Eye of the World

I really liked Brandon Sanderson's young adult Alcatraz books. That inspired me to try out some of his mistborn books, despite my poor experience with other high fantasy. They were actually good books (though not quite up to the Alcatraz quality.) Sanderson has also written the final books in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. He was chosen to do so after Jordan's widow was impressed by his Mistborn books. I want to read the Sanderson books. However, since they are in the end of the series, it would probably be best to start with book one. Hopefully the series would be as good as Sanderson's.

Thus, I am starting on Eye of the World. The book is really slow going. I'm halfway through and not a whole lot has happened so far. There has been some conflict. People fled a village. There is some gender-linked magic. There are some half-human monsters that fight.

Now I've made it to the end, and there still hasn't been a whole lot of stuff happening. Its tough to understand what the purpose was of all the words. The characters seem fairly flat, the action is pedestrian. I fell asleep listening to part of the audiobook and didn't seem to miss much. Apparently, Jordan tried to write his novel in the style of Tolkien. At least he got the tedium part right.

There are people out there that like the work of Tolkien and Jordan. Alas, I am not one of them. If they were shorter books, I might consider slogging through. But a dozen big fat novels? Nope. I think I'll be skipping to the end to get to Sanderson's novels. At least has a track record of fantasy that I can handle.