I’ve read all but the last two Goodkind books. I enjoyed them, but consider them something of a guilty pleasure.
I am convinced that they’re basically romance novels with a fantasy backdrop. I like the backdrop, but find myself skipping the parts where Richard and Khalen are longing for one another or having interior monologs about their relationship.
I’m also convinced that Goodkind has aimed these books right at female readers. There are strong female characters throughout, and for every prominent male character, there seems to be an equally prominent female character serving as a foil. I also remember one scene that went about 40-50 pages that descripted a royal banquet. Goodkind went over what each character was wearing in detail and described the decorations and each course of the meal in detail. Tell me that wasn’t aimed at female readers!
Goodkind has a knack for spinning a good story out over 700 pages and a good eye for detail. I don’t think he’s in Martin’s league, though.
Mark, I have a PocketPC and I’m reading the George R.R. Martin books with a program called µBook (pronounced “microbook”) that is an incredibly quick, intelligent real-time parser of plain text documents into sexy, ultra-readable ebook format. There is a windows version which is also very good and which I use to read on the job, but it doesn’t have the same appeal to me for real reading as the PPC version.
I never enjoyed reading anything serious off of a screen either, but my Pocket PC has completely turned that around. I still have an emotional, aesthetic attachment to read real books, but I will say that Microsoft Reader, µBook and Cleartype have completely changed the way I look at ebooks: from bastard monstrosities of a senselessly over-technological age to one of the easiest and most convenient ways to read. You can read in any lighting condition, store dozens of books on your device, lookup words simply by highlighting it, scribble deletable notes in the margin, insert unlimited bookmarks, search for words or phrases in the book, change fonts, assign book skins, etc. Everytime you open your device, the reader automatically opens to last page you looked at. While I still prefer real books on things that I will mull over, contemplate and constantly flick back through as I’m reading it (literature, history, philosophy) I’d say a PocketPC is the ultimate pulp reader. I even use it to save online articles I want to read later and then use µBook to format the HTML into an immensely readable format. I even tend to read when walking to work in the morning, since I can thumb through a novel or the morning news with one hand while I use the other to drink a cappucino. I have to say, the PocketPC has completely sold me on the ebook idea, and I had villified the concept totally before.
Yep. You read some books, get an idea of what the author might look like, and then you visit the website. Shocking, but true. Good call on Villanche. He wrote for the Beauty and the Beast TV series for a while and I think they based the Beast off of him somewhat.
Gunmetal, I’d say you could get about almost any book printed in the last five years by a major publishing house in ebook format. They cost almost nothing to produce, yet you are charged full price for them - a price which is almost all profit.
There are not shortage of free ebooks either. If you like reading older literature, and I do, you can find almost major or minor work written with an expired copyright from a number of sources. These would also fall under “legit”.
Cool. Thanks DrCrypt… A Tablet PC and an ebook sounds like a pretty sweet combination. My previous barrier to ebooks was having to read them while sitting at a computer screen and concern over lack of titles.
Necromancy at its finest. . . perhaps I am of the Rahl line.
I recently blew through Wizard’s First Rule and really, really enjoyed myself. I’m something over an overly sentimental sucker for highly traditional, well-told fantasy, though, so I think I “get” most of the criticisms lobbed Goodkind’s way.
Anyways, just wondering; does he start to get around the rather annoying habit of telling, rather than showing, extremely dramatic scenes/events?
I can’t exactly conjure up an example off the top of my head, but Goodkind just struck me as unwilling to let actions and dialogue do the talking for him most of the time. . . despite this fact, I got sucked into some scenes pretty hardcore. . . the first book definitely caused me to lose about 8 hours of sleep between two nights :)
Anyways, I’ll be starting Book 2 as soon as I get off my lazy ass enough to go to my car and retrieve it.
Odd that you guys seem to be saying that Goodkind’s a Jordan imitator; I can’t make it past the first 50 pages or so of WoT’s first book, despite owning it for half a decade.
Yeah, he’s just like Robert Jordan in that regard. Characters you like, an interesting world, and then 9 books of worthless filler. My problem–and it’s a big one–is that when I get attached to a character or setting, I have to finish their story, even when it turns to garbage…
It’s more plot things that he takes so if you haven’t actually read at least one or two WoT books then you probably won’t pick up on them. It’s actually a bit more egregious in Stone of Tears.
Goodkind gets very, very boring. The plot of both the second and third books are a rehash of the plot of the first (OMG it’s forbidden, possibly unrequited love! However will it work out!?) between the same damn characters.
After that he falls off the rails completely. You can recreate the rest of the “series” by shitting between sheets of blank paper and pressing them together. I’d suggest doing this in the bathroom, as you wouldn’t want to get any “prose” on the carpet.
I’m usually that way myself (i.e. I read every little book of Edding’s Beligarad series, even the stand alone books… shudder), but I could not do that with Goodkind at all. I just gave up after about book 4 and all I’ve heard since is that I got out just in time. I gave up on Brooks too, though every once in a while I get an itch to try out the new trilogies that he’s done and then I remember the pain and look and see if a new Erikson book is out.
Like a lot of people, I enjoyed the first few books. Aimed at females though? Maybe…but what is the deal with the leather clad hotties with the anti-magic, pain tool dildo things? That was fucking crazy.
The books are shit. Objectivist shit with evil not-chickens, big, barbed namble cocks, kicking 8 year old girls in the jaw for JUSTICE, and prose like:
If you like testicle-eating as punishment, pacifists getting indiscriminately slaughtered by the good guys, the main female character getting almost-raped 11 times, chapter-long objectivist rants, and a main character completely incapable of ever bing wrong then by all means, enjoy.
Yeah, the torture scenes were just unecessary. I never actually read these. Instead, I listened to them on cassette (through book 5 or so, I guess). Goodkind might when the award for worse overuse of the plot device that involves eliminating the best powers/advantages of your main characters in order to create drama. You know how improbable it is that so much Kryptonite would land on Earth to cause problems for Supes? Now imagine if instead, he had just ordered a transport ship full of such rocks and handed them out to random strangers as soon as they met. That’s what it feels like.
