Discussion Questions for That's How I Blog (The Eye of the World)

I'm going to be on the blog talk radio show That's How I Blog tomorrow night at 10pm EST.

You can get the details of the show (including how to listen in and the call-in number for the book discussion) in my post from last week and also on the show's home page: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thats-how-i-blog.


If you’ve read THE EYE OF THE WORLD (aka TEOTW) I hope you are planning to discuss it with me during the Book Club portion of the show.

For those who have read, check out my list of questions below. These are some of the things I want to talk. You can post your thoughts in the comments of course, but what I’d really like is to have you share them with me on the show.


***Warning: Do not read any further if you are still planning to read the book – there ARE spoilers! ***


Discussion Questions for TEOTW, or “Things I want to talk about” …

• Are you an epic fantasy reader or is this your first venture into the genre?
• Did the book turn out to be what you expected it to be?
• When I first read the book, the prologue confused the heck out of me. It didn’t really make sense until I got farther into the series. How did you feel about it?
• I read this book for the first time in the early 1990s. I STILL remember the creepy feeling I got when I read about Rand seeing the black rider on the road, with the cloak that didn't move in the wind. *shudder* THAT is when I knew this book would be good. Did that scene affect you in the same way? Or was there another scene that made you REALLY get into the book?
• My favorite characters in this first book are Perrin (and the wolves – yay! If you remember, I’ve always had a thing for wolves) and Nyneave. On my first reading, Matt was my least favorite character; he really irritated me, especially with the whole knife thing - STUPID, MATT, very stupid!!! After reading the series so many times, the only character I really dislike at this point is Padan Fain (side note: Does he remind anyone else of Gollum?). Which characters did you love? Hate?
• There are a few scenes whose creepiness stuck with me through the years … Shadar Logoth, the swarm of ravens killing the fox, and Machin Shin (the Black Wind) in the Ways. It is one thing to read about the Machin Shin and quite another (and much, much creepier!) to hear the Wind's words read aloud. *shudder*
• There are also scenes that I love, such as the story of Manetheran, first meeting Loial, learning about Lan’s tragic past, Lan and Nyneave’s declaration of love, Loial singing to the Green Man's tree, and so many others.
  
• What did you think about the final big climax of the series? On my first read I was very confused (but I was also pretty young- middle school maybe?) but it makes complete sense to me now. How did it come across to those of you who read it for the first time?
  
• I can't believe that I forgot where this book ended. I kept thinking that there was more coming, but all the exciting things I'm remembering must happen at the beginning of book 2 ... which makes me want to continue on with the series yet again. :)
  
  

About the rest of the series (spoiler free!) …

• A big theme in this series is the fluidity of truth over time and space – how a story that is passed from person to person will change the farther it gets from the physical location where it happened and the time in which it happened – add this to the cyclical nature of time in this series and you have a wonderfully complicated web/wheel of myths and legends continually changing and repeating themselves.
• There are characters, plots, and tidbits of info introduced in this book that become very important later in the series (sometimes MUCH later); it is so much fun to reread this series because there is ALWAYS something else that I catch that I’d missed before. A few things that become important later include: the story of Artur Hawkwing, the woman who tried to kill Rand and Matt, and the death of Hopper, the Green Man's comments to Rand, and so on.
  
• And just as a side note, the trollocs are really creepy in this book but so much happens in the rest of the series that the trollocs become almost laughable as time goes by.
• I read most of the series as it came out and got very frustrated with several of the more recent books; it seemed like things were going nowhere and taking forever to get there. However, reading the books straight through (rather than with a year or two in between) has made me love the series more than ever. Things really ARE going somewhere and it really ISN'T taking that long when you read the books one after the other.
  

Do you have any thoughts on the things I've posted? Maybe you have other questions you'd like to discuss? Post your thoughts and questions in the comments, then tune in to the show to discuss it all with me!