[viZion]

Terry Goodkind writes the "Sword of Truth" series which, much like Robert Jordan's series, is currently on its 38th book. The first book, Wizard's First Rule, I actually enjoyed quite a bit. Beware though, there's a lot of "adult" content which can be gruesome but nothing anyone that reads ASOIAF shouldn't be able to handle.

Anyway, the gist of the series is that Goodkind has these two characters, a male and a female, and he tries to make them as miserable as possible as often as possible. Anytime anything remotely good happens to these characters, Goodkind will pile on at least 3 or 4 horrible events to make sure that you, the reader, fully understand that this is a bad bad bad world they live in. This cycle repeats over and over again and reading the series starts to resemble what I like to call "a chore". There's no intrigue; it's just waiting for the next horrible thing to happen. The main characters aren't even particularly likable. I stopped reading about halfway through the 4th book (the only reason I lasted that long was because the first book was pretty entertaining although it follows the prototypical LOTR/Star Wars fantasy formulas).

Enjoy!