Wizard’s First Rule by Terry BrooksGoodkind. I suffered through the whole thing because I was young enough that I thought that’s what you should do when you’ve started a book, but I was also old enough to know that it was very bad. I’ve heard many people say they read it as teens and loved it, but I assure you, it does not hold up.
I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…
But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.
… Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…
Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.
Remember when Richard defeated the evils of socialism without his magic by pulling himself up by his bootstraps really really hard by (without practice or training) carving a really really good statue and all the lazy worthless slacker librulls were like dang, I love capitalism now, and then everyone looked directly into the metaphorical camera and said “Communism: Don’t let it happen to you”?
I don’t know if it’s the absolute worst I ever read but the parts I read were pretty bad. At some point I was like “What kinda Ayn Rand bullshit is this?” and quit reading. It turns out that he was a Ayn Rand make-super-improbable-and-convoluted-examples-in-my-fictional-fantasy-world-to-justify-terrible-political-views school of writing type guy.
Damn I legit liked this book, one of my top series. I just enjoyed the magic system, the antagonists, and the over the top nature. I might just have bad taste though lol.
In the later books they accidentally open a portal to the part of the world where there are communists and for a while afterwards Richard finds himself unable to eat cheese as penance for all the communists he’s killing but then he realizes that communists are so evil it’s ok to kill them so he can eat cheese again
On a somewhat lower pedestal: Eragon. What a hugely derivative poorly written piece of crap. I’ve run D&D campaigns with better dialogue and pacing than that.
Oh yes I agree! And I’m a huge dragon fan, so it was extremely disappointing. That one I gave up on after maybe 50 pages. I couldn’t get past the prose. So I didn’t even get to the heavily recycled tropes, but I did see the movie once and they were plenty obvious from that.
Wizard’s First Rule by Terry
BrooksGoodkind. I suffered through the whole thing because I was young enough that I thought that’s what you should do when you’ve started a book, but I was also old enough to know that it was very bad. I’ve heard many people say they read it as teens and loved it, but I assure you, it does not hold up.I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…
But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.
… Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…
Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.
Remember when Richard defeated the evils of socialism without his magic by pulling himself up by his bootstraps really really hard by (without practice or training) carving a really really good statue and all the lazy worthless slacker librulls were like dang, I love capitalism now, and then everyone looked directly into the metaphorical camera and said “Communism: Don’t let it happen to you”?
I don’t know if it’s the absolute worst I ever read but the parts I read were pretty bad. At some point I was like “What kinda Ayn Rand bullshit is this?” and quit reading. It turns out that he was a Ayn Rand make-super-improbable-and-convoluted-examples-in-my-fictional-fantasy-world-to-justify-terrible-political-views school of writing type guy.
It’s probably not the worst for me either but it’s easily the first thing I think of. Really left a bad taste I guess.
Damn I legit liked this book, one of my top series. I just enjoyed the magic system, the antagonists, and the over the top nature. I might just have bad taste though lol.
In the later books they accidentally open a portal to the part of the world where there are communists and for a while afterwards Richard finds himself unable to eat cheese as penance for all the communists he’s killing but then he realizes that communists are so evil it’s ok to kill them so he can eat cheese again
On a somewhat lower pedestal: Eragon. What a hugely derivative poorly written piece of crap. I’ve run D&D campaigns with better dialogue and pacing than that.
Oh yes I agree! And I’m a huge dragon fan, so it was extremely disappointing. That one I gave up on after maybe 50 pages. I couldn’t get past the prose. So I didn’t even get to the heavily recycled tropes, but I did see the movie once and they were plenty obvious from that.
Wizards First Rule is Goodkind not Brooks, Brooks wrote Shanarra
Ack thank you, I mix them up even though I’ve never read Brooks, who seems to be better loved.
I’d rate them about the same, personally. Though Brooks is at least just derivative and juvenile; Goodkind gets increasingly self indulgent.