I'm interested in attacking The Eye of the World at some point. How does it compare to other great fantasy works?
I think it's fair to say that opinions are mixed on it. For me, Lord Of The Rings is still no. 1, and probably always will be, but WoT is definitely very good. The scope of it is absolutely huge, and probably even moreso than LOTR. There are a lot of secondary characters to memorise, and TBH quite a few of them are so similar they become indistinguishable. There is a really good 'magic system', with different groups of people having different abilities. There are some really cool baddies, and some epic battles.
There's quite a few similarities to Tolkien, especially in how the story starts out, with a rural farm boy going off to find his destiny with a few friends, but it starts to make its own path after a while.
One of the biggest criticisms is the pace of the series. Some of the books seem to plod along at a snail's pace, then explode into life in the last few chapters. The other related criticism is level of descriptiveness (?) of some of the text. Robert Jordan builds a really detailed world, but there are also painstaking descriptions of characters' clothing, hairstyles etc that can feel like a lead weight at times.
There is one of the books, Crossroads of Twilight that's regarded as the worst offender, so once you get past that, the series picks up again. Robert Jordan died before completing the series, and Brandon Sanderson took over to complete the last few books. IMO he did a fantastic job, and it got me into reading some of his own books.
If you think you have the patience to get over those few things, and still fancy giving it a go, I'd definitely recommend it.