W H E E L O F T I M E series
I don't usually read fantasies. I read non fiction mostly: memoirs, health books, biographies, social commentaries, political exposes. I have some grandchildren who read exclusively fantasies...also my son-in-law Fox reads a lot of them. I listen in amazement to people who know all about the Lord of the Rings series and how they have such devotion to the books and strong opinions about what it all means. I have seen the Lord of the Rings movies and I have listened to a dramatized version of The Chronicles of Narnia. I did read Orson Scott Cards Ender's Game because Harrison Ford stars in the movie that will come out at the end of this year.Fantasy has not been my thing. But there is a whole world of folks out there who absolutely love it.
Today I discovered just in some random reading on the Internet..
The Wheel of Time series.
Oh my..where have I been all this time?
This is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time
The Wheel of Time is a series of
epic fantasy novels written by
American author James Oliver Rigney, Jr., under the
pen name Robert Jordan. Originally planned as a six-book series,
The Wheel of Time now spans fourteen volumes, in addition to a prequel novel and a companion book. Jordan began writing the first volume,
The Eye of the World, in 1984 and it was published in January 1990.
[1]
The author
died in 2007 while working on what was planned to be the final volume in the series, although he had prepared extensive notes so another author could complete the book according to his wishes. Fellow fantasy author and long-time
Wheel of Time fan
Brandon Sanderson was brought in to complete the final book, but during the writing process it was decided that the book would be far too large to be published in one volume, and would instead be published as three volumes:
The Gathering Storm (2009),
Towers of Midnight (2010) and
A Memory of Light (released on 8 January 2013).
[2]
The series draws on numerous elements of both European and Asian mythology, most notably the cyclical nature of time found in
Hinduism and
Buddhism, the concepts of
balance,
duality, a matter-of-fact respect for nature found in
Daoism, as well as a creation story similar to that of Christianity in "The Creator" (Light) and "The Dark One". It was also partly inspired by
Leo Tolstoy's
War and Peace.
[3]
So now I am wondering if I should perhaps read this series sometime.....Hmmmm....