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The Sword of Truth - Terry Goodkind

Kookamoor said:
Wow, I never knew about that. Hey, can you start a new thread about her, muggle? I'd like to hear what other people know too! Sounds like a neat background before I read her books.
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Done, I added her to "Author Discussion".
 
muggle said:
Please excuse me as this post by me probably does not belong in a Terry Goodkind topic. However :),

I read Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende and enjoyed both books, have not read Eva Luna. Isabel Allende is one heck of an interesting person. I had the pleasure of attending "An Evening With Isabel Allende" in Old Cabell Hall at the Univ. of Virginia. She told stories that made the whole evening pretty darn enjoyable. One story she told was of a traveling adventure that she and her daughter took, prior to her daughter's unfortunate death. They were in Sweden and she stopped in a shop and bought some sex toys to use in her research. Upon arriving in Chile the inspectors at the airport opened the package containing them.....she immediately pointed at her daughter and said; "THEY BELONG TO HER".

You are probably aware that she was raised by the maids in the household and had very little contact with her father, the President of Chile.
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My apologies, I was going from memory when I made this post and the info is close but not on the money. I will post the correct info under the "Authors Discussion" topic. :)
 
I've still only read the first one. It was great, though I think it stretched on in several places, and he added some stuff for no other reason than to lengthen the story. It was still very enjoyable - but does the rest of the series drag?
 
I've still only read the first one. It was great, though I think it stretched on in several places, and he added some stuff for no other reason than to lengthen the story. It was still very enjoyable - but does the rest of the series drag?
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I thought the first book, Wizards First Rule was average at best- and by far the best installment in the series.
 
Beibei said:
Ah, Terry Goodkind. One of
What I like about Goodkind is the fact that his characters are interesting. They can get annoying, but they're very intelligent people
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This is also why I liked The Sword of Truth. In many fantasy novels, you need to have someone who is stupid or ingorant of the world. And by explaining how the world works, or how magic works to that character, the author also explains it to the reader. And so you'll frequently be in the position, as a reader, where you know what's going on while the characters in the book haven't been bright enough to see what's happening.

Richard is quite unlike that. He's actually very intelligent and for the most part, when you figure something out, so does he. That's quite refreshing to read. I also enjoy a lot of the humor in some of the characters. Zedd is probably one of my all time favorite magicians. I also like the way Goodkind describes his magic. Because after you understand how the magic works, you realize how powerful of a wizard Richard really is and you see the amazing things he accomplishes. Without the background context, he's just another magician.

Now, everything in the Sword of Truth isn't a basket of roses. Some weeds got in and they grew quite fast. Wizard's First Rule, Stone of Tears, Blood of the Fold, and Temple of the Winds were all excellent. I enjoyed the plots and character arcs.

When we get to Soul of the Fire, the characters started changing. Without giving away the details, some of the actions seemed to be out of character and the ending seemed kind of rushed and/or contrived.

Then we get to Faith of the Fallen. I enjoyed this one. As a matter of fact, it's my favorite out of the entire series. After I finished it and I was reading some reviews, I realized the political overtones. I usually don't focus on stuff like that when I'm reading so I was kind of like "Yeah, I can see how some people might think that was kind of preachy, but I still liked it."

Then I read Pillars of Creation. Ignoring the fact that the characters we got to know over the past six books aren't even in they story until the very end, I didn't like this book. The characters were transparent, the plot was predictable, and while I glossed over the philosophy in book 6, it was smacking me in the face in book 7. It was then that I began to be gravely worried about the quality of this series that I had come to enjoy reading.

Then Naked Empire came out. So first let's discuss the plot. No wait, the plot was a trite piece of crap. The characters must have been good, right? No! I had a hard time trying to figure out why I should care a smidgen about any of them. The enemy then? It seemed like instead of coming up with a new diabolical bad guy, Goodkind was was stretching and writing down anything. And hoo boy, the preachy philosophy. If you're not able to notice when Richard is being preachy in this book, you need to have a hold drilled in your head. Literally, chapters - sequential chapters - are all filled with Richard's rants about why the philosophy of the Empire was wrong. After reading that, I wanted to stare at the sun for a few hours to try to burn the words out of my mind.

I haven't read Chainfire, and after reading Naked Empire, I'm not even sure I want to do it.

