Friday, April 5, 2013

Books by David Eddings (no spoilers).


I had checked out The Diamond Throne and The Ruby Knight from the library a few days ago, cuz I was trying to get a bit of a break from the series that I have been reading (not that I'm not enjoying them, but that I don't want to burn myself out on them). But I was only able to get through a few chapters of The Diamond Throne before I stopped and returned them.

I had enjoyed The Belgariad, Belgarath the Sorcerer, and The Rivan Codex ... and to a lesser extent, I liked The Malloreon, but those are really the only books of his that I've been able to make it through. No, I take that back; I also read Regina's Song all the way through.

God, that book was awful. It wasn't just the writing that I had problems with; the story wasn't as strong as it could have been, and it was kind of obvious that Eddings had no real idea of how modern college students spoke. I remember thinking over and over, "That is not how someone who is in college would talk." And the fact that it was so obviously not anything close to sounding natural for someone who was just a little bit younger than me, I kept being pulled out of the story and couldn't really ever get into enough to enjoy it as much as I might have (even despite the rest of the writing that could have been better).

I had also tried The Elder Gods and The Redemption of Athalus, but I couldn't make it that far in either of those (though, I had better success with The Elder Gods than I did with The Redemption of Athalus).

I sometimes wonder if the fact that I liked the series that I do (and that I was able to make my way through them) had something to do with the fact that they were the first of his books that I encountered. If I had encountered the others first, I wonder if I would have been able to make it through any of them at all. But then, that series seems to be well-liked by a good number of people, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered if I had come to them before or after any of the others.

So, yeah, I have another group of books by him that I have been completely unable to make my way through, which kind of disappoints me, since I would love to be able to have some more books that I would enjoy reading (and I would love even more having something that I would be able to re-read). I guess that I'll just have to stick to the books that I have.

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