This book starts slow, but when it picks up, you won't be able to put it down. The Wheel of Time is a fantasy series that will appeal to all readers and for good reason. Like Card, Jordan is adept at creating characters you will love. ( )

I just finished re-reading this book for probably the 11th time. Amazes me how I am still interested in this book and find something new each time I read it. ( )

Kearsten says: I love this series. It's exciting, complex, scary and engrossing. I read Eye of the World for the first time in...maybe 1994?...and I've reread it countless times, usually right before a new book in the series is published.

Rand, Mat and Perrin are best friends, which isn't surprising, given that they're all of an age and grew up in the same small, remote village, Emond's Field. The most pressing thing on their minds is the upcoming Bel Tine celebration, but this is thrown into shadow - literally - when the village is attacked by Myrddraal and Trollocs, creatures serving the Dark One. The three boys survive the attack, but are convinced to leave by an Aes Sedai, Moiraine, and her Warder, Lan, in order to keep their village from being attacked again. For Moiraine is sure the Dark One is after one of these boys.

RECOMMENDED! ( )

I love this series. It's exciting, complex, scary and engrossing. I read Eye of the World for the first time in...maybe 1994?...and I've reread it countless times, usually right before a new book in the series is published.

This was my first time listening to the book, though. I very much enjoyed it, as did my daughter. We have a 30min drive to and from school, and the moment we climb into the car, I hear, "Book, mom?" We've had great discussions about predictions, foreshadowing, characters, etc., and she's only 6 1/2! (We also discuss the scary parts - evil guys included - and how fiction isn't real...)

Definitely recommended! ( )

The start of one of the great epic fantasy series of recent years. There are many similarities to other great fantasy stories - riding away in the night to avoid the evil creatures on horseback, party being split up during a chase to force some of the main characters out on their own, a major battle that brings revelation to the main character. However, this is only the beginning of a unique series unlike any other I've read. ( )

It's a guilty pleasure, but I really do quite enjoy stock fantasy novels, even the epic ones. And nothing is more epic than Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. I first borrowed these from David where there were only around 6 of them to read, not realising I'd be stuck in a story than not even the death of the author could bring to an end. The next (posthumous) volume is out in October, so I figured they'd make good light reading, while I was on holiday and for in hospital and afterwards next week.

The pace is so much faster in the first few than it becomes in the later books that these are actually quite fun to read. It's interesting to see how if he'd liked Jordan could have wrapped it all up much sooner, and interesting to see all the characters before the intervening books have happened to them. I'd forgotten a lot of the detail, so it's good to read them and refresh my memory.

Basically this is reasonably good at what it's trying to be. Not a work of great literature, but readable fantasy that keeps you coming back to find out what will happen next. It may be some time before I read anything else! ( )

657 pages of story and as it nears it's climatic ending you get the sense that it all could end in one book. I have read this book more than a half dozen times. I have read the sequels as many. Some see this as a retelling of Tolkien, and to the extent that you have those who quest to thwart ultimate evil, it does parallel.

Jordan is not perfect though I find the Wheel of Time series to probably be our best epic fantasy. He breaks a cardinal rule of writing, show don't tell. Jordan is all about telling and narrative description.

Another problem when you look at the series in it's entirety is that Jordan felt the need to write a prequel as the series grew. As I mentioned the book could have been a single novel, though the ending is rushed.

Jordan did us a disservice I expect in the quest for money over being true to his art. He wrote many, many books dragging out the story. They are good, unlike Weber's Honor Harrington which lost it's way a long while ago. Jordan does know where he is going, he just finds thing to add depth to the world.

When I mentioned that things ended rushed, you get this because at the end the evil faced are minions of the worst but have not been mentioned until they come on stage. Other minions have been mentioned but not these two. We also still have our hero unprepared to face his challenge. With some more work, Jordan could have wrapped things up in one.

