Terry Brooks

[Seak]

I feel this exact same way about Terry Pratchett.

You're missing out then. He's hilarious. Terry Pratchett books are the perfect break for me from all the seriousness that is most epic fantasy.

[Khale]

I've only read First King of Shannara, but it's made it hard to go on with anything else Brooks has written.

I know it's not a huge deal if you don't always show rather than tell, but this book was all tell and it got annoying.

I own The Sword of Shannara but we'll see if I ever get there especially when there's so much other good stuff out there. Maybe if I'm really in the mood for LotR, but not for another reread.

The First King of Shannara is a prequel and, in my opinion, the weakest of all of the Shannara books. Even though it is a prequel, I recommend against reading it before at least the first trilogy (if at all).

[tdnewton]

After a few years of browsing through this forum and looking up reviews of almost every fantasy book out there, I believe the general consensus is that the first book, The Sword of Shannara, is a blatant Lord of the Rings rip-off.

I've gotten ~100 pages into the Sword of Shannara.

Eh. It's very descriptive. As in very descriptive.

Ditto'ing these, in a way. I read about 50 or so pages of Sword and it felt a lot like Fellowship, though not like an absolute rip-off to me. What made me stop reading it was what Dwagginz pointed out; Brooks is incredibly verbose. When your paragraphs are taking up entire pages, I tend to tune out... you don't have to describe every single little detail at every single point. Not a bad book, I would say, just too wordy for my taste.

[murf99]

Ditto'ing these, in a way. I read about 50 or so pages of Sword and it felt a lot like Fellowship, though not like an absolute rip-off to me. What made me stop reading it was what Dwagginz pointed out; Brooks is incredibly verbose. When your paragraphs are taking up entire pages, I tend to tune out... you don't have to describe every single little detail at every single point. Not a bad book, I would say, just too wordy for my taste.

You have to remember the SoS was TB's first book and wrote almost 35 years ago. Although I did find it good, its definitely not as well written as some of his later work. Imo he has improved considerablely since his early works.

[tdnewton]

You have to remember the SoS was TB's first book and wrote almost 35 years ago. Although I did find it good, its definitely not as well written as some of his later work. Imo he has improved considerablely since his early works.

Yeah, I guess I should note that I haven't written him off entirely, I just have a lot of books to read ahead of his in the "to read" queue.

[rune]

While looking for whats out in Sept 2010, I noticed a new series starting by Terry Brooks

Bearers of the Black Staff
(The first book in the Legends of Shannara series)

May be one for the Shannara fans to try out I stopped reading his books sometime ago, I got tired of the Shannara tale

[nquixote]

On Terry Brooks in general:

I liked The Sword of Shannara. It is a pure LotR ripoff, but it is IMHO the best pure LotR ripoff ever written (far better than, say, The Eye of the World).

The rest of Brooks' books were throwaway crap to me. He seemed to have no good original ideas of his own.

To me, this illustrates the importance of reading a large number of authors...if you focus on a few, you quickly exhaust the good stuff they've written and find yourself spending thousands of hours reading the B-roll...