Terry Goodkind may have stolen ideas from other writers, but he presented them in an intersesting way with characters, at least for a while, I really enjoyed reading about them. His books by no means are the best, but they're fun to read if you don't have anything else lined up - up to a point. So, if you really want to read the Sword of Truth, read up to book 6 and then imagine that the good guys win in the end and don't read any more.
 
I just finished Wizard's First Rule, and I've been a little puzzled as to how I could enjoy the book so much for the first 600 pages, and then finish reading the last 200 thinking that it wasn't really very good. I came up with a couple of ideas.

First, I agree, the torture was way, way too drawn out. Much more than was necessary. That seriously soured things for me.

Second, I started out liking the characters and the plot quite a bit. Things moved along fairly well, and Richard and Kahlan and Zedd and Chase and all the others didn't annoy me. In fact I liked them. Richard was appealing with his intelligence and his integrity, and Kahlan was intriguing with her secrets and her power. Zedd was appealingly eccentric and Chase was tough but also softhearted. All of them were special but still accessible to me; I could identify with them for those first 600 pages. Then after that long and painful torture sequence (My God, 80 pages....) it all fell apart, and I think it's because everyone all of a sudden became superhuman, in a bad way. They became too intense to be real, and I couldn't identify with them any more. Same with the love story. I was pretty involved with it at first but again, it became too intense to be real. I even started to dislike Zedd by the end, and he was pretty cool. All those crazy secrets he had been keeping about Richard really threw me off; I found it jarring. It turns out that Zedd had all of this extra crap floating around him too.... I guess I could just see the rest of the books going downhill from there. From what many of you seem to be saying, my prediction for the rest of the books isn't too far off the mark.
 
I enjoy this series myself but I do agree that Naked Empire was a huge disappointment. The preaching was practically non-stop, the citizens of Bandakar were extremely foolish, and the person who they picked as their "Wise One"... oh dear. Thankfully Chainfire had less philosophy and more plot. If he keeps up the good work, this series will end on a fairly high note.
 
..

Well, this is my first post here and this looked like a good place to start. I've read the entire Sword of Truth series, the first 5 twice because I stopped reading them for a while so I could build up a few to read all in a row and I wanted to reread the earlier ones too. I really liked the series at the beginning. Wizards First Rule was excellent. The last few books in the series really started to drag with Naked Empire and Pillars of Creation being absolutely terrible. Chainfire was better but that book irritated me before I even started reading it. I guessed fairly accurately what Chainfire was before I read it because he, for all intents and purposes, stole the concept of balefire out of Jordan's books. It is slightly different but close enough that I still knew generally what it was before I read the book. Although it is true that all fantasy authors use concepts from other authors in their writing I thought "chainfire" went a little too far. Just for experimentation I reread the Wheel of Time series after I read the entire Sword of Truth series and there are so many similiarities it is unreal. I wonder why the authors let each other get away with it. Right now I think the people that are still buying each new SoT novel are just buying them because after putting so much time and money into readng the series they want to know how it ends. After I finished Chainfire I wondered how a book managed to be 800+ pages long and accomplish next to nothing.
 
..

Well, this is my first post here and this looked like a good place to start. I've read the entire Sword of Truth series, the first 5 twice because I stopped reading them for a while so I could build up a few to read all in a row and I wanted to reread the earlier ones too. I really liked the series at the beginning. Wizards First Rule was excellent. The last few books in the series really started to drag with Naked Empire and Pillars of Creation being absolutely terrible. Chainfire was better but that book irritated me before I even started reading it. I guessed fairly accurately what Chainfire was before I read it because he, for all intents and purposes, stole the concept of balefire out of Jordan's books. It is slightly different but close enough that I still knew generally what it was before I read the book. Although it is true that all fantasy authors use concepts from other authors in their writing I thought "chainfire" went a little too far. Just for experimentation I reread the Wheel of Time series after I read the entire Sword of Truth series and there are so many similiarities it is unreal. I wonder why the authors let each other get away with it. Right now I think the people that are still buying each new SoT novel are just buying them because after putting so much time and money into readng the series they want to know how it ends. After I finished Chainfire I wondered how a book managed to be 800+ pages long and accomplish next to nothing.
 
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