FWIW the first chunk of Eye of the World was intentionally written to be very Tolkien-y to ease readers into the series - it goes very different places eventually. They aren’t always good places, in my view - I loved the series when I was an early teenager but drifted away by the time I was 16 or 17 - but that issue does at least go away (and there’s definitely worse Tolkien-aping happening in early 90s fantasy fiction, Dennis McKiernan would like a word).
4 Likes
In my late 40s I tried The Eye of the World and couldn’t get past the first chapter. It all felt so terribly self-important, just like Brandon Sanderson’s intolerable bombast. 
4 Likes
While I prepare to get torn down for this:
After the Expanse series, Blindsight, Echopraxia, and Infomocracy, it is really difficult for me to get into other sci-fi recommendations for this same reason. It feels like I’m supposed to have a fine wine and monocle at the ready when the first main character is introduced. That, or I’m supposed to be smoking a pack every four minutes and on my tenth bottle of whiskey by time I reach chapter two.
I much prefer characters who are largely nobodies just trying to get by. The only reason why the Roci crew from the Expanse has typical “main character hero” syndrome is because Jim is hell-bent on making everything his problem and jumping into literally anything he can find, and the rest of the crew is like “Ah, here we go again…”
If Jim wasn’t there, the other characters would be entirely unknown and/or dead, because the story largely focuses on the wider dynamics, and Jim is just there to allow a character-driven story to exist at all.
I guess this is also fueled further by the fact that I don’t really understand characters in fiction 99% of the time, so I tend to half-ignore them in favor of chewing on the setting and background dynamics. As a result, when characters are way too big or self-important, they feel like they’re getting in the way of the story and there’s nothing left for me to care about, so I drop the book. 
5 Likes
The near future. Everyone lives in the polluted City. A mother grabs a chance to bring her sick daughter into the fresh air by enrolling in an experiment where a small group of people go live in the Wilderness State as hunter-gatherers.
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook is a sledgehammer of a book. Despite being set in the pristine wild, expect no exhilarated nature descriptions or noble savage vibes. Short measured sentences bring the reader into the harsh reality of tribe life and the skewed group dynamics between a bunch of modern people living off the land.
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I recently finished The Word for World is Forest by Le Guin. It was a nice short read, and the inspiration for the novella is really obvious. I wish it had been longer though 
3 Likes