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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 2156784" data-attributes="member: 8863">Eddings is a fair writer, but he tends to pad the books with a lot of junk especially in the later books of the various series.  The Belgariad probably didn't need to be 5 books long, and the Elenium probably would have worked in 2.  Another of Edding's problems is that his political predjudices seem to show up in some of the books, which is something I dislike.I thought the Belgariad started out well as a coming of age story about Garion, even if the plot was fairly predictable.  I think Eddings goofed up however by [spoiler]killing off Asharak in the second book.  He spent most of the first two books building this guy up into a serious villain, and after he kills him off, a good deal of the tension is lost.  OTOH, there is the character development with Garion in realizing how his growing sorcerous powers can be dangerous, but I still think killing him off tends to make the next 3 books drag a bit.[/spoiler]  Another problem with the Belgariad is that Eddings introduces too many characters.  The first book works fine with the 6 characters in that book.  The later characters mostly seem extraneous.  Finally books 4 and 5 are pretty heavily padded, and drag the story out to a soemwhat boring extent.The Mallorean could have been good, and it does have some good moments, but it suffers from too much repetition from the Belgariad.The Elenium was a pretty good read as well.  The characters have more development to them than their counterparts in the Belgariad, and the political aspects of the story make it a little easier to believe than the Belgariad.  However, the second book is fairly heavily padded, and the story itself probably could have worked in 2 books like I said above.The Tamuli isn't too bad, even if it's padded as well.  It seems like less of a repetion than the Malloreon was, which is a good thing.  One of the weakest aspects of the book was [spoiler]Edding retconning and making Zalasta the main villain ultimately responsible for many of the evens in the Elenium.  His ultimate fate however, makes up for it a little bit[/spoiler].   The things about the Tamuli I liked was a somewhat gloabl scale to it that worked better than the Mallorean, and his development of the growing friendship between Khalad and Berit.  I'm surprised he didn't use that to crank out a sequel about the younger knights or something.  I also liked his development of what it meant for Sparhawk to be Anakha; while it felt tacked on in the Elenium, it works much better in the Tamuli.The one shot books about Belgarath and Polgara were fairly good, at least in the parts were he develops bits of history that haven't been touched on before and where he develops the characters themselves.  His shift to first person storytelling with both of them is interesting, as is (particularly in Belagarth) his telling of what really happened that the mythmakers and storytellers sort of gloss over.  But the stuff rehashed from the earlier books tends to slow things down a bit.</blockquote>

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