After enriching the last twenty years of my life with fourteen books and almost 12,000 pages of text, how do you appropriately say “thank you” to an author? How do you adequately explain the profoundness of getting to know characters and live their life through such intricately described points of views? Why would you give a rat’s ass about a fantasy series some dude on the internet thinks is awesome?
It was 1992, I was still too young to drive so I would often ride my bike to the library (yeah, I was that cool). I was looking for something new to read, and little did I know what I was getting myself into by checking out “The Eye of the World”, book one of the Wheel of Time series from Robert Jordan. I’m pretty sure that summer I blew through at least thew first 3 books without even blinking, so you can imagine my annoyance when around the fourth or fifth book I had caught up with the author. By book five it was taking on average two years to complete a book, so I must have re-read the series from the beginning at least three times waiting for new books to come out. Then in 2007 any series reader’s worst nightmare happened, the author passed away, and I was afraid I would never see the books through to the end after being so involved for so long. Enter Brandon Sanderson, chosen by the original author’s wife & editor to finish the series and final book (which ended up being 3) using extensive notes.
All of this led up to today, when I turned the final page of the final book and the only thing that I could process as a thoughtful summation was, “I wonder what happens next?”
Great! Now you can start The Dark Tower series! 🙂
That’s not the first recommendation I’ve gotten for that series, but for some reason I have never gotten into anything written by Stephen King. I’ll add The Gunslinger to my book queue and give it a shot after I finish what I moved on to (The Name of the Wind).