Hey, tell me about that…tell me, tell me. Brandon Sanderson, tell me about the first book you bought—the first Robert Jordan book.
Well, I walked in the door to this bookstore—I would go there once a week because I knew when new books came out, they came out on Tuesdays—and I would walk in, and there was the new release day. And these people knew books—they only carried science fiction and fantasy, which is what I loved. And they knew how to get the right books in the hands of a little teenage guy who was just devouring them. I discovered fantasy one year before.
And I remember walking in, and there featured displayed prominently was this big thick paperback of Eye of the World —I can just visualize it—and that’s the first book in the Wheel of Time. And it was big, and it was thick. And I loved big thick books because I knew that there was immersion there. I didn’t want something to be over quickly like a snap. I mean, that’s what you get in a movie or something like that. In a book, I want to be immersed. I want to be able to dig my teeth in and really get to know people in the world. So I looked for the big ones. It wasn’t necessarily an indication of quality, but I knew that if I found one I loved and it was big, I’d be able to spend a lot of time there. And this one was huge.
And I remember buying that book, and just really getting sucked in, like nothing I’d read before. I mean, the generation before me read Tolkien. I hadn’t read Tolkien. I’d tried Tolkien when I was too young and it had been too hard for me. It had been years since I tried Tolkien, but I grew up on The Eye of the World . This was the fantasy epic of the Wheel of Time for my generation, but I later read Tolkien and loved it.
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