The Eye of the World: Book One of 'The Wheel of Time'

Like most, I came to this book on a recommendation. I’ve read about 50 pages despite finding nothing that really captured my attention, thinking it’s got to get better... and then I came here and had all my suspicions confirmed! I am giving up today. The plot advances at a snail’s pace and the dialogue feels like dialogue for the sake of having dialogue, rather than having any actual relevance to the plot. It’s like purple prose in dialogue form; unnecessary and clunky. Fifty pages in, I should feel some sort of connection to the MC but all I really have is that Rand thought he saw something, has a few friends, a father, a girl he might like, and plenty of info about where he lives, but nothing about him that makes me feel I know him or care about what happens to him. I’m not even sure I care to know how it ends at this point. If anything, I will certainly be more careful about who I take book recommendations from in future!

I really wanted to like this book - the first few chapters were great, pulled me in and stayed on the mind. But as the story progressed I realized that Jordan was shamelessly ripping off LOTR: the characters (does a lost King pledged to fight evil, who fights with near super-human skill using a big old sword of destiny, while a beautiful woman pines over him in a forbidden but totally chivalrous romance sound familiar at all???), the baddies (Myrddraal = Nazgul; Trollocks = Orcs), the completely unambiguous fight between good and evil... it completely spoilt any immersion in the storyline. On my second point: I was expecting some really interesting subverting of tropes in a story which meshed a familiar fantasy setting with female authority (realm ruled by Queens, magic dominated by all-female Aes Sedai). What I actually got were some of the most tired, unoriginal female stereotypes I've seen. Nearly all the women, who are supposed to be competent, spend all their time blushing, gasping, crying, making tea, seductively dancing, and mooning after male characters. Oh and they are all beautiful of course, because that's an interesting character trait? Tldr: lazily written, lazily sexist. Read literally any other fantasy series.

The most common criticism of the Wheel of Time is that it's a Tolkien rip-off, and I'm always amazed when I read these criticisms that they're delivered as though the reviewer is clever for discovering the influence. Undoubtedly the first half of the Wheel of Time book 1 is not shy about following the plot line along with the plot elements put forth first by Tolkien (or - popularized in the fantasy genre by Tolkien more accurately). Almost to the point where you could question if Robert Jordan doesn't envision this as another third age in Tolkien's universe set a few hundred turnings down the wheel. The Two Rivers is a secluded part of the world with people who never leave that backs up to the 'Mountains of the Mist' (as opposed to the Misty Mountains'). There's a Dark One who is returning in strength, and Trollocs seem an awful lot like reskinned Orcs and Myrdraal are the next level black cloaked villains who even ride black horses. However by 3/4s of the way through the book I have a hard time seeing how anyone could seriously be contending that what they're reading is a Lord of the Rings rip off, other than that they're proud of themselves for seeing the parallels early on and trying to hold onto that feeling by the time they can get to the end so that they can write a review that shows how they were correct to write it off from the beginning. Where parallels can still be made and levied as criticism by late book I end up wondering why this person is reading a fantasy series if they don't like fantasy, at least in most cases. In fiction you look to like the characters or to believe the characters. You look the like the world, or believe the world. You want to keep asking questions and to sometimes already be able to find the answers, because the author has already put the answers in the text, or you are able to believe that such answers exist. If your mind is pre-disposed to be captured by the fantastic, your mind enjoys the task of making other-worldly elements real, you may end up enjoying less grounded novels like this one. This is why I would recommend WoT, and the EotW to anyone that enjoys the fantasy genre in general, because it is a thoughtful book. The character interactions and the plot proceed out of the mind of someone who is considering the questions that might arise. What the personalities of the people in the story are, what the motivations are, what their capabilities are, what the world they're living in is like, and once something is established what affect that has on everything around it. I suppose you might call this tightly constructed. To me this is what obliterates shallow comparisons to Tolkien, because I don't understand how something can be so well thought out, but yet so derivative as to not be worth reading. It's hardly perfect, fans will try to defend some inconsistencies in Book 1 that d...