Hi, I’m Michael Chantry from Podunk [?] Idaho—[claps] someone knows the area. Thank you for the books; they’re amazing. Thanks Robert Jordan for the books. I like them so much I actually named my second child Perrin. [applause]
My question is to both Brandon and Harriet. I know you love this new book, A Memory of Light , that you’ve created for us, and out of it, is there anything that we… What is your favorite part? What did you enjoy most about it? If you can give us a chapter, a section…anything. I know you’re going to say “the whole thing.” [laughter]
(flips through book) [laughter] There’s a 200-page chapter in this book. [hoots, buzz of talking] I felt it very thematically important, and my favorite part is right at the end of that chapter and the beginning of the next chapter, and the next chapter is actually very short, and so really, it’s probably Chapter 39, but with the lead-in at the end of chapter 38.
And Harriet, do you have a favorite part?
(talks to Peter) 37 and 38? Okay, 37 and 38. Peter knows these things better than I do. [laughter]
Well, I love the end of Chapter 23—the final sequence—and as you’re aware from Brandon’s other books, I mean a lot of the chapters will have a piece here, and then there’s a two-line space and you jump five hundred miles away, and so on, but the last segment of 23 I think is just super. But there are an awful lot of things that I do love in this book; the scene I read for you is one of my favorites; there’s more of it, but I thought, “Oh, I don’t know; I think I’m getting on too long,” because we hadn’t quite timed it out. I think it’s a wonderful book. [laughter, applause]
I know that the question wasn’t directed up here to me, but I think I definitely need to say that—without being cliché—the ending, the epilogue, was far and away everything I could have hoped it was, and it was my favorite part of the book. It was just…I can’t wait for all of you to eventually read it, and hopefully have the same kind of reaction that I did. It’s pretty awesome.
I can talk a little bit more about that, because…I told you the Asmodean story, but next under that sheet was this, was the…were the scenes that Robert Jordan had written for the book. And so, that included sections from the prologue, which got split into various pieces of the various prologues of the three novels; sections out of the book; and then this ending, the epilogue, and it’s one of the most…one of the scenes where you’re able to preserve, a sequence that’s the most close to the way Robert Jordan left it. Because a lot of scenes he’d leave, he’d leave like a paragraph, and then it’s like I have to expand that into, or I have to work a whole thing and then have that paragraph in.
There’s a famous scene, for instance, with Verin in Gathering Storm where he left, you know, the kinda…what you would imagine is the important parts, but it’s only the important parts, and then it doesn’t have a lead-in or an exit to the scene, and so I had to write up and then lead in to what he’d written, and then lead out of it, and that sort of stuff. And this, it’s actually…we’ve got complete sequences that he wrote before he passed away. And so, when you get to that epilogue, you can know…there’s some very non-touched-by-the-rest-of-us stuff that he had in a very good shape to be published before he passed away.
And I should have thought of that, but as he read it in 2007—and so did I, and I had known some bits of it for years before that—but it really is splendid.
Thank you very much. [applause]
More info on who wrote what in the epilogue.
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