Not too long ago, my dad told me the story of the time he thought he saw Wilford Brimley eating breakfast at a diner in Arizona. Wilford Brimley liked my tweet about said story, which I take as a tacit acknowledgement that the story is true.
Happy birthday, Dad. I can’t wait to hear your next out-of-the-blue celebrity story.
It’s 8pm on my birthday, and I am ready to go to bed. This is because of (a) the time change and (b) all of the empanadas I ate for dinner. Here’s what we’re having for the rest of Birthday Week:
One of the SITS Girls writing prompts for November wanted to know what the best book I’ve read lately is. That’s kind of hard to answer, because the last 12 and a half books I’ve read have all been from one series, so it feels like I’ve been reading one story since July.
I started reading Robert Jordan’s 13-book “Wheel of Time” fantasy series when I was in high school, but my interest waned somewhere around book 9. I don’t remember exactly why, but I suspect it had something to do with me going to college and reaching the end of what had already been published right around the same time. I started reading them again over the summer because I heard that Amazon was making it into a TV series and my brother, who also started re-reading them, said they held up pretty well 20 years after watching them the first time.
I’m currently about halfway through the final book. The last three books in the series — “The Gathering Storm,” “Towers of Midnight” and “A Memory of Light” — were actually posthumously finished by another author, Brandon Sanderson, after Robert Jordan passed away. He worked from Jordan’s outline and notes, apparently, so the story is still progressing as Jordan had planned. There’s a marked difference in the writing styles, and there are a lot of things I prefer in Sanderson’s work. His characterization seems to delve a lot deeper, and he makes far fewer references to the female characters’ breasts.
I’m not sure which book is my favorite. I really appreciate the world building in the first one, “Eye of the World,” and I love the end of the sixth, “Lord of Chaos.” Hopefully “A Memory of Light” will end up being a satisfying ending.
I’m really curious to see how they tell such a huge-sprawling story as a TV series. I hope they don’t cut some of my favorite characters or bits from it.