Ultimately we might have been content with one, but fifteen are so much more fulfilling. It is worth the time and provides enjoyment each time it is read. So you get your moneys worth with a great read despite all the telling and the length of the series. ( )

657 pages of story and as it nears it's climatic ending you get the sense that it all could end in one book. I have read this book more than a half dozen times. I have read the sequels as many. Some see this as a retelling of Tolkien, and to the extent that you have those who quest to thwart ultimate evil, it does parallel.

Jordan is not perfect though I find the Wheel of Time series to probably be our best epic fantasy. He breaks a cardinal rule of writing, show don't tell. Jordan is all about telling and narrative description.

Another problem when you look at the series in it's entirety is that Jordan felt the need to write a prequel as the series grew. As I mentioned the book could have been a single novel, though the ending is rushed.

Jordan did us a disservice I expect in the quest for money over being true to his art. He wrote many, many books dragging out the story. They are good, unlike Weber's Honor Harrington which lost it's way a long while ago. Jordan does know where he is going, he just finds thing to add depth to the world.

When I mentioned that things ended rushed, you get this because at the end the evil faced are minions of the worst but have not been mentioned until they come on stage. Other minions have been mentioned but not these two. We also still have our hero unprepared to face his challenge. With some more work, Jordan could have wrapped things up in one.

Ultimately we might have been content with one, but fifteen are so much more fulfilling. It is worth the time and provides enjoyment each time it is read. So you get your moneys worth with a great read despite all the telling and the length of the series. ( )

The story of a group of young men and women from the backwoods Two Rivers country who find themselves at the heart of a controversial tale that has been playing out since Time itself began. The Wheel of Time spins, Ages come and go, legends and people are born and forgotten. The Prophecies of the Dragon claim the Dark One will be freed from his prison, and when he is, Lews Therin Telamon, the Dragon, the Breaker of the World, will be reborn to fight in Tarmon Gai'don, the Last Battle. So the Dragon has been reborn, and the world will break again.

The first in Jordan's Wheel of Time series, this one is my favorite - a "good versus evil" story that is anything but classic. I can't seem to make it past the 6th book without giving out, but I always restart the series with good intentions - consequently, I've read this one several times. Jordan is somewhat long-winded, but I do love the story and it has great characters. How he managed to keep up with so many places, characters, and storylines is beyond me, but they are all amazingly well-developed. I think what astounds me is that even "minor" characters are fully evolved and can hardly be considered "minor". This, I believe, is the complaint of later books - too many characters and storylines making for long and complicated books where the main characters begin to take a back seat.

Kudos to the storyteller, may he rest in peace : ) ( )

Derivative it may be, but the first book of the Wheel of Time series is grande fun. And sets up the universe nicely. ( )

The first widely popular rewrite of Tolkien was The Shannara series, and The Wheel of Time was the next version. Its common for authors to take inspiration from an older work and create their own reimagining, as Virgil did to Homer. Tolkien himself was writing his own interpretation of the Norse Eddas.

When Tolkien and Virgil set out to write their great works, they expanded and changed what came before, and made it their own with a unique voice and vision. Jordan didn't have the knowledge of language, history, or culture to truly copy Tolkien's style. Nor was he able to add any unique spin of his own.

The Eye of The World is a more accessible version of Tolkien, but Tolkien is already a simplified version of the Norse Sagas, meaning that Jordan felt a need to dumb-down the accessible, which doesn't leave his book with much character of its own.

However, unlike other authors who choose a more straightforward take on Fantasy, Jordan kept the plodding length of Tolkien. How he wrote a book both simple and endless is beyond me. Without the strange and engaging details and magic of Tolkien's world, Jordan loses the depth which bolsters a long-winded tale. Instead, he gives us endless characters and plot digressions, losing any sense of drive or urgency the book might have had, were it shorter and streamlined.

In Tolkien, the first hundred pages takes place in Hobbiton. This prelude prepares us for the rest of the book, allowing us to understand the strange world and characters and setting a mood. Then the action takes us away, you don't really want to leave the beauty of Hobbiton, but when we do, the world he builds seems so much grander in comparison.

