Review: The Belgariad

My brother gave me these books by David Eddings when I was in middle school and they are an old favorite. With everything going on in the world, I have been struggling to read. This is breaking my heart, but it’s true. My brain just can’t process new things from books right now. New worlds and characters are too much.

So I borrowed the first book on audio book from the library just to have something comforting. I devoured them all over again. This series was a warm blanket of comfort.

The characters are not extremely rounded. They are in fact mostly two-dimensional. They were tropes when Eddings wrote the book. The world is kind of flat. Very flat. Nations are not made of diverse people, the people themselves are tropes. There are only two languages (apparently) and one of them might still be more “extreme dialect difference” rather than actually a different language. Like Spain-Spanish vs. Mexico-Spanish.

And somehow these things make the books work just fine. Better than fine. They are thoroughly enjoyable. The dialogue is snappy and smart. The good characters are generally good people and the bad characters are thoroughly wicked. When you go into this series wanting to the BEST of the fantasy genre – that is exactly what you get.

Now I am going to dig out my copy of Polgara the Sorceress and read it because I always do when I go through this series.