My Every Day

February 5, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
View all responses

My most ideal day? Well, that’s simple enough to describe — it’s pretty much my every day so far this year:

Get up. Do stretching exercises. Make the bed. Have a cup of tea. Play a bit of a hidden object game. Write a blog post. Read. Have breakfast. Read. Have lunch. Read. Take a short walk. Read. Rest a bit. Read. Have a quick snack. Read. Check online to see what if anything is going on with my blog. Read. Read some more until it’s time to go to bed, then read until lights out.

Well, that’s my every day except for the walk. I keep trying to get back into walking every day, but I can’t seem to always find the energy. Of course, in an ideal day, I’d have plenty of energy, no sinus issues, and the get up and go to just get up and go. Sometimes, of course, my ideal day involves a visit with a friend or neighbor or whoever else I might encounter during the walk, but apparently not today.

I used to play the hidden object game a lot more until much of that online time got supplanted by blogging. Odd how that happened. I never actually decided to start posting every day as I used to. I just . . . did.

I must admit, blogging does help make my day an ideal one. It feels like coming home, in a way, a comfortable way to spend time, a pleasant way to communicate without having people cut me off while I am speaking if they disagree. (You might cut me off and stop reading, but since I’d never know, it’s not hurtful.) It also gives me something to think about other than the state of the world and the lack of common sense (though why something that’s in such short supply is called “common,” I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, apparently, since this is a sentiment I encounter so often that it’s embarrassingly trite). Best of all, blogging allows me to play with words, like above when I wrote “the get up and go to just get up and go.” I tend to be too serious, so word play lets me indulge my fantasy that I’m witty and charming and lighthearted. (And no, that fantasy is not part of my ideal day since ideally, I need to be what I am, whatever that might be.)

Well, this part of my ideal day has been fulfilled. Now on the next part: Reading!!

(I couldn’t find a photo of myself reading, so here is the next best thing: my 97-year-old father reading one of my books during his last days.)

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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When Online Friends Disappear

February 2, 2026 — Pat Bertram

For almost twenty years now, I’ve been a quiet presence on the internet. Nothing I’ve posted has ever gone viral, though a few posts have accumulated thousands of views over the years. Most of those, I think, were posts about grief that apparently resonated with people, but for whatever reason, people have found me. Many of the people I met through this blog, as well as through various networking sites, became online friends. Some even became offline friends.

Once I stopped blogging about grief, stopped blogging every day about anything, and stopped participating in places like Facebook (Facebook banned all links to this blog, so I had no real reason to participate since all I had to say, I said here), I didn’t “see” those friends as often, but I did catch a glimpse of them online now and again, so I knew they were well.

Facebook has recently lifted their 7-year ban of this blog, so I have no real reason to continue my boycott, except that the ban pretty much put the kibosh on book sales since most of my buyers came from there, and that’s hard to forgive. I did log in to check on a friend, one who I admired and with whom I had a wonderful visit on my cross-country trip, but he was gone from the site. No record of his ever having been there. It turns out, it wasn’t his choice. Facebook just arbitrarily deleted his account. No reason. No recourse.

I’ve seen a lot of really horrible things posted online over the years, but this author, who I’ve followed almost from the beginning, has never posted anything the least bit controversial. He’d mention books, the ones he wrote and the ones he read. He’d share a joke. He’d write about his research. Oh, any number of interesting, totally benign subjects, and then . . . nothing.

He was understandably angry and mentioned his troubles a couple of times in a blog post, but then he even stopped posting anything on his blog. I emailed him, and when I got no answer, I checked obituaries. (But he wasn’t there, either. Whew!)

Obviously, we weren’t close or otherwise we would have kept in contact more frequently after our visit, but to tell the truth, I lost contact with a lot of people. I settled down, eventually began to live more offline than on, stopped writing. Most of my online friends were people I met through various author groups, some groups of which are now defunct (that’s why so many of us reluctantly migrated to Facebook). When I lost interest in writing novels, I also lost interest in talking about writing, so there went most of my online activity.

