All very standard fantasy on the surface, except that all the magic users – known as Aes Sedai – are women, as in the last age all the male Aes Sedai went mad and literally broke the world, and the Dragon, should he be reborn, would be as much a figure of fear as hope. It features a large cast of nominally ‘good’ characters trying to bring to fruition a prophecy that would see a great hero – the Dragon – reborn to face off against the looming presence of the Dark One, Shai’tan. If you haven’t come across it before, the Wheel of Time series is a grand, sweeping fantasy epic based around the classic ‘light vs dark’ premise, with a highly detailed world rich in history and mythology. Eight years on though, the trailer for the TV adaptation of The Wheel of Time was released… After reading, and loving, A Memory of Light (incredibly, 24 years later in 2013) to finish the series I wasn’t sure I would ever go back and read the whole thing again from the beginning – after all, even though I love this series, despite its flaws, we’re talking tens of thousands of pages (4.4 million words) across the whole thing, so it’s a massive commitment. I first read it in 1999, at age 16, and I’ve lost count of how many times I ended up re-reading it (and many more of the early books in the series) over the following years to refresh my memory about what happened, each time one of the final books was published. Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, the first book in the epic Wheel of Time series, has an incredibly strong nostalgic hook for me.
0 kommentar(er)
