The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time)

The Eye of the World is not a particularly gripping book at first - pretty much nothing of major note occurs for the first 500-600 pages, but instead spends its time having the characters travel through the world to introduce the reader to all the many factions and groups that populate the world.

The prose is very detailed, perhaps a little too much, but makes it easy to imagine you're there seeing and feeling what the characters do. I didn't realise how attached to the characters I felt even early on, but the writing is fantastic.

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would - staying up until 1am to finish it off without realising - and will definitely be reading the rest of the series! The payoff towards the end leaves a lot of room for whatever will happen next and will make you want to get the next book.

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!