What convinced me to wait for a giant, continuous read through the Wheel of Time was abandoning Knife of Dreams a few chapters in after suffering through Winter’s Heart years ago.
Winter’s Heart feels proportionate following Path of Daggers. The rotation around the circle catches everyone, without too many successive chapters of various minor characters. In fact, the pace seems to pick up, with several viewpoints in individual chapters now.
Crossroads of Twilight is a bit slower, mostly because its events are largely a continuation of the previous book’s events. Perrin is still trying to free Faile, Mat is still fleeing/courting, and Egewene is stuck in seige throughout. (It also suffers, a bit, from having Winter’s Heart’s rush forward with Rand, so that each other character in this book can mark time from the cleansing–it crosses all of their stories, but takes a while to get to for some characters.)
With Knife of Dreams it’s becoming clear that the world is coming to an end. The world is unraveling in ominous ways–Tarmon Gai’don isn’t just words anymore, it’s happening. It’s almost amusing now that I gave up because “nothing was happening” and I didn’t care about enough characters–because this is the book that lays down a marker and substantially ups the pace.
I’m just beginning The Gathering Storm, the first of Sanderson’s contributions. So far, I doubt I’d have noticed, which is high praise. [The first chapter with the abandoned farm feels somewhat different… more grounded? I did notice that, before I even thought about Sanderson’s role.]