Musings over Magician’s Guild & Eye of the World

I told you guys in my 2025 Reading Resolution post that I was going to try and read books/audiobooks that I find fulfilling by not rushing or forcing myself to read them to a timetable (funny that as I’ve started a book that I need to read and review by the beginning of April for a blog tour. Oh yes, I am a walking contradiction). 

Well, I have done that with my first two reads of 2025 and I decided to slam my thoughts and feelings over these two together in one post as they are quite similar and yet, very different. They are, as you know if you have read my previous posts on here (or on any of my socials - since deleting the hellscape known as Twitter/X, I am far more active on the others!), The Magician’s Guild by Trudi Canavan* & The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan*. 

FYI, the reason both the titles above have a * is because they are affiliate links to my Bookshop.org* page so you have been warned.

You can probably guess why I have popped them together, right? Both are high fantasy, with heavy fantasy tropes seen in Western Fantasy (good vs evil, the shepherd or the street urchin being the hero, an unspeakable evil to be defeat, a vast land with many cultures, a magic system, a mix of myths, legends and details [armour, weapons, etc] that is very medieval, elements which are tropes and clichés we see in western high fantasies & sword and sorcery fantasies). 

In other words, things we take for granted when we think fantasy and most of its sub genres. 

But why then, I hear you ask, have you only read these now when they have been on your radar for how long? Well, gather round children, it’s story time. 

For The Magician’s Guild, I have been aware of this series since it first got published in the UK and I did try to read it. But I quit before I got to the halfway point. I found the pacing to be far too slow for my tastes in that time of my life. 

As for The Eye of the World, I have been aware of the Wheel of Time series for decades. It’s one of the cornerstones of fantasy and I remember their early UK covers (I will pop a pick here so you can see) and, while I knew I would enjoy this series, each books length scared me (the longest in the series is book 4, The Shadow Rising, which is over a 1000 pages long and is under 400,000 words long!) and the series is so long, the author died after the 11th book publication and Brandon Sanderson was asked to write the final book from Robert Jordan’s detailed plans but so much was planned for this book, Brandon Sanderson had to split it into three!). 

So yeah, I kept my distance from them. I do wonder that if I read these earlier, if I would have enjoyed or would avoid them like the plague? 

Yes, am rambling so let’s get to the point: did I enjoy either of these? With Magician’s Guild, up to a point but not enough to read the rest of the trilogy. I found the pace of this quite slow and this felt very cookie-cutter and not as fleshed out as I would have like. Because of this, I didn’t really connect to the story or the world. I sense that, if I keep going with the series, this feeling will get less as less as the world building within the Guild, the city and the world would be explained more and it will make more sense. But I don’t have any desire to continue. 

And yet, I do like Trudi Canavan’s writing and I plan to read another of her books, Priestess of the White. 

As for the Eye of the World, I did enjoy, but only a tad more than Guild. If The Magician’s Guild was slow, then my goodness, Eye of the World was a crawl. I know authors from modern fantasy that would have written the entire novel within the first half of their 400 page novel. But, unlike the Magician’s Guild, the slow pace made sense because the world building and the details to flesh out the world and the magic system. The pace was needed, but I sense this pace will the author’s style (I have heard one of his later books is painfully slow and many fans of the series dislike it hugely). 

The characters are a similar kettle of fish. While I didn’t warm to either series’s characters, there were elements in Eye of the World’s characters that made me stay. Do I like them? Not particularly (I found Mat in Eye of the World really frustrating and all of the characters aren’t exactly the warmest characters), but I can see potential for character growth (but I sense this is going to be real slow going). 

So, am I going to continue with either series: No the The Magician’s Guild but yes to the Wheel of Time. However, I don’t think I will do the whole series - I know I will do the next, The Great Hunt and, if that’s good, maybe the next. But I can’t see myself doing the whole series. But you never know, I might surprise myself by how invested I get…