If I hadn’t met him in person, I would begin to think this disappeared friend was a figment of the internet, perhaps an avatar of some artificial intelligence, but I know for a fact he existed and that his intelligence was anything but artificial.

I may never know what happened to him, though I hope he is doing well.

Other people I have lost track of occasionally check in here with me, just to say they’re still around, which I appreciate. But then, I suppose that’s the way of the ever-turning wheel of the internet. It spins us together and then whirls us apart.

Though come to think of it, that “apart” part might just be life. Or aging. Many of the friends I’ve made since moving into my house I seldom see. Even a friend who lives a mere two blocks away!

So, for all of you I’ve lost track of, know I am thinking of you and hoping you are well and at peace.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Figuring Out the End of The Wheel of Time

January 30, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday I wrote about parts of the Wheel of Time that should have been edited out or at least shortened considerably.

One of those story lines involved the hero rescuing a nation from an evil king who’d usurped the throne while the daughter heir was off doing other things. In addition, the hero twice conquered another nation. He intended both countries to be ruled by the daughter heir who would have been the rightful heir under normal circumstances. But because he said he was “giving” her those thrones, there was a huge furor since she claimed they were hers by right. Except they weren’t hers by right any longer. He’d conquered both nations. He could have put anyone in charge as he did with other nations where he defeated the evil rulers. But she was angry at him because of that word: give. Sure, she didn’t want people to think she was his puppet and so she needed to gain the crown on her own by having the ladies and lords vote for her. But there they were, on the brink of a cosmic catastrophe, and she worried about them thinking she was a puppet? It seems to me that if all existence were at stake, that would be a minor issue. Certainly not one worth tens of thousands of words.

What makes the whole thing even sillier is that the city, Caemlyn, was a Camelot equivalent. (In the King Arthur Legend, The Battle of Camlaan was the climax to his rule.) So it might have made sense, perhaps, to waste time on a plotline that went nowhere if only to establish the importance of that city, except that the very first casualty of the cosmic battle was Caemlyn. So at that point it mattered not who ruled.

It surprises me that I ever bothered to read these books in the first place, and I probably never would have if I hadn’t been laid up at the time and desperately needed something to read. Then, when I realized what the books were with all their real-world references, not just homages to previous series, like The Lord of the Rings, but a retelling of the King Arthur tale as well as dozens of other myths and legends from around the world, I got interested in finding all the subtext. Then, when I found out how terrible the ending was, I decided to try to figure out the real ending. Which is where I am now. But sheesh. All that verbiage! Luckily, I know how to skim, and I am not at all adverse to skipping huge sections. (The seventh book took me two or three days to read. The eighth took me two or three hours.)

I am finding bits, though, that would have made the ending more interesting. The most obvious would be to have accepted that most of the characters had already reached the end of their arc and were ready for the last battle. In one case, the substitute author repeated an entire character arc. In another case, he simply undid the arc, erased the character’s growth and his acceptance of responsibility, and returned him back to his immature ways with no further development.

Another thing that should have been addressed is that at one point, the kings and queens of the northern nations all decided to head south with their armies. They did not like what the hero was doing to the southern nations, not realizing he was rescuing those nations from the forces of the Dark One, and they didn’t want the same thing to happen to them. So they decided to do something about it. The subtext (and even Robert Jordan alluded to it) was that this displacement was part of the dark side’s plan, and was helping to further disrupt the forces of the light. This coalition was going after the hero, and the whole thing was so hush-hush, that they were ready to kill anyone who found out or who got in their way. Not exactly a peaceful mission. By this time in the books, it’s obvious that nothing happens by coincidence, and yet combined, this northern coalition ended up with thirteen Aes Sedai (the women power wielders, who some called witches). And thirteen Aes Sedai, when linked could destroy the hero, no matter how strong he was against them individually.

And yet, despite this, the rather weak reason given during the substitute ending was that they were there to test the hero to see if it was okay for him to fight the Last Battle. Um, yeah. If this were true, all they’d have to do was send an envoy, asking for an audience. Instead, they took a force of 200,000 as well as all those Aes Sedai to deal with him. And if they found him unworthy and killed him, they would have doomed the entire cosmos to the dark side. Definitely sounds like a plan made by the evil ones.

