Kevin's Watch

Well, you could try the new audio books; Brick accomplishes a very lively characterization, and it's often easier to concentrate on the plot thuswise if normal reading totters. The first volume felt a bit bland, but the second improved the story considerably.

I've been reading all my life, everything from the Dune series, to Hitchhiker's Guide series, to SRD. I know my books, I know my writing. And I started reading when I was 16. I like his books, but I hate Linden Avery. Her existence has made Second Chrons less enjoyable, and all but killed the Last Chrons. I still reread, hoping for a great last book, but realistically, I doubt it.

Sherman Landlearner wrote:I've been reading all my life, everything from the Dune series, to Hitchhiker's Guide series, to SRD. I know my books, I know my writing. And I started reading when I was 16. I like his books, but I hate Linden Avery. Her existence has made Second Chrons less enjoyable, and all but killed the Last Chrons. I still reread, hoping for a great last book, but realistically, I doubt it.

Bang on the mark Sherman! TC's navel gazing never had that element of self-pity that runs through LA's every thought and balanced as it was in the 1st Chrons by a great storyline, secondary charachters (too small a word for the Lords, Giants, Haruchai and Ramen) and a backdrop to die for (literally) SRD's achievement in this trilogy has I believe never been surpassed by any other piece of fantasy writing - and I include Tolkein in that. The Second Chrons did it for me - but of course never in the way that the first managed. The third.... well, some things are best left unsaid.

My perspective (more at the link below) ...

If you have actually picked up this book, read the first hundred pages, and decided to keep reading ... you are either a Thomas Covenant fan or a hopeless masochist. No one else could endure the sheer misery. To me reading The Wounded Land is emotioanlly nauseating, like watching a good friend undergo the death of a thousand cuts. The Land ... destroyed and ravaged. The free peoples ... deluded and butchered like cattle. Knowledge of Earthpower ... lost or perverted. Proud Revelstone ... twisted into a gruesome chamber of horrors. And on and on. If it weren't for Covenant bumping into the sur-jheherrin and the Search near the end of the book I couldn't stand to pick it up at all.

However the plot of The Wounded Land is brilliant, perhaps genius. Like the introduction of the Mule in Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Empire, The Wounded Land allows Donaldson to have his cake and eat it too -- retaining a familiar and powerful setting while radically altering the nature of the struggle waged upon it. Though the effect obviously is lost upon those who haven't read the First Chronicles, Donaldson expertly weaves skeins of the original work into the darker, more ominous fabric of the Land languishing under Lord Foul's most exquisite perversions. Tolkien's magnificent tales of the Three Ages of the world spun out nicely but rarely against the same landscape -- there are good reasons for that. It's devilishly hard to revisit the same territory and look upon it with new eyes without either suffering by comparison or diminishing the original in subsequent readings.

theland.antgear.com/wounded.html