The "One More Chapter" Problem
I literally almost missed my stop at Palo Alto this morning.
There I was, wedged between a guy coding in Go and someone asleep on my shoulder, absolutely blasting through the Tower of Ghenjei sequence at 1.75x speed. My heart rate was definitely not resting. (My Apple Watch actually buzzed me to breathe. Shut up, watch. Mat Cauthon is in trouble.)
Look, we're at Book 13. If you're reading this review, you've already sunk—what?—300+ hours into this series? You're committed. You're deep in the legacy code. But here's the good news: Towers of Midnight isn't just "more Wheel of Time." It's the payoff. It's the deployment after months of testing.
And honestly? It might be the best pacing in the entire series.
Sanderson Refactoring the Codebase
Let's be real for a second. The middle books of WoT (the "slog") felt like debugging a race condition that you just couldn't reproduce. Frustrating. Slow.
Sanderson stepping in for Jordan (RIP) is like a senior principal engineer coming in to clean up technical debt. He respects the original architecture, but man, he optimizes the execution. In Towers, plotlines that have been dangling since the 90s are finally getting closed out.
Specifically: Perrin.
(I know, I know. We all got tired of Perrin brooding about Faile.)
But here? Perrin's arc is finally—finally—awesome again. The sequences in Tel'aran'rhiod (the Wolf Dream) are trippy, high-stakes, and visually spectacular even in audio format. It feels like the magic system is being pushed to its absolute limit.
And Mat? Mat goes to the Tower of Ghenjei. I won't spoil it, but the atmosphere is creepy as hell. It’s basically a heist movie inside a nightmare dimension. I lived for it.
The Kramer & Reading OS
At this point, Michael Kramer and Kate Reading aren't just narrators. They are the operating system of this world.
I can't imagine anyone else voicing these characters. Kramer's voice for Mat—that slight irreverence, the weary "why me?" tone—is just spot on. He nails the shift between Mat's humor and the sheer terror of the Aelfinn/Eelfinn realm.
And Kate Reading handling Egwene's politics in the White Tower? masterful. She gives Egwene this steel-spined authority that makes you want to sit up straighter on the train.
Are there glitches? Yeah, a few.
There are some weird pronunciation shifts that happen between books (the whole Mesaana thing). It’s like when a library update deprecates a function you were using. Annoying, but it doesn't break the build. You get used to it after ten minutes.
The ROI on 38 Hours
Is it worth the 38-hour runtime?
Yes.
Because unlike some of the earlier books where 10 hours could pass with nothing but dress descriptions and tea drinking, Towers of Midnight moves. It's frantic. The timeline is a bit wonky (Sanderson plays with non-linear storytelling here, so pay attention), but the convergence of plotlines is so satisfying.
It’s perfect for the commute because the prose is accessible, but the emotional beats are heavy enough to drown out the noise of the Caltrain. Just... maybe set an alarm if you're nearing your stop.
Final Verdict
This is the penultimate build before the final release. Everything is on fire, the stakes are infinite, and I am here for it.
If you stopped the series during the slog, come back. The patch notes are incredible.
