When Should You Read New Spring in The Wheel of Time?

New Spring is the prequel to Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, and it causes more reading-order debate than its modest size deserves. It follows Moiraine and Lan twenty years before The Eye of the World, as the search for the newborn Dragon Reborn begins.

There are three common places to read it. Some people start with it, since it comes first in the timeline. We don't recommend that for first-timers: New Spring assumes you already care about Moiraine and Lan, and it quietly takes the mystery out of a few things the main series wants you to wonder about.

The second option is publication order. New Spring came out in 2004, between Crossroads of Twilight and Knife of Dreams, and that's where our reading order lists it. The spot has a practical bonus: Crossroads of Twilight is the slowest stretch of the series, and a short, focused prequel is a welcome change of pace before the final run of books.

The third option is to save it until you've finished all fourteen main books, as a farewell visit with characters you know well. That works beautifully too.

Where did you read it? And if you started with New Spring, did it change how you saw Moiraine in The Eye of the World?