Thursday, October 7, 2010

And with that, I'm done.

I just finished reading the 6th book in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. It's the one everyone warned me about. It's the one where Goodkind's Objectivist/Humanist politics come front and center, where as they had been mainly in the background (and hence easy to ignore) since a quick scene in Wizard's First rule which was forgotten about just as quickly. It's not that I hold his political views against him, thats not the case at all. But I do hold against him ham handed preaching of said ideas. I don't like any book, trying to convert me to any thing. Whether it be a political idea, or a religious one.

The other thing I don't like, are the more and more sadistic sex scenes. I realize you want to make your villains appear to be evil.. but you already had one of them be a pedophile way back in the first book. It's kind of hard to top that, and simply getting more graphic with the scenes just make you like you have a problem.


It makes me wonder, had the TV series lasted this long, how would it have handled Richard's preaching? How would it have handled the increasingly sadistic sex scenes in the book?

It's really a shame too, as I really liked his character Zedd. Along with a few of the others.. But if the rest of the books in the series are this bad, I just don't want to waist my time trying to read them. I skimmed big chunks of this one as it was. I dunno, maybe I will give #7 a try after the new year.. but for now I'm through with them.

3 comments:

Trey said...

You're a far more tolerant man than I to have made it that far in the series. I never got beyond the first book. I found it remarkably mediocre and flavorless (except for jarring s&m scenes) and I heard they just get worse.

Lagomorph Rex said...

I dunno, I mean I was really prepared to look for the best in them..

I read the Wheel of Time series last year, all the ones that were out anyway.. and I really wanted another series like that.

But these just.. have nothing on the WOT books..

Brian Murphy said...

Yeah, I had heard that about these books and never bothered to pick them up.