A couple of friends told me about this series and said it was really good. Then when I was doing some research on Amazon, I came across most of the books. I have to say that the blurbs have me fascinated.

Has anyone read any books in this series, and would you classify it as Christian? If so, what were your impressions? Were there any inappropriate scenes or words? Was the plot intriguing?

I firmly believe that reading good novels, especially in my writing genre, helps saturate my brain and improve on my own books. I'm always on the lookout for good fantasy stories, and from what I've read, this series is supposed to be awesome.

I read the first chronological one in the series (New Springs) by 'accident'... I was going to read more, but the library never had Book II and the size of the series didn't help...

I think that from the perspectives of worldbuilding, character, and plot (except that the last is so complicated that in the middle sometimes it's seemed like whole books were devoted to "what else has been going on in the world through the perspective of these formerly-minor characters") it's quite good, maybe even excellent. But thematically ... I read all the early ones too quickly and too long ago (i.e. before I really started thinking about such things) to have an impression.


The worldbuilding is built on some Eastern assumptions (I wouldn't say "New Age," but rather drawing from the same roots as the New Age movement), such as an endless repeating cycle of ages, reincarnation, equality-yet-complementarity of the sexes---but it's quite hard to tell whether Jordan (and now Brandon Sanderson, who is finishing the series after Jordan's death) is using these uncritically, affirming them, or turning them on their head. (That last item in particular: in the series, 'magic' is divided into two sides, male and female, and a man can only draw from saidin and a woman from saidar---the two are similar in some ways, different in others, but about equal---but at the beginning saidin has been tainted ever since the beginning of the current age, so that any male "channeler" inevitably goes mad.) I also just had a thought that it's even possible that Jordan is using this partly-Eastern background to comment on some Christian eschatalogical schools of thought.

(I recall reading one review or essay somewhere that made much of the common phrase "by my hope of salvation and rebirth" (emphasis added).)

I do think that the Wheel of Time series is well worth reading, studying critically, and pondering; it's one of the big works of fantasy of the past generation, so I think we as a community didn't study it to learn what we can from it and to engage with what it's trying to say.

But for a young writer:

The worldbuilding is not obviously Christian (and there is evidence for its being not Christian), though Jordan was at least nominally a Christian himself. And it's decidedly aimed at the mass market. So I'd say it doesn't really fit the "Christian fiction" category.

About what we've come to expect from modern fantasy with romantic subplots---there are a few scenes that parents rightly deem inappropriate for children. Language-wise, I think pretty much all the "cursing" done by the characters is using phrases specific to the world, but in any case it all flew over my head.

In summary, I think that a young writer should probably wait to read the Wheel of Time series until he or she is more mature in his or her faith and isn't quite as impressionable. (I wish I had waited ... sneaking out to our barn, where most of our family library is stored, and reading these and Bujold's Vorkosigan series was one of my bits of preteen and teenage rebellion, since my parents had told me to wait until I was older to read them, but I hadn't yet learned to read critically.)

I read the first two! That's a huge accomplishment. They're long books. Really, really long that go on, and on, and on.

Not really New Age, but the milieu premise is that time is a wheel that keeps repeating. I remember a few elements that seemed Christian to me, but I read those two several years ago, so I don't remember.

Yes. And for the first few books (if I remember correctly ...) the plot hasn't yet begun to "fray" all that much. The plot gets so complicated and vast in scope that some of the later books (about book 9 or book 10, at a guess) have been described as "what's been going on in the rest of the world during the previous book" (though that's not entirely fair).


Yes. One age follows another, and eventually (long after history has become myth, then legend, then forgotten) the Wheel weaves the same tapestry over again. The idea of history as a repetitive cycle, it's worth noting, seems to be a very common motif in various ancient mythologies and philosophies, with the Jewish and then Christian insistence on a fixed beginning moving toward a planned and certain end remarkable by contrast.
And whatever we think about it, Robert Jordan's story simply wouldn't work without that basic framework, it's woven in (no pun intended) so firmly on so many levels.
What's if anything more worrying is the absence of any "religion" in the traditional sense---there's the Wheel of Time, and the Source which "channelers" "channel" ... and that's about it, except for the Enemy. There are a lot of various groups with various superstitions, apocalyptic ideas, and so on, but their various beliefs are about the world, each other (the "Whtecloaks," for example, believe that all "channelers" are in friends/servants of the Enemy), what is to come at the end of the age, and how they ought to behave, but essentially nothing at all about cosmology.

As I noted above, Jordan was at least nominally a Christian (I seem to recall Episcopalian, but I'm not at all sure on that point ...), for what it's worth ...

That would be why it seemed to be moving quite slowly then.

I hadn't noticed that part, but you are right.

I somehow forced my way through nine of them when I was 12 and I didn't even like them. I had this thing back then about finishing every book/series I started. . . I think that was the series that broke me.

