Slow-Turning Wheel

This is probably not a good sign. Roughly three months after I began reading the first book of The Wheel of Time, I finally finished it (just before I left on my Orlando trip). It's not a "bad" book; I just never found it particularly engaging. Every night, faced with the prospect of either reading another chapter of the book or doing "something else," the something else usually won.

What it basically comes down to is that it feels like a pretty big regression in the fantasy genre to me. Now granted, this first book of the series was published 20 years ago. Still... plenty of fantasy authors have finally moved out from the long shadow cast by J.R.R. Tolkien, and have started to tell other stories in other ways.

Not Robert Jordan. Not in this book. The Eye of the World is a clone of The Lord of the Rings -- a clone in which "Frodo" spends about three times longer in the Shire at the start of the book before finally hitting the road. You have a company of people, led by a wizard-type and a fighter-type. One is carrying an artifact that corrupts his soul. They're all trying to reach a destination, pursued along the way by minions of a dark evil. Partway through the journey, they're split up into three different small groups, each to have their own side adventure.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

I sound way down on the book, but really I'm just trying to say that I don't see what grabbed everyone's imagination. What made so many people latch on to these books, so much so that the author saw fit to stretch it to literally more books than he could complete in a lifetime?

That said, as a Tolkien clone, I would say that it is generally done better than Tolkien at least. The pace is still slow at times, but when the action does come, it is usually engaging. The characters are a bit more rounded out, less one-dimensional than their Lord of the Rings counterparts.

I'd rate The Eye of the World a B-. It's probably too much of a slog for people who don't generally read fantasy, but was good enough that I'll probably continue on and read the next book of the series... just not as my next read.