having read some posts, i see other people have concluded that the black towers in egwene's dream and the dark prophecy at the end regarding midnight towers and are about the forsaken. who do you think is represented by the tower that almost falls only to become the tallest of them all?

and thirteen black towers rose in the distance beneath a tar like sky.

one fell and then another crashing to the ground. as they did the ones that remained grew taller and taller. the ground shook as several more towers fell. another tower shook cracked collapsing most of the way to the ground - but then it recovered and grew tallest of them all

at the end six towers remained

given how the tower that fell and recovered became tallest before the end of the dream, when only 6 are left, the tallest tower is moridin.

is androl, the weak but skilled in weaving gateways dedicated asha'man anyone special?

red veiled aiel? while i'm hoping they're fain's it's not consistent with how the trollocs looked after fain corrupted them. so probably more like the aiel who ran away when have been twisted and used by the shadow

and yes i did find aviendha's possible vision of the future to be upsetting

the ashanderei was surprising, i always thought it was just like a receipt, but it was nice how it all tied together

finally we got some decent perrin chapters, though that bit with his new super hammer was just horribly tasteless. does perrin now have the biggest army then? i got the impression that it was a huge army. i can see him being a champion of the common man, the one who picks up a sword because he cannot bear to see the shadow win, who might not wield it with skill but with courage.

what will mellar/hanlon do with the copied foxhead ter'angreal? it's obviously of some importance otherwise he wouldn't have gotten away with it

will egwene never learn?

ituralde=awesome, everything about the battle of maradon, including rand's decimation (despite unlikelihood of him being bale to channel like that for an hour) of that trolloc army. also, does rand still have the swordsman angreal?

was the dreamspike physically taken to t'a'r? or was it a reflection? i wasn't sure about that. if it as reflection then it couldn't be destroyed, even if it was physically there, the nightmare is substantial and affective because it's believed in and accepted. how can a thing believe in the nightmare around it?

of BS:

there are some bits in this book (and tGS) that really bugged me. as i said perrin's new hammer, it reeked of "how can i make him cooler? let's give him a super weapon!" it's so inconsistent.

everyone has acquired a dry, flat, sarcastic or deadpan sense of humour...mat has become a quip machine with talmanes "the straight one"

it wasn't all bad, i quite like how he dealt with the action scenes and his technique of cutting between two or three PoVs to create suspense worked for me. the pacing was fine as well IMO, with the end coming up in a huge rush, though i'd like to have the Finns dealt more subtly. egwene's dream of him gambling with the Finns implied a lengthier and clever negotiation

despite my many misgivings though, i think that BS is a good choice to finish the series as he just gets on with it. RJ didn't have BS's directness and i think i prefer BS's handling of action scenes (with the last books concerning the last battle this is important). but there's no guile or subtlety to BS's work IMO and he handles anything that requires a delicate touch poorly, the character development is poor too. the best example being gawyn

he hasn't done anything that would persuade me to read his own works