The Eye of the World

I was introduced to WoT by the TV show. A lot of my visuals for main characters comes from it. I didn't read it with expectations of it following the books too closely though. In fact the very beginning of the book followed it much closer than I thought possible. The longer the book goes on the further the two diverge. Though you can see the essences the show was trying to bring. This is my first Robert Jordan book. Upon starting his verbosity was concerning to me. I had the quip the Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey used once going through my mind, "He never uses one word when ten will do." Even though his verbosity didn't abate his writing does have a good readable flow about. I found the book to be a very engaging read. Like with almost any work of fiction there are some eye rolling pieces of the book. They were few and far enough between to not detract from the overall piece. Based on how the book wraps up you can tell that he wrote this book expecting to write many more in this series. I'm looking forward to starting the second book in the near future.

I started reading the first book of the Wheel of Time series back when I was an internet teen with an internet crush on an internet guy with the username Lews Therin Telemon on internet forums and I thought it would be cool to like the same things he liked, or something. After several months of a global pandemic and general disaster I thought it'd be fun to get back into them as a goof or something, but joke's on me because a month and a half later, I'm still with it.

Anyway, what am I going to say about this ~NYT #1 bestselling epic fantasy whatever~ that hasn't already been said? There's a lot of neat stuff in the WoT mythology, and also a lot of eyerolly cisheteronormative stuff, and all the baby teen characters in this book are very annoying and bad at communicating with one another, but like, whatever. There is little enough excitement in my life hiding out from a respiratory virus and everything else that I am ready to gobble up these innocent little babies' adventures running from and fighting Trollocs and Myrddraal and Darkfriends, even though a whole lot of their choices are extremely SMDFH. (Like, all that shit they went through in Shadar Logoth??? Totally unnecessary but the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills I guess!!!)

Look, the truth is I finished this book several weeks ago at this point and I'm on Lord of Chaos now and it hasn't all started to blur together quite yet but I don't have much to say about this other than that my trash goblib self was apparently ready to tear through it again after not thinking about it for over a decade. I'm not saying anyone else should read it and I probably would have 0 interest if it were new to me at this point, but for someone who made it to Book 9 or something in the long-ago past, it's been some mighty decent comfort food. Stay tuned for more "reviews" where I don't remember what happens in the books but do complain about the main characters a lot!