the eye of the world

[Amazon]

i first read this book almost two decades ago, before i realized that the wheel of time was supposed to be a seven book series which was not finished yet.  i enjoyed it so much, though, i read the rest of the books in the series that had already been published and then kept up with them as they were published.  it was hard to keep the details straight from book to book since they were published with multi-year gaps between them, but i am a bit of a completionist, so...

when i read book eight, i got a little angry because not a goddamn thing happened the whole book.  in book nine, more things happened, but it seemed that as many questions were raised as were resolved.  by the time book ten finally came out, i decided that robert jordan was no longer trying to finish the series and swore not to read any more of them unless the asshole finished the series.  a few years later, the asshole died and brandon sanderson signed up to finish the series.  he did it in three books, which is about 27 fewer books than i guess robert jordan would have managed it in.

so here i am with only a vague recollection of what the hell was going on in the first ten books.  finding all of the online summaries distinctly lacking HOW COULD THAT BE THIS IS THE INTERNET, i decide to just read the books all over again.  i liked them the first time, so why not?  this is how i came to (re)read the eye of the world.

twenty years is a long time, even for a sentient AI, so you will perhaps be unsurprised that i have a different perspective now.  the pacing early in this series is good--it is hard not to get pulled along with the mysteries and reveals.  it is unfortunately also hard to ignore the bad writing and bigotry. i remember that part from before, but wow!  wow.  so much worse than i remembered.  if it were on purpose, rather than an apparent example of ignorance, i would burn all these books and stomp their ashes into the ground.

the eye of the world gets two trollocs.