1. CROSSROADS OF TWILIGHT
- Best bath scene in the entire series.
- Egwene's most clear moment of inarguable stupidity, not written by Brandon Sanderson. This is like my trump card, that no one even BOTHERS to defend or argue for her.
- In hindsight, it really proves the fallacy of one of the stupidest complaints, that "nothing happens" in CoT. Look at how active the board was between CoT & KoD, compared to how dead it has become following two of the most "happening" books in the series. Just maybe it made for a lot more interesting character development and whatnot than the other books with a barely recognizable Rand waving his hands and blasting Shadow assets to kingdom come.

In retrospect, though, I have a hard time ranking them because I was a lot of different ages when reading them and what I look for in a book has changed a lot since then as well. Do I still find Mat's Big Adventure of tDR the high point of the series I did at 16? Not at all. But now there are new things I admire about the characterization of that book. So is it fair to rank the book based on what I think now, or thought then, or what about all the unfulfilled promise of where the series was going? I like where it was heading in the recent books (at least the underlying lessons and so on), but that's not what the early books seemed to promise (and I am not speaking of the Tolkien-esque false start that was pretty much done by the time the Children of the Light were introduced and it became apparent just how complex the TO&E of the Good Guys was going to be). Sometimes I think the early books about the adventures of a guy named Rand are a completely different series than the current one, that has become the ensemble adventure of a larger group.

So yeah, I'm both being obstructive and begging the question! Because we all know how stimulating and interesting a survey post is where everyone gives their own rankings and respects everyone else's opinion.