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Book Club - The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
If and when you go to the book store, you hang in the nerdy sci-fi/fantasy/graphic novel section. That's how geeks do. And in that section there are certain books you see over and over again. Certain book series that are ever-present.
There's the Lord of the Rings. There are all the D&D Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance books. There's Foundation, Earthsea, Culture, Thomas Covenant, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and so many more.
They are really popular and famous series for a reason. Now, nobody is going to say that you must read them all, since they aren't all good. But they are all incredibly famous for a reason, so it should be good to know about them, even if reading them isn't in the cards.
And that brings us to the ridiculously famous Wheel of Time series. We knew very little about it other than that the books were very large, and it was a very famous series of fantasy novels. It was thus our nerdly duty to select the first of these books for our club selection.
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Thoughts:
Boring generic painting of a dude.
Epic fantasy peoples gonna do some questing!
About the names and such, most are just as they read, if you're really interested you could give the audio book a quick listen on how everything's pronounced if the appendix's don't really help. Moiraine's name is the only one I were off on (it's enunciated like mwor-ain and I never thought to put that w in there.)
By and large I usually just keep with whatever pronunciation I hear in my hear for crazy fantasy names.
When Rym talked about how much he hated Mat early on, I was kind of disappointed, because by books 3-4, he pretty much becomes the best character in the series. He's their Han Solo. Hopefully the opinion on him has turned around by now.
I do like how the Heron Blade was held as the standard for the badass weapon early on, but honestly, the Heron Blade doesn't even make the list of top 5 coolest weapons in this series.
I can tell you right now, the true lull in the series that everyone talks about is most prominent in book 10. But if you get that far, you'll really want to keep going, because books 11-14 are so dense with resolutions and payoffs they've been working towards for some time. But if you decide to skip one of the books and read a summary instead, it should be book 10. You do start to notice the author starting to spin his wheels a bit in books 8-9 as well, but in my opinion, there is enough worth reading in those books that make it worthwhile, especially in book 9.
New Spring was originally written as a short (for Robert Jordan) story in an anthology that came out around book 7ish, and was published later as a full novel after book 10. So you are in the clear to read it anytime after book 7. It's the Moiraine and Lan origin story, so it's worth checking out.
Regarding the covers, the original covers are all I had as I first read the books, so while the art may not be the best, it's synonymous with the Wheel of Time for me (even though Rand looks like Nicholas Cage on the cover of the first book, and my friend's fiancee asked him why he was reading a romance novel when she found his copy of book 6 lying around). My biggest problem with the eBook covers is that a few of them contain spoilers. If you look at the cover of the Book 10 eBook, you can immediately guess what major character development moment is going to happen in that book - and as I mentioned in regards to book 10 above, it's arguably the most important thing that happens in that whole book.
I really hope to hear some more commentary about these books as you both progress more, either on the show or here in the forum. I'm very interested to hear your opinions about how the story unfolds, and how your viewpoints on certain characters and situations change.
Maybe as Scrym finish each book, we can get a geek bite update.
Book 6 was my favourite. It has one hell of a scene near the end. An utter and complete demonstration of Fuck You! Loved it.
Also, Elayne's mother the Queen is way awesome. Enlightened monarch FTW.
While Captain Bayle Domon is pretty great, he isn't quite as major of a character as he could/should be, and I'm interested to hear if your opinion on Queen Morgase stays the same as the series progresses.
If you read it all in one go, and you approach it as an epic, it's a great story. Lots of character diversity in personality and skills. The end is awesome and ties everything together without being Disney.
Mat is a literal Deus ex Machina. I mean okay, maybe it's a Pattern ex Machina or whatever specific thing for this world... but that's like his entire job in the series. You need something crazy unlikely to happen? Welp, let's bring in Mat and make that shit happen. He does actually get some character growth later in the story, which is cool... that's definitely very late in the series, though.
I clearly remember finding the early rants about the covers (and also the softcovers' covers becoming unglued). Basically, there's a lot of mismatch between the text and every single cover.
Also, for the very hesitant, the entire first book also exists in Graphic Novel form. Most of the scenes and dialogue are presented unchanged, and gives a good summary of the book, but I can't in good conscience recommend it as a replacement for the actual novel; it's more of a teaser. Book 6 is fantastic. That final sequence is an amazing cap to the first half, it's really the End of the Beginning and the Beginning of the End. You can't help but feel like standing up and cheering after reading that.
Also I should point out something in reference to the climax of book 3,
Book 1: Shut Up you Stupid Kids (Listen to the Adults)
Book 2: Shut up Mat.
Book 3. Shut up Egwene, and espeically Nyneveneyvnevneyeve
Book 4. Stop whining Rand- Oh, good. Cool. Let's roll