In Eye of the World, you spend the first hundred and fifty pages in whatever small farming community so that when they finally leave, it will seem like something is happening. Unfortunately, this is only a clever illusion.

The hero is an orphan who looks different, he gets his father's magic sword, he goes on a quest with an old, wily man, gets attacked by evil proto-humans, meets the princess by accident, &c., &c.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Like a lot of modern fantasy, the plot and characters are old and unremarkable. Every fantasy fan has read this same story again and again from countless authors.

There's no reason for this sort of repetition, a new book should be more than just fanfic of an older book. There are hundreds of different influences out there, even before Tolkien touched pen to paper, there was Lord Dunsany, The Worm Ouroboros, H. P. Lovecraft, H. Rider Haggard, Robert E. Howard, Ariosto, Spenser and E. Nesbit, to name a few.

Contemporary with and after Tolkien there are Mervyn Peake, Michael Moorecock, Fritz Leiber, and Gene Wolfe. There is no reason for writing the same stories over and over when there are so many interesting and new inspirations out there. It is especially inexcusable when an author does this with an endless long-windedness.

Also, like most fantasy authors, Jordan will later reveal an unsettling chauvinism, since any powerful female character will end up subservient to a male character, often through a ritual which involves her public nudity and a spanking. I wish I were joking. Luckily, the first volume of the series avoids this.

UPDATE: one might point to the endless and pointless repetition in modern literature as a sure sign that there is no God, no grand plan, and no purpose to the universe. A benevolent power would surely want to spare us the pain of such unending mediocrity.

However, if there were some deity, and he had a sense of humor, he would allow the uncreative authors to publish, to gain fame, and to write a series the length of an encyclopedia, only to have the author die during the very last book. Since this is exactly what happened, I will have to look again for other signs of this humorous creator, possibly involving banana peels and fright wigs. ( )

Pre09:

I'm only putting the first book on here. If he'd made this a trilogy, I might have added more. I read about 7 of them. Nothing happened past the first couple books. I repeat. NOTHING HAPPENED. It made the series total shit for me.

That's a shame too, I loved the character of Matt. Rand was just a whiny bitch to me. ( )

I just don't read fantasy, but in an effort to be more well rounded, I began the Wheel of Time series with this book. It is easy to see how this book has become so praised and the series so followed. This is an epic story centering on Rand Al'Thor that tries to save the world, punish satan, and deliver from danger a whole cast of characters that you have begun to care about. If you start this book, you may as well buy the next one because you will be hooked. Great read. ( )

Jordan is great. Those new to Jordan should find the first book an easy read. I will read his books again and again, but I won't attempt to write a meaningful review of his 6,000 plus page series here. Suffice it to say, the books are central part of my fantasy library. If you haven't read The Eye of the World you should. ( )

I was looking for an easy read, something I knew I liked. I first read this book about 12 or 13 years ago. I was out of work and a friend recommended the series. It was a good thing I was out of work because I read the first four books (600+ pages) in three days. I read all night because I wanted to find out what happened. The characters became real. I had dreams about them and thought about the books all the time. It was scary how much they took over my brain. As the series continued it lost its hold a bit. When the author died without finishing the books I was more upset because I would never find out what happened in the end than I was about a person dieing. This is how I learned about Brandon Sanderson, he was chosen by Robert Jordan's widow to finish up the series. Having read all Sanderson's other books, I think she made an excellent choice. Now it looks like the end of the series will be three more books, with the first coming out in the fall.
All that is background to my reading this book, this time. I haven't read them for a while, not wanting to get irritated about no ending again. I was amazed at this book's ability to make me stay up too late even after multiple readings (at least 4) and years of knowing what happens to the characters later. This is an excellent book. I love the characters, the detail, the plot, the prophecy, it is all so well done.
The best part of rereading this book was seeing how much is put into the book to set up things that come later. There are bits of prophecy, there are characters that only have a chapter now but whole plot threads later. There are weird little incidents, not more than a paragraph, that prepare you for the huge plot twists that come later in the series. The amount of work it took to keep all of this straight is awe-inspiring. I can just imagine the office; with notes, diagrams, bulging file cabinets, all full of the details of the world Robert Jordan created.
His characters are incredible too. They are all people, even the serving maid and the innkeepers are people. So often the minor roles could just as well be faceless robots, with no personality, no interest beyond keeping the main characters fed. Though it takes up a lot of space, the incidental characters here feel like they continue living after the story has left them.
There are so many other parts of the novel I could rave about. The prophesies are the most I have ever seen in a book outside the Old Testament. The style of storytelling is not just a single line. As a character who is ill retells the last week, the narrative skips, following the jumbled memory of someone who has been ill and missed a bit of events. If the rest of the books had kept to this level of skill Robert Jordan would be proclaimed the best fantasy author of all time, perhaps even beating out Tolkien. Alas, they didn't. There was a marked drop-off about book 5, but by then you are so thoroughly hooked you keep reading anyway. ( )

