I voted "worst thing i ever read" - although to be quite honest, that was because you didn't give me the option of "most disappointing". The worst thing i ever read has to be the book "Spellfire".
Here's my argument:
The book starts of with the usual cliché setup (bad evil guy "over there" becoming an actual threat, young male guy set up to become hero via coming of age story) to reel its audience in, and it does so in very competent way. That's actually a good way to start a story, as it handles your audience familiar elements, and they feel right at home without having to read The Compiled History of Fantasyworld #4316 - Song of Ice and Fire also does this in a similar way.
It's often said that the first sentence of a novel is the most important one, and while i'd argue that's not strictly true, the sentiment that the setup needs to reel the reader in is still valid. WFR does this well, and then it deviates.
And it deviates in a good way - it shatters the usual frame of reference we often have, and takes us into a world where the female heroine isn't just a sidekick, but a power of her own, where the hero is the hero not because he was born to be (regardless of the fact that he actually was ^_^), but because he stumbled into it & sees it through; it didn't set us into a standard LOTR copypasta world, nor did it attempt to explain magic in a formulaic way.
In some parts, it also was a lot more adult then other comparable stories; the twist at the end that everyone had to see from miles away was competently implemented, and the style of writing is adequate & easy to read without making you cringe.
So, if i had been asked whether the series is worth reading, i would say "read the first 3 books". There's a lot worse out there.
Throughout the first 2-3 books, Richard is set up as a hero because he genuninly wants to do the right thing, is motivated by love, and has the tenacity to hold on against really bad odds. And then for some reason - i can only presume a major tragedy or trauma in the life of the author - it all goes wrong.
Between writing #3 and #4, the author apparently was apparently hit over the head with a copy of Atlas Shrugged (the aforementioned trauma), and desperately tries to convince his readers Randian dogma is The Right Thing (tm) - and the books not only suffer from that, it completely annihilates the worth of the series as a whole.
Whereas before the threats where real (at least as far as the fanatsy world is concerned), in latter books the author goes out of his way to setup weak strawmen as nemesi, but it's so transparent that - barring all else - the story simply sucks.
Richard shifts away from trying to be good, and hides behind a dogma of "everyone is responsible for himself and his own actions only, and any other viewpoint is morally evil and needs to be destroyed"; while Kahlan - who was formerly one of the few valid female characters in a fanatasy novel - becomes a blind enarmoured sidekick, and stops being interesting or a valuable addition to the story.
The weakness in the latter stories is accompanied in a drop of literary quality / writing style, a massive drop in the quality of how the stories are build and how moral issues are argued. Strawmen, red herrings & deus ex run rampant; the characters flatten out into stale cardboards propped up to carry Goodkinds newfound "wisdom" out into the world, and he is so preoccupied with waggling his moral finger, that he fails to come up with a good story to tell in first place.
In short: the latter books read like someone decided to write a Lord of the Rings + Atlas Shrugged crossover fanfiction - and i'm pretty sure that if i head into the deepest recesses of the internet & comission a fanfiction there (let's say finding a piece of Twilight fanfiction secretly written by a /b/ guy), it would be less painful to read.
tl;dr:
The first 3 books are ok to read, after that for the love of god spare yourself & do something more enjoyable, like stabbing a rusty fork into your eye. The series as a whole is nowhere near "best ever", and (outside the first 3 books) is on my top-10 do not read list. It's really disappointing though, because it started of so well :/
PS: Wheel of Time has it's own bag of issues, so this isn't a WoT vs. SoT rant. In fact, the first 3 SoT are better reads than WoT, although you'll only discover that around halfway through the 4th book of WoT when you realize Jordan was a good worldbuilder, but terrible narrator; and that WoT only redeems itself when you read it the second time around because as a reader you can then skip all the fluff that whould have been cut out had the editor done his job.
Fantasy novels - Serious Business
If you like reading fanatasy, there's tons of decent material out there that beat both WoT & SoT as far as i'm concerned.
For light reads:
- Raymon E. Feist (start of with Magician: Apprentice)
- Tad Williams (start of with The Dragonbone Chair)
- Weis & Hickman (Death Gate cycle, start with Dragon Wing)
- David Eddings (start with Pawn of Prophecy)
- Terry Pratchett (start with Colour of Magic)
For more adult reads:
- George R.R. Martin (start with A Game of Thrones - warning: series not finished)
- Robin Hobb (start with Assassin's Apprentice)
- Jacqueline Carey (start with Kushiel's Dart)
