Knife of Dreams

I’ve started listening to Robert Jordan’s Knife of Dreams on audio book. It’s long and at the end of long series. This will be the first of several reviews.
I’m 45 minutes into the story and don’t have enough information to review the plot, characters or the internals of the book. I do have some problems with how the book translates to the audio format.
The first problem is the names. Like most fantasy authors Jordan makes up ‘kewl’ names. Damodred, Morgesse, Seanchen, Aiel, etc. The books all have pronunciation guides. I ignored them and have a very sketchy idea what the names actually sound like. I don’t ‘hear’ words in my head when I read so this wasn’t a problem until now. It gets worse because there are so many damn characters and many of them have similar sounding names. They’re spelled differently enough that I don’t trip up when I read them. It leaves a lot of silly sounds to keep strait. I spent a few minutes on the way to work this morning wondering who the hell the ‘San-Shen’ were before the context told me it was the ‘seanchen’. So the new format is going to present challenges. It’s been good this far but we’ll have to see. More to follow.