A student recommended thos book to me while I was helping him with a research project. I expected a trilogy. The cahracters are well-drawn and develop during the course of the book. There are enough mysteries and counterplots to keep the usuasl "We need to save the world from being destroyed by incredible evil" plot from being stale. ( )

This is the first book in a rather lengthy fantasy series. The universe and plot are interesting (if a bit formulaic), and the characters are well defined with distinct and interesting personalities. There were a couple points where I felt the plot (or a subplot) suddenly just leapt ahead or was rushed. In general, the story was compelling enough to pick up the next book in the series, but I don’t have enough confidence to feel committed to the entire series just yet. I picked up the book as the next book for the online scifi/fantasy book club podcast, Sword and Laser. ( )

I loved this book. It was recommended to me by someone in the bookstore. (I've always wondered if it was Jordan himself.) My mom couldn't finish it because the dark parts were too much for her, but for me they just made it more compelling. His characters are very real and the women are definitely not wimpy. The adventures are exciting and the descriptive passages are eloquent. Then end is good considering it is a series - that is, everything is not resolved, but it feels like a good place to stop. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed the world Robert Jordan created in the first book of The Wheel of Time series. His characters, places and story blow a breath of freshness on to the fantasy landscape. However, there must be some bad mixed with any good review. This man desperately needs an editor. I cannot count the number of times the word "hastily" is used and some of his similes are laughable. Perhaps the writing improves in future books?

I highly recommend this book, not so much for the writing, but for the creative and amazing story hidden within. Hastily, I shall read the second book. ( )

Wow. I remember what it felt like when I first read this book. There were 6 or 7 books out at the time, and I dove in, and absolutely loved this one. It didn't feel like a Tolkien wanna-be; I loved the characters and was totally immersed in the story. Ditto for the second, and the third. By the time I caught up with the series' release schedule, I found that I had to start over at book 1 each time a new book was released. I was starting to get the books confused with other series I was reading. Then when rumours of Robert Jordan's ill health surfaced, I abandoned the series until someone concluded it. Robert Jordan instilled in me a new rule; never read a series until all of the books have been published. Even if the author is in good health, you never know when a big bus is lurking around the corner. Once the final book is released, I plan to start with this one again, and hopefully regain the sense of wonder that I had reading it the first time. I have to admit that I got very disenchanted with the series by book 8 or 9, and I'm not sure how much is due to the story line getting bogged down or wandering off, and how much is due to the time in between books, and my concern over whether to invest time in a series that might not ever be concluded. I'm certainly going to give the series another try, largely on how great this first installment was. ( )

I loved the first few books in this series, particularly this first one. Well-written and fast-paced, this is a great introduction to the main characters we'll see throughout the rest of the series. I thought that later books were bogged down by unnecessary detail and far too many characters to keep track of (seriously, you'll need a cheat sheet!) but this one is wonderful.

very good book, but very in depth. You really have to focus and concentrate to get through it. There are a lot of characters that are explained in depth and sometimes it was hard to keep everyone straight, especially whn you put in down and then a couple days later pick it up. ( )

My Bookspotcentral review ( )

(Alistair) And so it begins.

