Getting into The Wheel of Time and audiobooks

When somebody asks me what kind of books I read the answer is always the same: fiction. I very rarely read non-fiction books because real life is boring, a funny sentence that I said without thinking many years ago and became a constant joke at work. Jokes aside, I think it describes quite right what I look for when reading: I want to visit other worlds and live other lives.

One of the fantasy series that I’ve always heard good things of is The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. I heard ramblings about it but never paid attention or did any research about it. That was until the tv show started to be rumoured. I immediately got worried about that. I didn’t want to watch the show without having read the book first!

Of course, thanks to the creepy Internet we live in, it didn’t take even five minutes for Youtube to show me videos from Daniel Greene talking about it. And, this time, I’m happy it did because I’ve become a huge fan of his channel.

His video convinced me on giving this series a chance. Even if I was a little scared, fourteen books are not a joke. But the, very, positive thing is that the series is finished and right now that’s something that I’m very keen on.

So I decided to give it a go. I bought the book for my Kindle and started reading for a couple of evenings. But one of my flaws quickly showed up, I have always some trouble with starts, specially in epic fantasy where they present to you a thousand characters in a couple of pages… and I’m very bad at names!

The other inconvenience that I found is that my eyes are already drained enough after an entire day in front of a computer to keep forcing them until midnight. I have many issues with eye sight and so I’m always careful with adding more work to them.

I was about to drop it but then took the decision of switching to the audio-book instead. For me this was the best decisions, it solved all my problems. I have to admit that took me a couple of chapters to get use to the voices, specially since they change the narrator depending on the main character and I’m not a big voice of the woman’s narration. But once I got use to it everything changed.

First of all, I can read more and faster. As you may know I usually consume content at 2x, but reading at double my usual speed would be quite tricky. But whith an audio book I can crank up the speed with no problem. I keep it at 1.5x because of course comprehending a fantasy story is way harder than a youtube video but still, I gain some time with that. But more importantly, I can read while doing chores at home. This means I can read more often and, as a good side effect, that I don’t mind doing them ^^.

I finished the first entry, The Eye of the World, in about a month. Sadly I was not really impressed by it. I was aware that it’s really just an introduction to the series, to a huge world and story, but that’s not an excuse for moving on so slowly. You can read on Goodreads the review I left just after finishing it.

But that didn’t made me stop. Just by the end it got interesting so I quickly jumped into the second one before I lost the hype. Right now I’m about 80% on The Great Hunt and I have to say that I’m liking it way more. The story still moves really slow but I think the characters caught my interest already, which is good.

I hope I can finish it soon and have enough energy to continue with the series!