Minor Thoughts from me to you

About 3 ½ years ago, Brandon Sanderson gave a talk at the Polaris Conference. I listened the the recording and took some notes on his comments about the Wheel of Time. Here's the overview he gave of the series.

• Books 1-3 (The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn) are quest stories
• Books 4-6 (The Shadow Rising, The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos) slow way down and are really deep character drawings. The destinations stopped being as important as what was happening with the characters and the way the world was expanding. If you don't make the transition, book 4 is a hard transition but is the favorite of many fans.
• Book 7-9 (A Crown of Swords, The Path of Daggers, Winter's Heart) are the start of a bunch of big arcs and they stopped being individual books. There aren't climaxes where you'd expect until book 9, which has one of the biggest climaxes of the entire series.
• Book 10 (Crossroads of Twilight) is a weird outlier. It's a parallel novel that tells the backstories of some of the side stories. It's the slowest and is catching you up on what happened with some of the characters during the big events of book 9. It lays a lot of foundation work.
• Book 11 (Knife of Dreams) starts to build on the foundation of book 10.

I've kept this in mind ever since. Now that I'm in the middle of book 8 (The Path of Daggers), it's an even better help to keep my bearings in this immense story.