Friday 11 April 2014
Following on from my discussion of audiobooks in my last post, 'Reading habits in the modern age', and considering the interest this review generated on Facebook when it cross-posted from Goodreads, I thought it was worth throwing up here as well. Stay tuned for more scathing reviews as I continue needlessly to torture myself with Goodkind's works until I'm all caught up ...
(Source)
Deplorable Ayn Rand fanatic Terry Goodkind's sole plot device of separating hyperbolically perfect lovers Richard and Kahlan recurs yet again in Chainfire, if in a slightly more interesting incarnation this time, with the erasure of Kahlan from everybody's memories but Richard's. This results in some characteristically tedious, repetitive, unrealistic, interminable, eyeroll-inducing exchanges between Richard and other characters as he tries to convince them of his inevitable correctness against their insistence that he is deluded. Oh and also something about an invincible beast that (of course) horifically mutilates people to get to Richard.
Goodkind has only my obsessive compulsion to finish what I start to thank for my continued consumption of his free market capitalist propaganda, and the fact that the books have been turned into audiobooks. I don't think I'd get through them if I had to will my eyes to continue relaying the derivative, uninspired words on the page to my brain instead of just tuning out and doing something else as the poor voice actor drones on and on, trying to intone the author's awkward phrases with any sense of realism. There are also, of course, the obligatory clumsy, transparent, desperate, deluded attempts from the author to trick the reader into endorsing morally untenable positions that glorify selfishness and pose helping others as the greatest kind of evil, as well as other philosophies that support a purely self-interested free market capitalist, minimal-government, nonexistent welfare dystopia.
The book ends on a cliffhanger to propel you into the next book in the triology, and I have to admit despite my innumerable objections that I'm usually interested in what happens at the end of each book as events (finally) reach their climax. Anyway, I'm one book closer to catching up to Goodkind and hopefully not reading another book from him for many years to come (or ever again).
Thanks for reading
LPL
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