I find myself halfway through the fifth book in the series, the Fires of Heaven. I certainly hadn’t planned on getting wrapped up in an epic, twelve volume plus fantasy. But these things happen. Granted, they happen to me more than most people.

While perusing the West Wing of the National Gallery of Art with my father over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I noted that my taste in visual art – paintings and the like – ran to two extremes. I love post-war, avant-garde art and I love dull, boring 18th and 19th century Italianate landscapes – the kind with crumbling Roman ruins and a shepherd in it.

My literary tastes seem to run in similarly divergent directions. I love poetry (though not always the most avant-garde poetics, i.e., Language and Conceptual Poetry) and dense, critical and philosophical tomes. But I also love me some paperback fantasy and science fiction.

I stumbled across the Wheel of Time series in a New Jersey bathroom.

Let me explain: I was managing some political races in South Jersey and was sharing an apartment with my field director who kept a hardback copy of the second book, The Great Hunt, in the bathroom. I read a couple of pages before getting my own place.

I won’t say I was instantly hooked. More that, having started, I felt the need to see how it ended. So I picked up the first book and things escalated and now I’m on the fifth.

I will be the first to admit they are not great literature. The author, Robert Jordan, took a little while to find a voice beyond just that of a second-rate Tolkien hack. Once he’d done so, he found himself falling into the sprawling cast of characters, plot gone out of control trap (which is almost inevitable if you go over ten volumes, I would guess). And he has even less of a sense of humor than Tolkien. But, I keep on reading. And that must mean something.

I should also note that Jordan passed away, lest we be tempted to speak too ill of him.

One day, I will be finished with them and can move on to something else.