Reading: Confessor by Terry Goodkind

I'm reading this book right now. I bought this book at random. By random, I mean I didn't find anything more interesting at National Bookstore that day. I would have greatly preferred a novel by a Filipino author...but I don't like reading Tagalog and the English-language short story anthology by Filipino authors that I did find were printed on poor-quality paper. I used to be not at all fastidious about the quality of the print, but lately I am. It's strange.

Anyway, I think I've mentioned before that I really don't read high fantasy. I am fascinated by it but for some odd reason I don't like to read books about them. I once tried reading Tolkien's Silmarillion and The Two Towers (from The Lord of the Rings) but couldn't even get past the second chapter of both books. I was only able to finish The Magician's Nephew from C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia by some herculean effort. I really don't know why since I'm fine with watching the movies (The Lord of the Rings trilogy is some of my favorite movies of all time).

And then here comes Terry Goodkind.

I first heard about this author through the tv series, The Legend of the Seeker, which is based on Goodkind's The Sword of Truth series. FYI, I don't watch the show. Sometimes I catch it on TV when I'm flipping channels but I don't follow the story and only have a very basic grasp of what's it's all about. Obviously, the way all high fantasy usually is, it's good vs. evil with some unlikely hero rising up from the ranks to vanquish the great evil overlord of something or other. My sister is a fan of the show. I think that must have registered unconsciously in my brain so that when I did go to National Bookstore last week and saw this book, Confessor, supposedly the last book of the series, I just went and bought it without thinking about it too deeply, like "am I going to regret this?" It costs P315.00. I could buy two paperbacks at Booksale for less than that.

Yet, even more oddly, I have no regrets. It's a fascinating read right from the get-go. I don't know if it's Terry Goodkind's writing. The first line of the book goes like this:

"For the second time that day, a woman stabbed Richard."

Quite simple but it does very well in drawing the reader in. Understand that I don't have any sort of previous background on the series, and yet the story is not hard to follow at all. I had initial trouble orienting myself with the setting or who's working for who and who's on whose side, but the book is very plain-speaking. No overly manipulative characters or deceptive ones. Sure, there are evil characters who manipulate people but the book actually tells you that this character is so-and-so and he has this kind of power and he's bad but now you know, so no problem trying to decipher any hidden meanings between the lines. lol

I haven't finished reading the novel yet. I'm in the middle-part. But so far so good. I'm not sure if I want to read the entire series now or if I'm now entirely sold on the high fantasy genre, but this one book is doing a great job of entertaining me.

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