Phantom – Terry Goodkind

  • Posted by Shaun on December 18th, 2006 filed in Books
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Very early Friday morning (around 3am) shortly after getting sick I finished up the last chapter in Phantom by Terry Goodkind. It took me about 5 days to go through it and I was taking it easy, savoring the entire thing.

It felt great to read a decent book for once. I’ve been reading others (Kurtz) and they just don’t live up to the other authors. I open a Goodkind novel and I’m sucked into the story. I open a Kurtz novel only to kill time. I usually end up looking at the page number to see if I’m close to the end yet. That’s usually not a good sign that the book is interesting. The only time I looked at the page number while reading Phantom was to see if I was reading it too fast.

Okay on to the book. Since I hate to spoil things for people I’ll be as nebulous as I feel necessary. For the second to last book in a long series it was clear that he was setting things up to come to a final conclusion. Richard and Kahlan are both within very close vicinity of Jagang and one of Richard’s decisions is taking a bite out of Jagang.

I probably say this about most books, even the poor ones, overall it was good. A very quick, but good read. I do have a a big complaint though. Goodkind spends an awful lot of time writing about how bad Jagang is and the characters in the story try to convince Richard how bad things are. Anybody that has read the previous books knows all this. I’m not sure why he wasted so much time on it. I would have rather read about other plots than rehash that stuff again. There was also very little plot revolving around Jagang himself.

I do have to mention that my cousin Sarah was very generous in letting me borrow her audio copy of Phantom, but I didn’t really get to listen to it. I listened to the first couple chapters, but I found that I enjoy listening to a book after I’ve read it. That way I can pay attention to the story while reading at my own pace (and don’t have to rewind). Then, I can listen to it and catch all the things I missed reading.