Finished reading The Wheel of Time, again....

This is the twelfth book in a series which is truly a single tale. Not a linked series of fantasy novels, but one long tale. I started rereading months ago. Each volume runs six to eight hundred pages long. A serious bit of reading, but enjoyable none-the-less.

Robert Jordan himself wrote the first eleven novels. The balance of the story was in the works when a rare disease took his life. Brandon Sanderson has been selected to write the rest of the story, and he picked up the tale and presented it admirably.

I expect the next volume to come out on schedule next Fall. I hope that the tale will remain fresh enough in my mind for that much time. Reading this epic yet again would be a challenge. Perhaps one day I will read the whole thing again in its entirety, when the final volume is completed. Until then I hope to simply pick up the story when the next volume comes out.

There is something to be said for reading series novels like this. Part of the fun is the anticipation of the next release. Generally books do not come out in a series like this more frequently than one volume each year. In some cases a bit more time is required to craft the next installment, as Harry Potter fans learned over the course of that series.

Yes, I read Harry Potter as well. That series only once, so far. I have read The Lord of the Rings more than ten times, though I cannot recall the exact count. Every couple of years I feel compelled to visit Middle Earth again. I am delighted that both Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings made the transition to movies quite well. I view the movies again from time to time, being a bit more approachable than a reading.

Perhaps not that much more approachable, come to think of it. My extended edition of The Lord of the Rings runs around thirteen hours, and the completed Harry Potter series will probably go quite a bit longer when finished. That's a bit more than an evening of movies at home.

Such series literature will be both the blessing and the curse of the eReader, no matter what model each of us ends up with. Those of you planning to hold out continue in your delusions. The prospect of carrying your entire library everywhere will necessarily draw even the most devout of "real book" readers. Most of us will still have favorites in paper book form, but we will have fewer and fewer as time goes by.

It is the transition that will be troublesome. It will be necessary to purchase once again each of those favorites, unless someone in the reading industry comes up with a way to make the transition easier. I may never give up my Red Book edition of The Lord of the Rings or my signed copy of one of the volumes of The Wheel of Time, but I will gladly exchange the hard copy of most of my hard copy books for a free or deeply discounted electronic counterpart.

But, that is then, this is now. Next, the Chainfire trilogy in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. I acquired the second and third novels this last Christmas, and now that I am in waiting mode for the next volume in The Wheel of Time, I have time to read them.