologues to 13:
The first thing I found out, is that the current versions of this book have an extra prologue that takes place when Egwene is nine years old. And in that prologue, one of the first things that we find out is that Egwene has the job of carrying water for the villagers who are working and she is going to be the best water-carrier ever. So I know that the show absolutely nailed her character.
You get much more description of the village residents in the books and there is definitely more attention paid to the side-characters. Rand is much more central to the story, it focuses on his journey through the woods with Tam for example, instead of on the (much more visually exciting) battle that takes place in the village. They also made Egwene the same age as the boys, which made it less clear which one of the four friends was the Dragon and added some intrigue to the first season.
I use the term “friends” loosely, because although the boys were all friends Egwene and Rand seemed to barely know each other. In fact there seemed to be a big divide between the men and women of the village in a way that seems frankly weird to me. Having different “Counsels” OK, having different jobs, sure that’s not unusual… but to never even talk to each other? Socialize at all? Maybe that’s what the maypole was for, I dunno. In spite of that, the matrons seem to be all about fixing people up together. Everybody was saying that Egwene and Rand would be getting married already when she was only nine. And Rand learned to avoid the women of the town because they would immediately start trying to get his father to meet somebody.
I liked how Padan Fain was barely there at all. It makes his return all that more shocking.
Thom reads as a different character too. He’s less “mysterious travelling man with secret skills” and more court jester.
Chapters: 14 to 25:
It could be because of the age difference between the books and the show, but man, Matt is not smart here. It gets to the point where Rand is seriously considering getting out of his bathtub long enough to thump him just to get Matt to stop talking about Trolloc’s. Fortunately Lan is everybody’s grumpy dad and chases the servant out of the room. And then later of course it’s Matt who tells Padan Fain exactly where they are staying in town.
Then the incident with the Whitecloaks – these people are genuinely dangerous and Matt decides to play a practical joke on them. Not smart.
The dream they all share is dead rats instead of the bats in the show. I’m just glad we didn’t get a description of Rand pulling a dead rat out of his throat when he woke up.
We meet Min much earlier in the book. And man, she is creepy. That whole “you can’t escape me” thing. I did kind of prefer her personality in the show, she is much more somebody who is plagued by her visions rather than the cackling witch she is in the book.
Nynaeve joins the group at the inn, and she wants to take her people home. Unfortunately Rand runs into a Fade in the middle of the night and they are running away again. They have another encounter with the Whitecloaks at the gates and I have to assume that Morraine casts some kind of a glamour to make herself look bigger. This is a very different type of magic than in used in the show as well.
I found it interesting that when they have to fight the Trollocs in the woods, Perrin and Rand were shouting “Manetheren” but Matt yells something in the old tongue. We know from the show that Matt turns out to be a Hero of the Horn, so I bet that’s a bit of foreshadowing.
Shador Logoth is described ad being much bigger and more intimidating in the book. They also encounter Mordeth, who was not included in the TV show. I gather he was something like a Wormtongue character, somebody who gradually corrupted the personalities of everybody in the city until Mashadar manifested.
The team is still split up after they escape from Shador Logoth, and Nynaeve ends up with Lan and Morraine. But this time Rand and Matt end up on Bayle Domon’s boat along with Thom. During the intial struggle Rand almost gets captured by a Trolloc and is saved only when the ship’s boom knocks the Trolloc off the boat. I have to wonder if that’s Rand channelling without realizing it. He also starts already displaying a bit of mental instability when he climbs up the mast and starts playing around as if he can’t fall.
Perrin and Egwaine end up together just as in the show, but the sequence of events is different. They run into Elyas instead of the Whitecloaks. Book Elyas is much more forthcoming about how the Wolf Brother connections works and he’s the one who takes them to the Tuatha’an, who know him and all about his wolf friends.
Perrin doesn’t seem to like Aram much in the book, and doesn’t approve of how he flirts with Egwaine. This is completely different from TV Aram – he flirts with both of them.