Even sillier, they were acting on a so-called prophesy that had been handed down by word of mouth for 3,000 years, negating one of Robert Jordan’s themes, which is based on the game of Whisper, or Telephone, or Gossip, whatever it was called in your part of the country. In the game, someone passes a secret to the next person, who passes on what they heard to the next person, and in the end, what results is generally nothing much like what was originally said. His point was that things change over the centuries, that stories change, that names change. So the chance that this prophesy, passed down orally through the millennium, would be the same at the end as at the beginning isn’t that great.

Even worse, though this army that had been manipulated by the dark side to leave their lands could have become a great disrupter at the last battle, instead the substitute author brought in a devil-ex-machina — an entire hitherto unknown army of dark friends.

I’m thinking I’ll eventually give up my idea of figuring out the real ending (for me just to decipher, not to write). Until then, it is rather an interesting puzzle. If I can get through all the scenes that should have been edited out, that is.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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When Editors Don’t Edit

January 29, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Too often, novels that start out good and end with a satisfying twist, lose traction somewhere in the second half. The best that can be said of those parts is that “stuff happens.” Nothing important to the story, nothing important about the character, nothing that propels the plot forward. Just stuff happening. Ho hum. This seems especially true of authors who are extremely profitable. I don’t know if the editors just give a cursory look before passing the manuscript on to be published, if they are too intimidated to ask for rewrites, if deadlines proscribe rewrites, or if it’s simply that no one cares because no matter how good or bad the book is, it will still make a fortune.

The Wheel of Time books are a good example of this. The first seven are generally good, sometimes great, and sometimes truly brilliant, but after those books, the brilliance fades, the lovely writing gets lost in the muddle, and the best that can be said is that “stuff happens.” There are still remarkable parts, but those parts are surrounded by hundreds of pages where things happen, but they don’t seem to have anything to do with the thrust of the book, don’t seem to move anyone closer to the last cosmic battle that will determine if life and even the universe will continue as it is.

I understand that Robert Jordan liked turning fantasy tropes on their end, for example, making women major players (in most fantasy written before him, women had bit parts if that). He also was playing against the lone hero concept, not just with three interconnected heroes, but also with the idea that the entire world had to cooperate to make it possible for the forces of light to win against the darkness. But, as I pointed out before, what an author intends and what ends up in readers minds is not always the same thing.

Some people like those parts, where tens of thousands of words are devoted to the women characters setting up their power bases, and I sort of understand the necessity, but not the huge portions of books devoted to their power grabs. A lot could be simply skipped, later showing that they achieved their goals, because as the books stand, two of major heroes mostly disappeared, one for an entire book. The third one’s story could be vastly truncated, especially since the same basic story (his fight with himself about whether or not he is a leader) plays out again and again. Even after he accepts leadership, there is a whole other book that repeats that entire character arc. Admittedly, this repeated arc is not Jordan’s fault, but the fault of the author who finished the series, since the substitute apparently didn’t pay attention to the fact that the characters had almost all become who they needed to be to go to battle, and so made a hash of it.

Still, I can understand why people don’t care that those final books didn’t make sense. His editor didn’t care. Since she was also Jordan’s wife, I imagine ending the series in any way possible was her way of honoring him and his last wishes. The publisher certainly didn’t care. A barrelful of money rested on those books. And most readers didn’t care because there was an ending to a series they had lived with for most of their lives. Besides, after all those books where stuff just happened without any sense that the story was moving forward, people were thrilled that the story finally pushed toward to an ending. (Not THE ending, but an ending.)

In the last books that Jordan wrote, there are still flashes of brilliance, still parts where exciting events took place, but yikes. The rest of it should have cut considerably by a few hundred thousand words or more, but apparently no one dared suggest such a thing to such a popular author.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Would-Be Fantasy Writer

January 28, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The Wheel of Time book series has apparently inspired as well as created a couple of generations of fantasy writers. Although I have never been able to get into any of those other stories (the books may have been inspired by Robert Jordan, but their worlds and their writing styles fall vastly short of his example), I can understand the urge to create one’s own world. I’ve thought about it myself, perhaps continuing the story I began in Bob: The Right Hand of God. Although Bob: The Right Hand of God is a stand-alone novel, it does seem to lend itself to a sequel since anyone born into that re-made world would have to start developing a new civilization (or not), but I don’t have any interest in writing the sequel. To me, the interesting part of the story was the de-creation of life on Earth as we know it. Anything further seems as if it would be just a ho-hum book. A been there, read that sort of thing.

