I finished reading Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series recently - twelve books (including the prequel), somewhere in the area of 10,000 pages, many hours on my couch spent digesting all of this. The first five books were good enough to win the 2008 Brammy for Favorite Book of the Year.
And I didn't like the ending.
Don't get me wrong, most of the plot got wrapped up as it should have. The right characters survived, the right characters didn't (and in the right way). But the overall theme of the last twenty pages just seemed mean-spirited toward religion, and I think I took it a little personally.
In his Dark Tower series, Stephen King talks about the ending not being any more important than the rest of the journey. That the experience of seeing the world through these characters was the important part - not what happens to them in our imagination AFTER the events of the book. And there's a certain validity to this argument, but I can't emotionally wrap myself around it.
For the first 9980 pages, I enjoyed these Sword of Truth books. But if I went back and re-read them, knowing what I know about how the series ends, how much of this (supposed) mean-spiritedness would I see in different parts? By that rationale, the ending IS important. It would be like watching "The Sixth Sense" after seeing the ending of that for the first time (or having a resident tell you the end of it because he was mad that he THOUGHT someone stole his wallet). You can't separate the ending from the rest of the story, even the story is incredibly long and involved.
Or it could be something as simple as a short-ish blog post with a terrible ending; my butt itches.
3 comments:
I'm not sure how many of these other books you have read, heard of, or anything.. but you may find them interesting.
By Tad Williams - Tailchaser's Song, Memory Sorrow and Thorn series, Otherland series, War of the Flowers
The Redwall series, and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.
I have read all of the Tad Williams books, and the Wheel of Time (so far). I am not familiar with the Redwall series.
The redwall series is excellent. tends to be aimed towards a younger market than the robert jordans, but great characters and epic stories. and the cutest talking moles.
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