University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

The Eye of the World is the first book in the epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time and was published just as I became a teenager and started to read longer novels. While I was an avid reader of comic books, which have sci-fi and fantasy elements, my family did not read heavily so I did not read longer form fiction. I discovered this book through my local public library, the New Martinsville Public Library in West Virginia. It was engaging enough for me to finish despite its huge size. This book opened up the whole history of fantasy, so I then explored Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. However, I think the most valuable aspect of this book is that the series and characters have grown with me from a child to an adult. The series even survived its author by six years, with Brandon Sanderson (the next generation of fantasy authors) finishing the last three books.