Just Finished Reading Robert Jordan's Book Winter's Heart

As I continue to plod my way through Robert Jordan's fourteen-part fantasy Wheel of Time fantasy series, I just finished reading the ninth book, titled Winter's Heart.  Once again, we have here our main characters of Rand al'Thor (the "Dragon Reborn"), his boyhood friends Mat Cauthon and Perrin Aybara, and their allies fighting against his foes, who are numerous and seem to spend about as much time and effort fighting each other as they do against the "good guys".   In this volume, Rand is trying to free the male source of magic of the taint placed upon it by the supremely evil Dark One by gathering his allies and performing a special, elaborate ritual...this is how the book ends.  In the meantime, subplots and minor characters reign supreme...this flood of characters and story lines is by far the main gripe I have with this series.   I did enjoy the greater emphasis given to my favorite character Mat, one of the main protagonists (he was completely omitted from the previous book), and how he encounters the Daughter of the Nine Moons, whom he knows he has been prophesied to marry...

I have five more books in this series to get through, but only two that were written by Jordan himself.  He died after writing the eleventh book, and the series was completed by another fantasy fiction writer, Brandon Sanderson...an author I respect from his Mistborn series that I read a few months ago.  It should be interesting to see how he manages to to tie up the myriad loose ends Robert Jordan left...