Wednesday 7 October 2009

Book smarts

Geoff_Taylor_Pawn_of_Prophecy_full_v2I have always considered myself an avid reader who blasts through, even back to when I was reading decent young books (read; NOT vampire angsty type books) such as Goosebumps and Animorphs and I was later introduced to what fast became my favourite series of books, and as the author died a few months back I thought it would be appropriate to discuss them.

The series is referred to as “The Belgariad” and is a great story about a young boy (Garion) who starts off an a journey to recover a mythical item, known as The Orb of Aldur to stop an evil god.

As generic as the plot sounds, the first book of this series was written almost 20 years ago, so many people that have written similar things since may have taken inspiration from it.

The characters within are very rich, as are the descriptions of the locations and people, and there are many turns along the way and some suprises such as there being something more special about the one boy who can touch the Orb without being burned. Many religious themes run though this as there’s multiple gods for multiple races of people and even gods that interact with characters like Belgarath.

This series served to introduce me to the fantasy genre which I now so love and has helped me get in to games such as Final Fantasy and even Pokémon to an extent, to which I do love.

I do hope to someday write something that is as good as the series, or even any of David Eddings works but that’s quite the pipe dream.

If it weren’t for reading the books, I doubt I’d be able to blast through 800-page plus books as quickly as I do these days and I wouldn’t have even glanced upon Terry Pratchett’s books.

If you want to know more about the books (I’ve attempted to avoid spoilers in case you haven’t read them) then start here with Pawn Of Prophecy and hopefully you’ll enjoy the books as much as I do.

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