A Year of The Wheel of Time (maybe?)

I am sitting in front of the box right now. It weighs 13.5 pounds. Removing the prequel volume, it weighs 13 pounds.

Adding up all the pages of all 14 remaining books yields 12,143 pages of Rand, Mat, Perrin et al tromping around the world. Dividing that number by 365 is 33 pages.

Thirty-three pages a day, to finish the entire 14 volume Wheel of Time series in a year.

Can I do this? Do I even really want to?

I've read the first three books a few times (once during a Thanksgiving break from high school, during which I made my eyes sore). I believe I started the fourth book ages ago, but got bored. And then the series didn't seem like it would ever end, and I decided to wait until the final book was written. 

Robert Jordan died in 2007, and that certainly didn't feel like a good omen for the series at the time. But Brad Sanderson took up the pen and Jordan's notes, and wrote the final three books of the series, wrapping up the saga in 2012. At that time, I had a preschooler and a toddler -- not exactly a lifestyle that encourages three-inch-thick fantasy novel reading.

It's now 2021. I've just lived though a year in which many books were purchased with all the intentions in the world of reading them, but nothing came of it. Furthermore, no new hobbies were learned, little exercise was done, and distance learning became a giant source of mental anguish for one of the kids. My spaces of away-from-home adulthood and quiet were ripped from me. Even the hard won WFH space I carved out in the garage came to nothing, needing to be tied to the house as I was. And there is no end in sight for any of these things in this new year. WHY ON EARTH WOULD I TRY TO ADD A YEAR-LONG PROJECT TO MY LIFE RIGHT NOW?

It is totally stupid. But I'm going to try anyway. Because it's not a year all at once. It's 33 pages a day. Just over two pages an hour. And last year I lived a year without routines, without anchors. And it did not go well.

So here I go, to "spit in Sighitblider's eye" by committing to reading 33 pages a day. (And writing a quick summary here on spacehey to keep myself honest.)