My mom was talking up a favorite series of hers to us, and she had borrowed them from my uncle. We weren't exactly flush with the money to run out and buy new books whenever we wanted, so she called him and asked to borrow them again. He passed them along in a bag with a couple other trade paperbacks we might be interested in, which were Eye of the World (it had the interior art on the cover, of the group riding through a town, instead of on the hill in the moonlight) and The Great Hunt. My mother insisted on reading these new books first to check for "adult" content, which is rather ironic, considering the books we had asked for, and which she thought were just fine, were David Eddings' Belgariad and Mallorean, which had way more sex than EotW or tGH (especially weird is that their prose was a lot more accessible to younger readers, and much less mature in the themes and ideas of the stories, and featured a 14-16 year old protagonist & sole PoV character in the former series, whereas the closest to sexy times in the first couple books of WoT was a bunch of 19-year-olds getting embarrassed about the memory of coed bath house encounters, staring awestruck at a woman's bare legs, and getting embarrassed at the realization that an unmarried man and woman share a room with only one bed in it).

But for all I came away a bit dissatisfied with the ending of book 2, they stuck with me, and a few months later, I saw tDR in paperback in a local bookstore, and that really hooked me. A few months after that, they had tSR in hardcover, which was one of the first two hardcover novels I ever bought with my own money (the other was Talismans of Shannara, around the same time, I don't recall which one was first). That one really sealed the deal and I read it until it fell apart.

That was early in my junior year of high school, and in January, I went on a school trip to Washington for the March for Life, and on the way home, we stopped for supper at a mall in Maryland, and the rosary ladies had all fallen silent, and I and some of the other guys ran across the highway to McDonalds rather than wait for a restaurant table to open up, so I had time to kill and went to a book store looking for something to read on the bus ride back, and found a paperback of Eye of the World (the first copies I read having been returned to my uncle), which, managing to survive a housefire seven years ago by virtue of my sister borrowing it and not returning it until months later, is now the oldest book I own. On an amusing note, she finally did read Eye of the World about a year ago, when, after she made our brother watch Yellowstone, he decided to avenge himself by then making her watch "Wheel of Time." In order to have some comprehension of WTF she was supposed to have just watched, she started reading the series. For the record, she is a TV addict, and not a big reader (to my knowledge, she still has not started tGH, despite her professed enthusiasm for the series), but readily admits the books are the superior version.

Anyway, from that time on, I was into it. The next two in the series were released in November, and my family has a rule that you don't make any significant purchases for yourself from the start of November until after Christmas (extended for me, as my birthday is the first week of January), to facilitate other people's ability to buy Christmas presents we genuinely want. That meant I had to wait until Christmas Day to read The Fires of Heaven and Lord of Chaos. The latter came out after I was out of school and I snuck more than one peek at the prologue in various bookstores, between the release date and the holiday. Then, when aCoS had the temerity to not come out a year after the last, I made a pain of myself in the local bookstores trying to find out the release date. Subsequent books I simply would take the bus to the bookstore the day of the release, get breakfast at the nearby McDonald's and wait for the store to open to get the book. For Winter's Heart, step one was to go vote (election day 2000 - I circumvented the November rule by reserving a copy long before November), then breakfast, then bookstore. A Storm of Swords was in the bookstore that day, and I naively assumed we would know who the next president would be before I finished both. It was also the first book where I became aware of the uses of the internet in this sort of thing. I learned you could acquire the prologue online, but you needed to submit an e-mail address, so I opened up a Juno mail account for that purpose. The household computer was in the room closest to the phone jack, where my brother also slept when he was home from college. He was a very good sport about my sitting there late into the night waiting for the whole thing to download and then read it. After WH, with no new possibilities for a fix in sight, I started exploring the interwebs for anything about WoT. I found Theoryland and also the Theory Post Board on wotmania, and went nuts for a week or so searching Theoryland for the content I found more interesting, before I found wotmania again. When I saw THAT was free and all I needed to do was provide an e-mail address to sign up, I was just thrilled at how useful this electronic mail nonsense was proving wrt the important things in life.

And that's how "Cannoli" was born.