[the smiling weirwood]

I am a completist, I have a severe compulsion to finish anything I begin, but I simply could not make it past Goodkind.

Like Jordan's series, the first book was good, but it should have ended with that book. The difference is Jordan is just boring after book 1, Goodkind is straight up awful.

As the series progresses it becomes less and less bad fantasy and more and more pathetically thinly veiled socio-political commentary. It's awful, I hated it. I actually made it all the way to the book after that one called Naked Empire, but I forget the title. I think I've managed to block it from memory.

It was agonizing, but it was the first time I quit a series before the end. I just couldn't see what kind of ending could possibly justify that series. The characterizations get worse and worse, the action is so pallid, and the plot goes in drug-induced stumbles around in circles. After reading it for a while you start to feel like you would rather gouge out your own eyes and dab an alternate version of events over the text in your own blood than read one more of his pathetic excuses for a fantasy story set in what is most likely Anne Coulter's private dreamworld.

Anyway, I would not recommend Terry Goodkind unless you are reading it out loud as some sort of sadism-masochism scenario. Seriously, horrid, despicable books. The worst part is that its not even well-written garbage, his prose sucks.