R.A. Salvatore

For those of you who have read a volume or two of his, what's your opinion on his writing style and book series overall?

If you don't take it too seriously and just read it for the fun of it, it's mostly fine.

I'm listening to his Serpentwar Saga on audiobook, and he's...okay.

The cool bit is that I've already read three of the four books, and the Main Fantasy Protagonist Boy From a Small Village has steadily refused to become the object of any prophecy, to inherit any plot-relevant magical objects, to become the Chosen One Most Important Person and generally defies cliches, which isn't something I'd expect from Salvatore.

Hell, in book 3, the Hero's little village is finally set on fire like all villages that give birth to heroes usually are in the first three chapters of the first book - except that the Hero sets in on fire himself, because the army is retreating into the mountains and they're playing a Scorched Earth strategy with the invading army that's coming in behind them, so they set the village on fire after evacuating everyone and plundering all the stores so the enemy can't resupply there.

Plus there are some quick throwaway passages on the nature of consciousness, reality and how it all came to be.

That's the cool part.

The sucky part is that there's a bunch of omnipotent NPCs running around in the background who can wipe away continents, and who are actually moving the standard fantasy cliched plot which involves artifacts on the lines of The Noun of Another Noun which must be recovered/destroyed/whatever.

He's all right, but definitely over-rated.

Of all the stuff with Drizzt, I have to say I like Drizzt, but hate almost every other character he writes about. They're all too "look at me, I'm going to do this benevolent act without any personal motivation because my character alignment dictates I should." But that was only in The Dark Elf Trilogy, The Icewind Dale Trilogy, and The Legacy of the Drow. I've not read the others yet, but I plan to read The Hunter's Blades Trilogy, and possibly the whole Sellswords thing, but I hear mixed things about those.

But I did like The War of the Spider Queen series.

The main characters were all very interesting and the fact that they all hated each other (mostly) made things even more interesting. I still don't understand why so many people hated the ending. I guess it's because they did what they realistically would have done based on their personalities or something.