Brief introduction of me.
I'm not sure if my mother had any idea what she was doing when she handed me LOTR when I was eight years old. I was overcome, in love, smitten, and all those other words. Thus began my love affair with fantasy. As an eight year old I obviously didn't have much access to other fantasy, but as I grew older I read and re-read LOTR and gradually started looking for anything that could match it in any way. Some great children's fantasy out there - Cooper, Alexander, L'Engle... but nothing 'adult' worked until I stumbled across SRD when I was about 14. The first books I found that could compare - in terms of standards - with LOTR.
Weirdly enough, I started out with the second chronicles. This is purely because of a mistake - The covers where I bought them (I grew up in London, England, although I'm now in Israel) were quite confusing - the bit where it says 'the first (or second) chronicles of TC' was very small, and on the spine it just had '1', '2' and '3' and I didn't realise until I got them home that I'd bought 1 and 2 of the second chronicles, and 3 of the first. So I ended up reading the second chronicles first, and meeting our dear old leper as a troubled hero rather than the anti-hero of the first chronicles.
Still, I loved all six of the books, became a firm fan of SRD, and have read everything he's written since (LOVE Mordant's Need, btw). About six or seven years ago I read an interview online where he said something about his intentions to one day write the last chronicles. This was obviously extremely exciting - in my rereads of the books I have to confess that oftentimes I actually would stop reading about halfway through WGW because I was just toooo sad at the ending; it broke my heart. Not that it was a *bad* ending (that would have broken my heart in an entirely different way) but flip, I was a weeping puddle on the floor every time Covenant was killed and Linden left without him.
Incidentally, and I hope this will not be held against me on a SRD forum
but a few years *after* I found SRD I found Guy Gavriel Kay, and he kinda took over. I still *love* SRD, but I tell you all this as intro to my other 'qualifications' in the fantasy field - I'm the creator and owner of the authorized site on GGK's work, at brightweavings.com. I found his email address oh, about 6 years ago now, and we became friends, and a couple of years later the website was born. In fact, it was GGK who told me that Runes was out already - I knew that it was in the works but didn't realise it was about to be published. But really if we're talking about fantasy, about the books I love more than any others, and those I consider to be the giants of the field, they're JRRT, SRD and GGK. That's my take, anyway 
As soon as I found out Runes was coming out I ordered a copy (had to wait a while for Amazon to deliver it to me over here), and commenced a reread of all six of the earlier books to prep myself. This weekend I finally consumed Runes. I think I need to read it again before I decide exactly what I think (and need to read the rest of the last chronicles as well, to really give an opinion, so it'll be about a decade, so i hear...) but it's just been great having the TC retrospective again, and browsing here, and on the SRD website as well, reading all the interviews etc has been wonderful.
I don't know about anyone else, but I found it quite surreal to be going back to the Land, to these characters. I mean, I've known the first six books intimately since I was 14 years old, and that's oh, 17 years ago now, read them and reread them. To be reading something new, where I don't know what's happening next...as I said, quite surreal. But in a good way. (Almost felt a surge of welcome when I saw those words appear again... exigency, gravid, inchoate, innominate...
) Although much gnashing of teeth and despair at the thought that I'll be in my forties before I get to the end of these final chronicles!I've been browsing round the site a bit and just looking in on all the great discussions going on here (came online as soon as I finished Runes late last night). Not sure how much I'll be posting but I'll definitely be lurking and posting when I feel qualified to do so, and I did want to introduce myself.
So here I am!
Thanks,
Deborah
