The Wheel of Time: The Series That Started It All

The Eye of the World, Wheel of Time Book 1, by Robert Jordan

This is the one that did it. Wheel of Time was the first big series I ever read — the first time I looked at a shelf that long and thought yeah, I'm doing all of that. Everything else on this site traces back to it in some way.

The Sanderson connection

Robert Jordan died before he could finish it, and Brandon Sanderson was brought in to write the ending from Jordan's notes. That's how I found Sanderson at all — and given how much of this blog is Cosmere, that one hand-off is responsible for a stupid amount of my listening hours since.

[Narration note] Michael Kramer and Kate Reading narrate this one too, trading off the way they do on Sanderson's stuff. If their voices sound like home to you by now, that's probably where it started.

Long. Really long.

I'm not going to pretend it's flawless. It's amazing, but it's really long and it gets redundant in the middle — there are stretches where you could skip a chunk and miss almost nothing. You have to be willing to ride those out. Worth it for the payoff, but go in knowing what you signed up for.

About that TV show

I had high hopes for the Wheel of Time TV show. This is the series that got me into reading at all, so of course I was excited to see it on screen. It let me down hard. It's bad, and it stings more than most bad adaptations because of how much the books mean to me. Skip it and go listen to the real thing.

9.1/10. Not the tightest series I've listened to, but one of my favorites and the reason I read at all.