So, if not Bob: The Right Hand of God, then what? Create a whole new world and culture as so many fantasy writers do? I considered that possibility, thinking a world of my own would be a place to escape to in my own head if not in fact but, though I hate to admit any failing, I don’t have the imagination for such an undertaking. (Although I’ve written two novels that could be considered fantasy, both took place more or less in our own world.) Nor do I need to live any more in my head than I already do. Besides, the truth is, so-called real life is fantasy enough for me.

There are theories that all time exists at once, so we are living our past and our future at the same time we are living in the present. My very first book, the terribly written one that no one will ever see (mostly because a few months ago, in a fit of decluttering, I threw away the only copy of the manuscript), was the story of two people who meet and fall instantly into if not love, then an incredibly deep connection, only to find out that they are reincarnations of each other. My question (and hence the premise of the book) was that if everything exists at once and if there is any validity to reincarnation, could this happen? There is an obscure theory that we are all reincarnations of one another. That not only is there a single electron that moves so fast and through so many dimensions and quantum processes that it creates the entire universe (or even multiple universes), but that there is also a single soul that we are all part of. (Yeah, I read weird stuff, which is inevitable when one reads almost anything almost all the time.)

Other theories say we are creating the world as we live it, that nothing exists yet but possibilities we haven’t yet encountered or envisioned. Other theories suggest that everything exists in our thoughts, that we are thinking into reality the world we live in. The reason we are such a mess is that everyone is thinking of different things and wanting different things. If everyone thought of the same thing at the same time, then that thing would come into fruition. Of course, the chances of that happening are nil since whenever you have even just three people together, one will always be thinking of something else, daydreaming or disagreeing or whatever goes on in people’s heads, and the other two will be saying they are thinking of the same thing, but that thing could be completely different for each of them. (For example, if they are trying to envision an apple, one might see a green apple, another red.)

Am I getting too silly here? Well, not too silly for a fantasy writer, but except for Bob: The Right Hand of God and Light Bringer, I probably will never be a fantasy writer. Probably will never write another book, either, but who knows. I could get bored with the books that currently exist and need to occupy my mind another way.

 

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

 

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Point of View

January 27, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The Wheel of Time culture shows me exactly why people can’t agree politically on . . . well, on anything.

By Wheel of Time culture, I don’t mean the various cultures in the books, though there are many, but the real-life culture surrounding the books. There are hundreds of websites devoted to discussions of the books, many websites that offer encyclopedias of Jordan’s world, other sites that offer snippets from Robert Jordan’s notes showing the development of his ideas and that sometimes include answers to questions fans ask (his answer most often is, “read and find out,” though sometimes he does elucidate). There are also companion books to the series that offer more information on characters, motivations, glossaries, a dictionary of his made-up language, explanations of things that don’t show up in the books like outlying cultures that have little to do with the story and things that Jordan never wanted people to know.

His subtlety (which it seems he prided himself on) is such that often there is no way to find the truth in the books themselves. In one case, we don’t find out who killed a particular bad guy until we see it in the glossary of the following book. I understand that he wants people to think about the issues and the happenings in the books, tries to get them involved in his world, and accords them the intelligence to be able to fill in vague lines. (The person who finished the series after the death of Jordan had no subtlety, no granting readers a modicum of intelligence, and explained every little detail.) I can also understand an author wanting people to figure things out on their own, such as Frank R. Stockton did in his 1882 story, “The Lady or the Tiger,” but at times it also feels a bit like a cheat. If it’s important, it should be in the books somewhere. If it’s not important, it shouldn’t be treated as if it’s some sort of mystery. (Though as Jordan admitted once in an interview, he was surprised when these — to him — throwaway incidents garnered much discussion.)

