Daniel Shellenbarger > Recent Status Updates

Here we are... the Last Battle... Brandon sure does love big chapters for the climax

A little progress, things have been getting dire for our heroes, and even though this is a reread and I know how it ends, it's still an effort pushing through the hard parts (in many ways this book is like if you took the battles of Minas Tirith and the Black Gates and the Mordor chapters from Return of the King and stretched them out to 900 pages, and a lot more major characters died).

past it, actually, but as usual, I forgot to note my page number when I got off break.

freaking Seanchan, the world is ending and they won't help out unless they get to keep their slaves.

another favorite scene not in the original: communists vs. fascists brawl at Goodwood (actually, haven't had Spode at all to this point)

Can't believe it, the whole "Fire" scene from "Ask Dad" wasn't in the original story at all. Cyril Basington-Basington gets fired during the dress-rehearsal and that's pretty much the end of the story. Likewise, Lady Glossip doesn't even appear in the whole Bingo/Bertie x Honoria story. Now I'm not saying the BBC versions are better, but... man, their writers made some great additions to these stories.

In some ways, I think Aviendha's vision is the grimmest moment in the entire series. Sure, in A Memory of Light we have (seemingly) dozens of characters killed off, but it's all to a purpose, all for victory, Aviendha's vision suggests (though not definitively) that ultimately it will be the loathsome Seanchan who enjoy the fruits of that hard-won victory. It's a bitter pill to swallow.

So far, Bingo x Myrtle (Rosie M. Banks), Pearls Mean Tear, and halfway through Bingo/Bertie x Honoria

Rereading this, I totally forgot that Perrin's chapters are happening during the events of The Gathering Storm while the rest of the chapters are happening after those events, which makes it very confusing, particularly as Tam al'Thor seems to be in two places at the same time for much of the book.