The big Wheel of Time re-read, that is. Now we have some confidence that the next book will, in fact, be the last book of what turns out to be a duodecalogy, it seems like a good time to start this - although I'll still be spreading it out among my other reading - and hopefully finish in some sort of good time for the release of A Memory of Light.

Booklogging it without bringing in a whole passel of externality, of course, is tricky - having read, over the years, the next eleven books, for one thing, and of course, it can't really be denied that having met so many interesting people, including of course most particularly my wife, through the fortuitous chance of having acquired the first through fifth books of this series almost simultaneously with first meeting the Internet, I am perhaps a little biased with generalized goodwill towards the series.

But let me attempt to set that aside and continue, in any case. The Eye of the World is, on its own merits, a good book. While to some extent Mr. Jordan's description-heavy writing style takes some getting used to, it hasn't reached its apex yet, and does a good job of realizing the world. (Much the same could be said for some of the other irritating tics of his writing, in particular the almost Greek love of epithet, in which braid-tugging takes its place alongside rosy-fingered dawn and wine-dark seas in the long list of the now-cliched; and the tremendous lack of communication between characters, regarding which I am entirely in agreement with Tom Lehrer.)

He makes a nice use of a Tolkien-imitative style quest plot in this book to start the series off and draw the reader in; unfortunately, the closure to that particular quest - just one part of the much bigger picture, of course - at the end of this book is almost a little too good, since I essentially forgot about the rest of the series after reading this one, and didn't acquire more for several years, at which time I bought everything from The Great Hunt to Fires of Heaven in one go. (But as that was - good grief - 1991, and I was much younger and less discerning a reader then, let us by all means not hold that against it.)

In short, then, a good start to the series, and one which I have much less hesitation in recommending to fantasy readers than I might have had while its length was still up in the air; however, as it does "sag in the middle", with regard to quality, one might wish to wait until the next few reviews come out, and indeed possibly all the way up to books 7, 8 and 9, before acting on anything I say in them.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ce... )

(Amy) So, it's difficult to write a review for this book. For one thing, I've read it well over a dozen times, starting some 15 years ago, and discussed it and most of the rest of its series to death with assorted denizens of the once-thriving Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan, once upon a time. Late in the series I lost my patience for Jordan's ridiculously low plot-to-wordiness ratio, not to mention the interminable descriptions of impossible gowns and iterations of the "that-other-one-understands-women-better-than-I-do" theme, and so drifted away from the Jordan fandom and, in fact, have never got around to reading the most recent installment of the series.

However, I do still have a soft spot in my heart for these books, given that not only did I enjoy them quite a lot for many years, I also met several close friends and, in fact, my husband on that newsgroup referenced above, and it's difficult to disentangle my thoughts about the books proper from all of these associations. Not to mention, the long awaited last book is finally coming out (probably sometime this year), and I could really do with a sense of closure to the plot threads that have been pending for so long.

All of that out of the way, I'll try to do justice to this book itself. It's not really particularly original - plot-wise, one could believe Jordan had a copy of the monomyth and was using it as a checklist - and the characters are flat, irritating, and unconvincing. The women are particularly bad. It's as if Jordan uses all female characters to express aspects of I Have Met The Other, And She's A Dumb Bitch. So, as one might imagine, that's a little irritating. But having once acquired the knack of setting that aside, there actually is a story worth reading buried in there - more in later books than in this one, but that's not so surprising, given that this one had to be largely self-contained in case it ended up being the only one.

Would I recommend this book? Well, quite probably not to people who are critical readers, or veteran fantasy readers with a couple of decades of similar books behind them, unless I was sure of their ability to read past the very real flaws. And probably not until the twelfth book has indeed come out, because I have a suspicion that the series will hang together as a whole far better than it ever was able to stand as a bunch of single books read years apart. But for certain types of reader - and certainly for just about anyone under the age of 20 - then yes, I would recommend it. Just don't blame me if the number of characters you want to punch in the nose exceeds the number you can keep track of on your fingers.
(http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ze...) ( )