Wizard’s First Rule (Sword of Truth, Book 1) – by Terry Goodkind
Once more into the Fantasy realm I delved, and this book was certainly more faithful to the genre than others, though human’s nature and their imperfections also play a large role.
Goodkind sets the scene with two brothers, one (Michael) who is adept at the political intricacies required to take control of the reins of power, the other (Richard) is a forest boy, who has received training as a forest guide and been mentored by a wise man of the woods.
With a similar plot device to Gaiman’s Stardust & the forthcoming A Song of Ice and Fire book reviews, there is a boundary between kingdoms, put in place to protect the people.
Richard discovers a lot of truths about his origins, and struggles to understand why his life has turned out the way it has. Michael soon finds that power corrupts the soul, and is unable to stop himself from travelling down the path to ruin.
As you may have guessed from the title of this book, Richard is taught his first rule, a summary of which is ‘People are stupid, they can rarely tell the difference between a lie and truth, but are falsely sure of their skills therefore are easier to dupe’.
This is the first book in the Sword of Truth series, I’ve not yet read the others, but once I’ve finished my current collection, I’ll be looking into sourcing the others.
March 1st, 2008 3:09 am
[…] The Terry Goodkind ‘Sword of Truth’ series is one I would like to continue reading, see here for my Wizard’s First Rule review. One area described within the books is the garden of life, […]
March 1st, 2008 3:41 pm
Very good series – once you’ve waited the few years between the release of each book. Not for beginners into the fantasy realm, but certainly worth a few weeks out of your life to read from start to finish :o)
March 1st, 2008 4:00 pm
Need to get my nice e-bok reader installed on my new phone/pda doobery, then source the other e-books 🙂
March 3rd, 2008 3:13 am
The fun thing is that the Russian translations of other Sword of Truth books are named Wizards’s Second Rule, Wizard’s Third Rule, and so forth. The publishing house has obviously cut the title translation budget.
March 3rd, 2008 3:47 am
Wow, second comment in just a few days on an old post. Think I’ll have to look into putting up a rotating random post link on the front page – the only reason this post originally appeared in the ‘recently commented’ widget is that I updated some trackbacks that still had the old permalink structures in them…
re. Wizard’s Second Rule etc. I suppose it would be an easy mistake to make if you didn’t engage with the literature, and just skimmed…
March 3rd, 2008 6:41 pm
FYI: I recieved the trackbacks you mentioned via RSS.
And, by the way, I think the right column at your site is far too wide.
March 3rd, 2008 7:31 pm
You’re right about the columns. I thought it might be some issue with the recent comments widget forcing the columns to be too wide, but after a little fiddling, I can see that isn’t the case.
I’m about to upgrade the theme to the author’s v2, we’ll see how that goes 🙂