I wasn’t that much of a fan of The Eye of the World. It’s got a couple of things that make it good Fantasy: detailed worldbuilding, for example, and characters that were clearly recognizable and not all the same. A big bad evil and a young farmboy, well, you know the deal.
But it is sloww. Very, very slow. Very, very detailed. A character comes into a new room that is irrelevant and will never appear again? You’d better believe you’ll know everything about this room! Every encountered person (like a farmer giving the main boy band a ride) is named and contextualized. This would be fun in an interactive adventure where I can choose to skip information like that after the 50th time. I won’t count the first third of the book being extremely like the start of the Lord of the Rings, but oh boy, is it ever.
Also, there were just no characters I really liked and sympathized with. The protagonist is bland, one of his friends is nice enough to hold my attention, and most other people are annoying (N., looking at you!) or evil, of course. I’m … not sure I’ll make it through 14 books of this.
