I Read: First King of Shannara

I Read: First King of Shannara

I realized recently, as I was putting my bookshelves back up after moving, that I owned many books that I have never read. Too many.  I put aside the ones I haven't read and set them on their own rack.
I have a massive amount of books to read.
So as I read through them, I have decided to do an illustration of each, and then give a little opinion piece on what I thought of it.  Why? Well, Why not?
The first book off of the list is First King of Shannara by Terry Brooks. 

Illustration: Bremen The Druid
This is my first Terry Brooks novel, and since I have always been a fan of fantasy, it was recommended to me.  It was, at best, OK.  I don't want to bash it too bad, as it is my first experience with the man and his writing, but I was not blown away by what I read.
To begin with, I must acknowledge that this was not his first novel.  It is the first in the chronology of his fictional universe, and it was the first one given to me by a fan.  So most people who have read his stuff, probably didn't start with this one, and there may be reasons that it was written the way it was.  That way, in my opinion, was not nube-friendly.  There were many instances of passages that seemed to have no purpose, and then they would like "And that man's name was Joe." Next chapter.
Who?  What? is that supposed to mean something to me?  I assume that it would make sense for people who already knew the future of the series, but for me, I just had to guess or use wikipedia.
Now lets get into the story.  It may have been bad luck, but starting me out on a fantasy series on a novel that is a near exact copy of the plot of the Lord of The Rings Trilogy is not going to impress or interest me.  If I want to read LOTR, I'll read that.
Seriously, the plot is the same: old wizard shows up, says the bad guy they thought was dead thousands of years ago is back and has an evil army to take over the world, assembles a diverse "fellowship" to find the "lost king" and "item of evil the bad guy wants" and stop the evil guy from conquering all the "good races" with "evil races." Also the bad guy is a formless wraith of darkness and has other evil wraiths of darkness that do his bidding. characters die, fight, "fall in love," and the boring guy gets the girl and the crown.
Actually, never mind.  It's not that similar. Aragorn is absolutely quirky compared to Jerle Shanarra.
Along with snagging the basic plot of LOTR it also takes its cues on the villain.  The Warlock Lord is a motivation-less evil force that makes two total appearances in the book, never gains a personality, and is gone before we can care.  The world also feels so sparsely populated that I don't see his actions as much of a threat.  there is mostly land and few people in a land that you can apparently walk across in a matter of days. And the Warlock Lord doesn't function very well as just a representation of Evil-Otherness as his supposed evilness can't reach out from beyond his little wagon, and the races he uses to fight with are just foreigners that want land.  In short, I felt no particular desire to see this enemy defeated.  I just knew it was supposed to happen.
So there's that.  So lets get into the actual writing. As I read, I thought I shuld have a map to look at as Brooks continuously refered to fictional geography in so much detail, I assume he would want you to check a map and pat him on the back for being so creative.  It is creative, but the extent to which he would detail a location got distracting.  Other distractions include extended descriptions of the natural world, histories that distracted from the moment, and what seemed like filler "action" sequences to keep things going.
Something I thought was interesting was how he described magic.  It made me picture how spells look in video games.  Cool, especially for coming from a pre-video game world, but at times it was cheesy.
To some up, it wasn't that great.  I never got a chance to see the characters as more than stock archetypes, and so I didn't invest in them.  The villains didn't do anything specifically evil enough to characters I cared about to make we want to see them defeated.  I'll give Mr. Brooks another shot, but that might be it.