The Eye of the World

I picked this book up in an airport in 1997 because I'm not a good flyer and needed something to distract me. I liked the cover art and the brief synopsis on the back. Fifteen years later...Robert Jordan is my absolute FAVORITE author. The Wheel of Time series is not an easy read. Jordan is hyper-descriptive to the point of madness sometimes, but because of the way he writes you really feel like you are THERE and the characters (and there are a LOT of them) are rich and full and you get a strong picture of who they are. There are few books/authors that measure up to this type of Epic story telling...if you have read these books and enjoyed them, Patrick Rothfuss is a fantastic writer who reads almost like poetry. If you are a true reader...pick up these books...it's a long commitment, but well worth the story!!!

The first six books in this series were published when I was in high school and I read them all eagerly. In college I had less time for personal reading and put the series aside, intending to pick it up again when I had more free time, but I never did. I recently watched the first season of the tv series, which was neither especially good nor especially bad, but it did make me want to pick up the books again. The show didn't quite gel with my (admittedly decades old) memories of the first novel, so I thought it best to start from the beginning. It's weird picking up a book that enthralled me at 14 and thinking "it can't be as good I believed it was then", and then finding out it is actually better. For such a long novel it moves at a rather windswept pace, relentless once the heroes are chased from Emond's Field and out into a wider world they have little understanding of. And even at that pace it is incredibly detailed and precise; it really feels like you've spent a lot of time getting to know the characters inside and out, despite the constant peril the find themselves thrown in. It is a young persons' novel that nonetheless feels grown up and world-weary, which, I suppose, describes all the best young persons' novels, before they were dumbed down and marketed as "YA". I'm very happy I revisited this and am looking forward to 49-year-old me reading this series through to the end.