Archive for April 28, 2010

Title: The Eye Of The World
Author: Robert Jordan
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
Pages: 832

Summary
Rand Al’Thor is a farmer from a small, relatively unknown remote village, Emond’s Field. Nothing interesting ever happens there until two strangers appear on the eve of their spring festival. Then everything changes and Rand and his friends are swept up into a series of events foretold by ancient Prophecies which foretel the breaking of the world.

Notes
This is not the first time I’ve attempted to read through this series. I got all the way through book 5 the first time before I lost interest and gave up, but I am determined to go through with it this time (at least as far and as fast as they release the books for the Kindle.

Robert Jordan is an author I have a love/hate relationship with. At times he’s brilliant. Other times, he resorts back to a series of cliches. All of the characters look sharpely at one another, or continually raise their brows. Braid tugging is common and very detailed descriptions of seemingly random things (I do not care what the pattern of lace on a dress of one of the female characters is).

He’s also absolutely horrible at writing women. Or man/woman interactions. Every time Rand, Mat or Perrin encounter a woman they’re interested in, they inevitably say something to the effect of “Oh, I wish <blah blah> was here…he knew how to deal with women” There’s even situations where one chapter Rand says something like “Oh, I wish Mat were here, he always knows what to say to women” and the next Mat says “Oh I wish Rand were here, he always knows what to say to women”.

I do realize it sounds like I hate the books, far from it. It’s a testament to the richness of the world and the interest of the story that I put up with Robert Jordan’s favorite cliches. He’s not all bad. When he gets away from the braid tugging and when he’s not trying to write female characters, he’s got some really well written stuff in here. Well, at least in the early books. But we’ll get to that when I get there.

This first book is probably the best written one (that I’ve read). It stays away from a lot of the cliches (that I think creep in as Robert Jordan tries to establish separate personalities for his characters and can only really fall back on several iconic actions for each.) and, though it’s long, the story moves along at a good pace.

Next Book

After this book, I continued onwards with the second book in the series, The Great Hunt, also unsurprisingly enough, written by Robert Jordan.