Still, as long as I can find out the information I want by checking online sources, I don’t really care that much if such particulars aren’t in the books since I certainly can’t remember every single detail of a 4,000,000 word story. I often end up checking on characters who showed up again after 1,000,000 words and I needed a refresher on who they were and what they had done. Sometimes if I can’t find an explanation for a certain minor point in any of the encyclopedias, I end up reading various discussions to see if any reader had figured it out.

All this to explain why I get caught up in other people’s opinions of the various aspects of the books.

It makes sense, of course, that people would have disparate opinions about the unsaid bits, but what’s really interesting to me is even when the story is explicitly laid out, when the characters’ actions are visible to everyone, when the motivations are obvious, that readers all see something different and are vocal about defending their point of view.

And this is just a story. The words are static. There are no edited versions of the sentences making them seem to say what they didn’t say, no edited videos making us see a different version of the action. It’s all right there in the books. And yet, the interpretations are wildly different. Some people hate a couple of the characters because their plot line goes on and on and seems to accomplish nothing. Other people love those characters and hate other characters. That makes sense to me. Some people even hate the main hero while loving the books, which doesn’t make sense to me, but it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s about preference.

But misinterpreting the story? Seeing what isn’t there? Not seeing what is there? That doesn’t make sense to me since we all have access to the exact same words. I suppose it’s possible that it is I who is misinterpreting the story, since after all, I am totally the wrong demographic (older by decades!) but even that would prove my point, which is . . .

Hmm. What is my point? I suppose it’s that if people can’t even agree on what they are seeing in a book series, can’t agree on what is right and what is wrong when it matters little, it’s easy to see why there is no agreement about what is best for us individually and ultimately the country.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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How Fast Time Flies

January 26, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What do you complain about the most?
View all responses

I wasn’t going to answer this particular blog prompt because I don’t think I complain all that much. I suppose it’s possible I do complain at times to other people, and it might seem to them that I complain a lot, but since I spend most of my time alone, to me, those complaints seem few and far between. I do, however, tend to mention how fast time is passing, which could be construed a complaint.

January especially seems to skim by me with barely a nod to the passing days. By the middle of the month, I’m usually bemoaning the speed which the year is passing, and by the end of the month, I figure the year is all but done.

But not this year. This January seems interminably long. It feels as if the month should be over, and yet there’s still most of a week remaining. I don’t suppose it matters how fast the month seems to be passing except that it screws up with my internal clock. Also, I am trying to do a “dry January,” and having to be extra cognizant of what I eat is wearing on me.

[I learned of Dry January (a program started in the UK in 2013) from my sister who follows this program, and since I don’t drink, I decided to show my solidarity by eschewing sugar and wheat, with of course, the goal of trying to reset my metabolism and eating habits. (I always try to eat as healthy as I can, but I find as the year progresses, I slip more and more from my goal, and I wanted to give myself a good start to the new year.)]

I suppose my starting Dry January early (the day after Christmas) could be making the month seem longer, but the Christmas treats were gone, and so was the tree. (I wrapped the fully decorated fake tree in cushioning packing materials, stuck in in a heavy trash bag and took it down into the basement, ready to pull out for next year. It makes it so much easier to put up a tree when it’s already decorated!) So there was no reason to wait to start that particular resolution. But even given that I started the “dry” month early, there’s no reason for January to seem so long.

Oh, well. It will eventually be over, February will fly by, and I will soon be complaining again about fast time is passing.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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A Sort of Apology

January 25, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I feel as if I should apologize for all these Wheel of Time posts, and yet, here I still am.

In an effort to find an alternative to posting here, I looked for book discussions, thinking it would be fun to talk about the story, characters, and implications of the various events with other students of the work, but the discussions fell into a few distinct categories:

Discussions during the long years while fans waited for a new book to be published, most centering on where they thought the story was going, and which are now defunct because the series of books is finished and the ending, or at least an ending, is known.

Discussions centered on who loved what character, and how foolish were those who didn’t like said character. That sort of non-discussion gets old, especially if you hold a minority opinion and don’t want to be lambasted.

