The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, #1) in The Wheel of Time Read-a-Long

Aug 15, 2012 Sara J. (kefuwa) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: faves, formative-reading-shelf, fave-series

I honestly cannot remember how many times I have read this book. Honestly.

First read this in '95 and then plowed through all the available books in the series up to that year which was Book 6: Lord of Chaos if I'm not mistaken... then I read 7... which was when things started going downhill... after that I bought 8 & 9 and decided to stop buying/reading until the last book was near. Well in the interim Mr. Jordan passed away (RIP, sir, T_T) and Sanderson has been a thankfully good proxy for him. ...more

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Jun 05, 2009 Tracey rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy

Long, long ago – while I was manning a pharmacy cash register on my first job, so long ago that cigarettes were about $10 a carton and candy bars were a quarter and some newspapers were a dime and I really shouldn’t be dating myself like this … that long ago, I happened to look at the tiny rack of paperbacks the store boasted, and saw a big fat book with a Darrell K. Sweet cover. Especially when younger I always gravitated toward chunksters, and especially chunkster fantasies, so I pounced, and Long, long ago – while I was manning a pharmacy cash register on my first job, so long ago that cigarettes were about $10 a carton and candy bars were a quarter and some newspapers were a dime and I really shouldn’t be dating myself like this … that long ago, I happened to look at the tiny rack of paperbacks the store boasted, and saw a big fat book with a Darrell K. Sweet cover. Especially when younger I always gravitated toward chunksters, and especially chunkster fantasies, so I pounced, and unwittingly started out on a journey which, some 24 years later, had still yet to end, for me at least.

I loved it. I loved it to pieces (literally; the covers on paperback chunksters don’t tend to fare well). And whatever happened with the rest of the series, whatever my impatience or frustration or other brand of aggravation, I still love it. I’ve read EotW several times, since my tendency is to start over at the beginning every time a new book comes out in a series, and it has held up. I am still impressed by the skill with which a huge story is handled, how characters are introduced and kept individual and distinct in the reader’s mind, how cultures are kept individual and distinct, and with the tantalizing glimpses at the distant past. I love the story of Rand al’Thor, the ordinary country boy who discovers he is far from ordinary, and who has to deal with the million ramifications of what he actually is. Whatever else I may – will – say about Robert Jordan and the Wheel of Time series, I will never detract from the sheer brilliance of the concept and of its initial execution.

I am not quite sure what prompted me to embark on this journey when I did last year – partly, I think, exhaustion at having so much of my reading dictated by Netgalley and suchlike. I picked up book one at the beginning of the year, and made my way – ploughing, at times – through the series over the next nine months, with only a handful of side-trips. This played merry hell with my reading challenge for the year – at one point I was about 40 books behind. There were a lot of factors in that … but probably the biggest one was that Robert Jordan never did “short”. Or “succinct”.

So, back at the beginning of 2014, I read Eye of the World for – what, the tenth time in 24 years? And it has held up. It was the first reread in many years (ten?), which had the added benefit of letting me forget a lot while still being extremely familiar with plot and characters. My overall impression? Despite the very first Nynaeve braid tug, and the very first Nynaeve sniff (if you don’t know what I mean, stay tuned for reviews of the succeeding books) … Yes. Yes, this is why I kept going with the series despite all the hurdles, despite the deterioration in later years, despite the huge chunks of time and chunks of pages involved. Because there, in that first book, the characters – all shiny and new, young and innocent – are well drawn. Because the settings are vivid without being a distraction. Because the world-building is in my opinion nothing less than spectacular. Because it’s still just plain exciting: can Moiraine and Lan be trusted? Can anyone? Holy crap, those Trollocs are scary – and despite quite a few similarities to Nazgul the Myrddraal make them look like fuzzy puppies. EotW still ranks high in the genre for me.

The rest … varies. Wildly.
...more

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Aug 20, 2010 Kelsey Hand-Cunningham rated it really liked it

Long ass review incoming!

The year is 2003. A chubby twelve year old walks into the Walden Books at her local mall. The Return of the King has just come out, putting her in a fantasy chokehold. She is on a mission. "What's like Lord of the Rings, but with more girls?", she asks the college aged clerk. "Uhhh...this," he mumbles as he hands the book over without looking at her. The cover is promising enough, a small lady in blue on a white horse against the moon. So she takes her babysitting money Long ass review incoming!

The year is 2003. A chubby twelve year old walks into the Walden Books at her local mall. The Return of the King has just come out, putting her in a fantasy chokehold. She is on a mission. "What's like Lord of the Rings, but with more girls?", she asks the college aged clerk. "Uhhh...this," he mumbles as he hands the book over without looking at her. The cover is promising enough, a small lady in blue on a white horse against the moon. So she takes her babysitting money and buys it.

The book then proceeds to consume her life the next two decades. Highlights include the painful years waiting to hear if Mat survived being crushed by a wall only to not have him show up for an entire book.

I'd be here forever if I were to talk at length about how important The Wheel of Time is to me. The only female centric fantasy I'd read up to that point was what we would now call YA. But they were all these tomboy heroines who rejected any notion of femininity, and as a very girly girl, I never could quite identify with them. But the women of the Wheel of Time were complex and complicated. Femininity made them powerful (literally). Something about that world captured me. I saw my curiosity in Egwene, my anger in Nynaeve, and a sisterhood in the Aes Sedai. I think that's why I as a young girl was drawn so strongly to the series, and why Moiraine is still my favorite character in the series and one of my favorite characters of all time. It's a series I will never get tired of.

Naturally, I had to do a quick re-read in anticipation for the Amazon adaptation. I'll admit I hadn't read Eye of the World in probably ten years (Dragon Reborn and Shadow Rising have the most re-read value) and I found myself reading with a fresher critical lens. EoTW is tough, at the publisher's request, it feels like Fellowship 2.0 at times. A mentorish wizard characters sweeps some youths out of their quaint meadow town to Fight Evil and Learn Magic. But there are subversions here too. The Chosen One is essentially doomed to a life of insanity and the powers that be mostly don't care about it. I was really surprised just how different in tone EoTW is from the rest of the series. But, there is brilliance here too. Specifically when it comes to world building. A world that Jordan described as “the late 17th century without gunpowder". I'd place EoTW in my ranking of the series somewhere in the middle, I will never forget the door it opened for me.

please watch the show though, I've been so alone in my fandom for so long. ...more

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Jan 04, 2019 Simran rated it liked it

Reread/re-listen because the show is coming out. It’s fascinating starting the story again knowing how it all ends. All the main characters are so young and innocent!!! There was a character I remember liking in this book that I drifted away from later in the series, and a character I didn’t initially like that I love now and appreciated more during the reread. And of course the character that was really annoying this book but is a total badass later on. It’s definitely a set up book to start es ...more

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