Lord of Chaos

Executive Summary: I enjoyed this more on my reread than on my initial read, but I still found it weaker than the previous books, and the start of the slower pacing of the “middle books” that often prevent me from recommending this series to others.Audiobook: Micheal Kramer and Kate Reading once again do a fantastic job with the narration. They made listening to the slower parts of this book a lot more tolerable than reading them probably would have been.Full ReviewMy original rating of this book was 2 stars. I suspect it was maybe a 2.5 rounded down but it's hard to say at this point. The audio book is 41 hours long, and the prologue makes up over 3 hours of that. That's over 7% of the book. I think it helps to highlight some of the pacing issues I have with this book.We are introduced to entirely too many new characters and POVs for me to keep them all straight in my head. Finally Perrin shows up in the prologue after being absent in the last book, only to not show up again until the final third or so.That said, I was never bored by this one. I think part of that is because it was a reread so I was picking up stuff I missed the first time, and I'm more attached the the characters who are sometimes annoying here than I was on my original read.There is entirely too much setup and moving things around. I feel like this book could be about 25% shorter and not lose too much. This is epic fantasy, so of course there is going to be more detail and world building than your typical book, but I question what a lot of the early parts really add to the narrative.The last third of this book does help to make up for a lot though. The pacing gets much better, and the scale of plot developments is massive. These aren't tiny details lost to the history books. This is history in the making. The actions of the protagonists will be remembered for years to come. Assuming they can all survive the rise of the Dark One and his minions.I'm a huge wheel of fan time, but it has flaws. This book starts to really highlight some of my issues with the book, but it also has the elements that made me love it enough to do a reread. It's hard for me to say if you'll have the same feelings that I do. If you've loved the books so far, you're probably going to be good here. If you were so-so on them, this may be where things start to fall off for you. It's hard to justify telling someone to read 600 pages to “get to the good parts”.Overall a decent entry in the series, and definitely better than [b:Crossroads of Twilight 113435 Crossroads of Twilight (Wheel of Time, #10) Robert Jordan https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1408325146s/113435.jpg 195579], but by far the weakest book of the series of the first six.