re: Wheel of Time TV, Full Trailer Oct 27, show premieres Nov 19

Ya well Shadow Rising up through book 7 or so is just an incredible stretch in fantasy, so you are right in the middle of most people's favorite part.

Outside of books 9 and 10, the rest of the books are really all pretty good to exceptional, including the final 3 by Sanderson so 12 / 14 is a solid average for the series as a whole.

I don't know if its 100% true but it seemed in one of Sanderson's interviews he mentioned that Books 10 and 11 were written as a single volume - and they needed to split it in half to publish the books. So they just split the book in half chapter wise and so you end up with Book 10 as pure set up and Book 11 as the turn to the end, which kind of makes sense.

I think the other aspect that comes into play here is that Jordan was writing the series essentially following the main characters every day from when Moiraine comes to Emond's Field up through the ending. So he doesn't really have very much "7 months later" type techniques to pass time where the characters get help up and are struggling to complete their task. This sort of aspect comes to a head in books 9 and 10 - although the back end part of 9 is still pretty good it is the only other one I felt was below the Wheel of Time standard.