Discussions about the end of the book, and how wonderful the ending was, or if not how wonderful the ending was, how wonderful the substitute writer was for writing it (ignoring the fact that he got paid, and even more importantly, that the project catapulted him into fantasy superstardom).

None of those discussions fit with anything I wanted to discuss, and anyway, most were many years old. Any newer discussions revolved around the now cancelled television series, and how terrible/wonderful the show was. (Terrible because it turned the story into something completely different from the books, wonderful because . . .  well, because it was the Wheel of Time.)

I tried starting my own discussion, but only got the usual fan-type comments such as “I liked character A, I hated character B.”

I considered resurrecting one of my dormant blogs and doing a chapter-by-chapter discussion, but that didn’t appeal to me. I like the puzzle the books present, and I like that in some ways it is (was?) a cultural phenomenon, with many more millions of words written about the books than were actually in the books (the first book was published right around the time the internet, discussion boards, and social sites were just beginning, and the story happened to be geared to the age group that first embraced the online world). To be honest, I didn’t want to spend that much effort on what is really just a way for me to pass mental time. (Physical time, too, but I like having something to occupy my mind, more than the issues of the day or . . . whatever.) Besides, however much I determine that upon this rereading, for sure, I will read every word, I never do. I find myself skimming or even skipping the characters I find annoying and the parts that include too much torture, both mental and physical.

I make sure, however, that I never skim or skip some of the most lyrical of Jordan’s writing. At one point, a character got lost in thoughts of the past, remembering that “They danced beneath the great crystal dome at the court of Shaemal, when all the world envied Coremanda’s splendor and might.” That’s pretty much all we ever find out about the lost nation of Coremanda, but that one sentence is haunting, conjuring in just a few words a long-forgotten time.

And then there’s a song that the same character remembers from long ago, a song that seems to be a theme of the books (NB: the Aes Sedai are the women power wielders):

Give me your trust, said the Aes Sedai.
On my shoulders I support the sky.
Trust me to know and to do what is best,
And I will take care of the rest.
But trust is the color of a dark seed growing.
Trust is the color of a heart’s blood flowing.
Trust is the color of a soul’s last breath.
Trust is the color of death.

Anyway, that lyricism is beside the point . . . actually, no — it’s not beside the point, it is the point of my rereading the books. It’s just not the point of this blog post and my feeling I should apologize for dumping my thoughts on the books here.

So, if you want an apology, you got it, but it’s not truly an apology because a sincere apology connotes a promise of not repeating the offense, and perhaps unfortunately for you, I will continue posting my thoughts until I’ve finished this reread or until I’ve given up blogging again.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Hero

January 23, 2026 — Pat Bertram

When does an author’s intentions become superseded by what is actually in the written book? I tend to think that as long as the book is unpublished and exists only in the author’s mind, then what is intended is what is. However, when a book is published and read, the author’s intentions no long matter — only the story the reader experiences counts.

This is especially true for the Wheel of Time books. I read an interview with Robert Jordan where someone asked if one of his themes was about women looking down their noses on men, and he said, “I’m not certain that I have a women-looking-down-their-nose at men theme; I simply have women that consider themselves competent in and of themselves.” They might be competent, but the truth is, whatever his intentions, almost all his women look down their noses on men, thinking men are nothing but wool-headed pieces of fluff who “think with the hair on their chests.” At best, the women seem indulgent or frustrated; at worst, contemptuous or even hateful.

In another interview, he said, “Egwene has had to give up the life that she’d assumed that she was going to live, and to adopt this other life in the name of the greater good.”

Some people do see Egwene as a heroic character, one who does give herself to the greater good, as Jordan apparently intended, but others see her as the embodiment of the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism (entitlement), Machiavellianism (manipulation), and psychopathy (lack of empathy). She pretends otherwise, of course, and sees herself as better than everyone else, especially better than the men heroes of the story. The men are all reluctant heroes, and they did have to leave the bucolic lives they led to save their village and ultimately the world. She didn’t have to leave. She just couldn’t stand that they were going to have adventures that she wouldn’t have, so she forced herself onto the expedition. All through the series, she lusts for power, seeks knowledge for the power it will eventually get her, and envies anyone having power she can’t have. Her ending is one of the few that actually makes sense in that senseless ending: She takes on more and more power (the power of the universe) until she destroys herself because she can’t let go of the one thing she wants. (Like the Gollum and his “precious” in The Lord of the Rings.)

