Order of the Phoenix, unquestionably. It's by far the darkest and most dangerous of the five. I didn't even like Goblet much - I thought that the characters ignored the stakes way too long. Unrealistically so.

I'm glad he's revisiting the first and second Chronicles and finding their strengths. It's so easy for an author to forget what works and concentrate on weaknesses; that so often tends to lead to weak novels.

Wow. So Book 4 will come out about, say, 2008-2010? Yikes........

I don't love Harry Potter. But you HAVE to read the series. It already rivals LOTR as the most successful fantasy series ever, and it may soon surpass it. By successful do you mean according to book sales figures? I have read all the Harry Potter books and have enjoyed them as well. And yes, I have...

Min Donner, Warden Dios, and Hashi all HATE Holt Fasner, and want to end his control over both Mining Company and the MC Police. It's clear why Min and Warden hate him - they feel that he has used them for his own weird purposes. They feel that he is maintaining the uneasy peace with the Amnion for ...

I see all that you're saying - there's a lot in the story. But I have several problems with it. 1) Rather than having the discussions of morality and philosophy arise organically from the narrative/characterization, they feel tacked on. It seems much more like an article about morality than a story....

11, the very year they were released.

I can't even imagine a better ending. Covenant had to come up with another answer to Foul - what happened in the First Chronicles wouldn't work again. I actually think that it would have been a fabulous ending to the Chronicles as a whole.....not to say that I am not looking forward to the next Chro...

Hmm, I'm not sure I'd agree with your assessment there. I never got the impression that Covenant was particularly weak, in fact all the walking he did in LFB made him notably fitter. I'd say he'd be of average strength. His dexterity on the other hand would be pretty damn low, as his numb hands and...

My point about unhermeneuticable wasn't that I couldn't understand what it meant. My point is that I don't think it's ever been used. I guess I'll have to check out the OED in the library to look. It seems like a neologism to me - a rather ugly one at that, although it comes at a really tense moment...

Note - I've added roynish to the list.

Eureka! Unhermeneuticable . Page 366 TOT. Unhermeneuticable? DAMN. From Pitchwife of all people. It's funny because there are unusual words he could have picked there, and instead SRD simply makes up a word. Hermeneutic - a word. But I can't believe anybody has ever used unhermeneuticable.

Dukka - I think your stats are right on! But, do you think TC's constitution would be so high? I would figure it would be like his strength. Then again, the white gold might help heal him. You could well be right. What I was thinking of was that he was able to function---travel, even occasionally f...

In thinking about this, I've decided that the Land will be just like our world. It will no access to the Earthpower. The destruction of the forests will eliminate the access to Earthpower through wood, and something else will happen to stop it through stone. No one will have health sense. And someth...

I'm going to tackle this one. I'm not sure why. S - 8 D - 10 C - 12 I - 15 W - starts at 14, increases to 18 by end of 1st series, 20 by 2nd series. CH - 7 But this is extremely difficult. Covenant is often weak, but he handles things that could kill 10 normal people, making constitution difficult. ...

These are some fascinating comments. I'd like to know why Berek saw fit to leave ak-Haru there. Did he anticipate the destruction of the Staff of Law, as well as the need to find a different kind of staff? Did he suspect that either the Worm or the Tree couldn't handle another branch being removed? ...

Dromond wrote:unhermeneutical-- that tounge twister gets me every time

Wow - I didn't even notice this. Where does he use it???

There's always someone predicting the end of the world! When I was in college one of the guys on the floor was convinced the sign of the end of the world was that the E.U. had 13 members at the time. A sign of the apocalypse. I told him what was he going to look for when the E.U. went to 15 the nex...

I voted for ambergrise , because one of my very favorite sentences in all of TCTC is unambergrised by the promise of any uncorrupt end. Does anyone remember it being used anywhere else? And does anyone know what the heck it means? I was never able to find anything other than that whale thing. I got...

Turiya Foul wrote:I'd like to know where roynish is. I voted for exigency, but it says I voted for, err, something else.

I found this site; I apologize if everyone on here knows it. It pretty much makes this thread irrelevant (oops):

www.cs.cornell.edu/home/wkiri/donaldson-words.html