Personally, I did not enjoy them. They are rather cliche, dealing with the "chosen one" that you find in many fantasy works. However, I did find the idea of the Aes Sedai and "channeling" fascinating. As far as Christian themes go, I would not label it inherently Christian. Of course, it has been nine years since I've read them, and, honestly, I was pretty scarred by the later books as a twelve-year-old. The first two or three are your basic Bildungsroman sort of deal, with themes I believe one could label as Christian. The later ones become more and more adult with each successive book. I suppose it depends on your age and maturity level, but the later books have a lot of sex in them, and not regular sex either. It gets kind of disturbing at points, so I would advise you to use your discretion, particularly if you are under 16. Overall I would say they're not really worth the ridiculous amount of time it takes to read them. Perhaps the first two or three, but even those were a bit dull.

My parents gave me the first book for my birthday several years ago. After reading the first one, I was hooked on the series and worked on getting the rest. However, my enthusiasm for the series waned, the longer it progressed. At first I thought it was just three or four books. Then I discovered five and six, and later on, 8-10. When I got the tenth book, I thought that at last the series was finished, but then it ended on a cliffhanger. I did some digging and when I found out that there were still more books coming out to it, I got frustrated and stopped reading the series.
Overall, despite some New Age elements, it was a good series but I found the author to be very long-winded, and I got annoyed with all the subplots and new characters popping up and nothing really getting resolved.
Even my mother dropped it because it was so long.

Lightwalker's comment is a fairly common complaint with the series, and is reasonable. (And this is part of why I'm not going to put it on my list of books everyone ought to read.) But while Jordan was long-winded (he proposed the series as a trilogy, was given a six-book contract because his editor knew he tended to underestimate, and ended up with, if I remember correctly, sixteen volumes, each "epic-length" even by epic fantasy standards), and I think from about the middle of the series on the publisher decided to not spend much editorial effort on paring it down because it'd still be a best-seller anyway, it's "simply" a complicated story that widens to include a vast scope ... with careful effort someone might be able to revise it down to fourteen or even conceivably ten volumes, but not much further, I think.

In any case, the most recent volume is definitely the last ("I'd thought we'd never see the day!" that we'd see the words "the final volume of the Wheel of Time" on the cover of a book), and while not entirely as satisfying as some of the earlier volumes, it's still a worthy conclusion to the series, and the series is one of the major mythos of the past generation that I think readers and writers alike ought to engage with.

*chuckles* I have to admit that I was shocked when I found out that the series actually came to an end.

I did, in fact, read the whole series, minus that last one. I'm waiting for it to be in paperback, or kindle, or somehow reasonably affordable.
It's an interesting world. I like the development of his world and how he can bring in entirely new cultures halfway through a series and make them seem as if they belonged all along. And what I'm really curious about are the 'lands beyond the Waste' that he's always mentioning. He just barely hints at what's there -there's so much potential! I also wish we could have seen Malkier before it fell, because Lan is my favourite character.
That said, it went on so long, it's difficult to keep track of the characters and whose side they're on and who died. I actually kept a list while I was reading it, of Aes Sedai and which Ajahs they're in. Plus, there is a lot of that 'what was going on in the rest of the world during...' parts.
I would not classify it as 'Christian'. But I would like to note that they acknowledge both the 'Creator' and the 'Enemy', at least from the point of view of the major characters that we follow from the beginning. The Source is less like 'the Force' from Star Wars than I originally thought it would be. It's not alive -it's just like a river of power that they can draw on, which, to my mind, made it a fairly legitimate cobha. I objected to the fact that they often used what they considered good things to curse people, but the swears, as someone said, were fairly limited to ones that made sense in the story -they were 'their' swears, not 'our' swears. That said, it's evident fairly early on what words they use as swears.

My opinion overall? The writing is good. I was drawn in by the world he created, and wanting to see more of it. I find his writing very vivid. But, the story is ridiculously long, so you have to be either very dedicated or just have a lot of spare time to want to get through them. I only want to finish them because I want to know how many people die. He's usually fairly good at not leaving his books with cliffhanger endings. Except, of course, the second-to-last one. And the last couple, that Brandon Sanderson wrote, are on par with the rest of the series. It carries over really well.

When the choice of Sanderson to complete the series was announce, my dad read one of Sanderson's novels and said that he didn't much care for Sanderson's ideas (plots, characters, etc.), but that his style (on a sentence-to-sentence and paragraph-to-paragraph level) was very similar to Jordan's, so he would probably do well. And this proved to be the case. I didn't read my first "solo Sanderson" until after I'd read A Memory of Light, but after experiencing him both in his own element and ghost-writing for Jordan, my opinion is the same ... I got a quarter of the way into The Alloy of Law before uttering the Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care what happens to these people!") and abandoning it, while, as I saidd above, I really liked the concluding volumes of the Wheel of Time.

(By the way: It's not really fair to say "... that ... Sanderson wrote ...", because Jordan left fairly detailed outlines and drafts for a significant fraction of what ended up being the last three volumes.)


The copy I read was lent to us by a friend of our family (the last remaining member besides us of our book discussion group). But is it possible that a local library might have it?

I tried to read the first book. I read 300 pages and nothing had happened. So I got fed up and quit.
(Started reading a book on geography instead. )