Any good she does is purely accidental, a side effect of her power grab. Since she so often opposed the main hero, the one who was actually going to fight the last battle, once she gathered her forces, those who also opposed him, all he had to do was convince her of the rightness of his path, and then he held both sides (those who opposed him and those who were for him) in the palm of his hand. So in that case, she fulfilled her destiny, and died for the greater good, no matter what she was truly after.

And who knows, perhaps that was Jordan’s intention after all. To show that the reluctant hero ends up purposely choosing to do the right thing, and the gung-ho hero ends up only accidentally doing the right thing.

It’s funny that I think about these books so much. Most books are out of my mind as soon as the covers are closed, and rightly so. With too many novels, what you see is what you get. There is nothing beneath the thin veneer of the story, nothing to puzzle out, nothing to gain by ever thinking of them again. I’m still not sure if I like The Wheel of Time. There is so much that I don’t enjoy reading at all, such as anything about Egwene, not just her own point of view chapters, but also the chapters where other characters extol her (non-existent) virtues. Still, there are many, many layers in these books and I find it interesting to try to peel them all away to find the truth.

Assuming there is any truth.

Actually, that’s just specious. One particular truth shines all the way through the books, a truth that seems to fit our world as it exists right now. As Jordan said in an interview: “What you know as truth is not the whole truth. Sometimes it’s hardly the truth at all.”

Or as one of the hero’s mentors tell him: “You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway.”

Or, as Bernie LaPlante says to his son at the end of the movie Hero, “You remember when I said how I was gonna explain about life, buddy? Well the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always telling ya about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or somethin’, and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn, as you get older, is there ain’t no truth. All there is is bullshit, pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life like when you get older is, you pick the layer of bullshit that you prefer and that’s your bullshit, so to speak.”

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Books I Want to Read

January 21, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What books do you want to read?
View all responses

The books I want to read are novels with a new story (which is hard to find since it seems so many novels repeat the same old stories with minor variations) or a truly different twist on an old story. The characters in these new — or old — stories are loyal and kind, nice until it’s time not to be nice, have integrity, do their best and when they don’t succeed, try to do a better best in some way. Often these characters have a talent or skill, but the story challenges them in ways that those abilities don’t help, and in fact force them try to find ways to use their lesser abilities. (For a simplistic example, a person with great eyesight would be at a disadvantage in a lightless cave and would need to rely on their perhaps diminished hearing.)

These books are also all written with clarity and grace using words and phrases that are sometimes lyrical or out of the ordinary, but always clear and understandable.

The books are of various genres, but at their core they are all great stories with relatability and depth, a sense of wonder and perhaps a touch of strange. No category romance! And not much science fiction or fantasy, either. (A lot of fantasy starts out very confusing and quite frankly, I have enough trouble sorting out the confusion in the real world. I don’t need to bring more confusion into my life.) Some speculative fiction would be on the list of books I want to read, especially if the stories are rooted in an everyday world and only after the story is established does it branch off into extrapolated plausibility (or implausibility).

The books also keep me absorbed without nail-biting tension. Curiosity about what is happening is better for me since tension, like confusion, is something best left to the real world. In fact, if a book makes me too tense, I read the ending, and if the ending fulfills the author’s contract with the reader, giving a satisfying and fulfilling resolution (another thing that’s in all the books I want to read), I’ll go back and finish reading the book with a deeper understanding of the situation.

I’m sure there are other characteristics I’m looking for in the books I want to read, but for now, this will do.

Oh, you want the titles? If I knew the titles of such paragons of the written word, I’d have already read the books!

The truth is, although the books I want to read have all the elements I’ve just described, I read just about anything as long as it engages my attention enough to get through the first chapter. Besides, somewhere in all the sludge are gems just waiting to be found.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in books, fiction, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 11 Comments »
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