The reason that I come here is largely by inertia. At wotmania I had stopped going to the WoT board altogether - once I clicked just for fun and it said something like 12,752 new messages since you last viewed this message board.

However, I do want to at least know how it ends. After all, I found the books an interesting diversion through Lord of Chaos. After that it was a boring, fifth-rate diversion. Now, Sanderson has recaptured the spark of the original books and gotten me excited about finding out how it ends.

Defining "serious" literature isn't that hard. It's literature that cuts across genre lines and raises relevant issues about what it means to be human in a way people find aesthetically pleasing.

If you can get people who don't read fantasy to pick up a fantasy book and they uniformly found it meaningful, the book is serious literature. Jordan obviously doesn't qualify.