The Sum of All Men

A world of interesting magics and moral choices.

David Farland has created a land where the rulers take advantage of a magical process by which one person can acquire the attributes of another, such as strength, stamina, glamour, metabolism, or grace. The person that gives the endowment loses the attribute and is "crippled" while the receiver is enhanced. These Runelords approach the process of receiving endowments from multiple moral perspectives and this adds to the richness of the story.

This ability to take/receive endowments re-defines how people live, rule, and fight wars and Farland goes into much detail explaining how this ability can be manipulated by good or evil. Rarely is such a structure governing magic so well defined in Fantasy books and for me it really helped make the magic seem more realistic and plausible.

Endowments aren't the only magic in this series and there is also a whole range of wizards that use various elemental magics, as well as strange creatures that live underground known as Reavers. Ray Porter does an excellent job of bringing all of these various characters to life with his narration.

This book hooked me pretty quickly and I have now listened to the first 4 books in the series. I have enjoyed them all, so this book is an excellent start to an excellent series.

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Excellent Fantasy Series!

Exceptionally good book! Magic, romance, and characters that you love and others that love to hate.

It has been awhile for me to find a new series that is similar to and as good as the "Wheel of Time series" by Robert Jordan. Like the "Wheel of Time series", I am totally engrossed, sitting on the edge-of-my-seat listening. The plot is very interesting. Also, the book is up-beat (most of the time anyway). But, like George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series there are some tragedies.

NARRATION: The narrator reads the Prolog in a way that seems too overacting, but after that his style of reading changes and I enjoyed listening.

At this point, I have commited to purchasing books 2 thru 4. Book two, I downloaded. Books 3 and 4 are not available on Audible(at this time), so I ordered them 'used' from Amazon.

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Liked it, at times gruesome

I hope audible gets the rest of the titles in these series. This book is basically about a race of people who can steal others traits, such as intelligence, beauty, grace etc.

The story is about a young prince and his desire to thwart a villain who has enslaved and killed many people in his quest to be the perfect 'some of all men' an immortal being with thousands of human traits taken from others.

At first, I found the story a bit gruesome. It *IS* gruesome. But eventually I became engrossed. This is a tale about people with morally questionable habits. Can you take talent from others and still be human? Does the end really justify the means?

It poses some interesting ethical dilemnas even if the author doesn't go there as much as he should. But the talented people are very difficult to resist.

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Good Book

There are two things not mentioned in the description and reviews of this book so far that you should probably know:

1) The rune endowments are more complicated than it seems from the description.
2) Its not the only type of magic present in the book, its just the most common one. Nearly every character has an endowment of some sort, but a few characters (including the main character) have other magic.

So if like your like me and didn't think the rune system seemed that interesting don't worry about, theres much more to the book than that.

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Good entry book for a solid series

If you could sum up The Sum of All Men in three words, what would they be?

Surprising, Epic, and Magical

Who was your favorite character and why?

Gaborn-reading about a character become the hero of series is always interesting and the way in which Gaborn comes into his own is great and worth the time it takes to read/listen to this book and those that follow in the series

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The death of King Orden how tried to save the world from a man who takes from others to make himself the king of all. This sets up the rest of the book and the change that needs to happen in Gaborn for him to become something more than himself in which is the only way he can save the "earth"

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Good but...

Okay, overall I liked the story - it wasn't great, but it was solid. The plot is good, the idea of magic as just one element of a capitalist society is good... I love the idea of an Earth Warden who will bring together not just the people but the creatures and animals and elements that inhabit the earth, against a greater evil. I like all the references to various herbs and their uses, to magic which is in many cases simply a refinement of basic physics. There's a load of potential for the remaining books, which I have not as of this writing yet read. But I like to be able to totally lose myself in a believable "other" world and this book doesn't quite get me there.

One, the economics of magic just don't work for me. How can any society support so many people who have given their endowments to so few, people who are now dependent on social welfare for sustenance? Thousands of people who give up essential parts of themselves and are supposedly supported by others - family, government or both - for the rest of their lives, for the benefit of just a few lords and ladies? Raj Ahten has thousands of dedicates who support him - who is supporting them? Who tills the fields, farms the lands? Who has time to provide these dedicates with food and water? It just doesn't work for me and was, unfortunately, constantly in the back of my mind as I listened to this book.

Two, I got tired of hearing the words yet, fey and fell, and the phrase "to the core of" in the narration. Admittedly I'm a bit of a grammar nazi, a word nerd... but I didn't like the manner or the frequency with which any of these were used - they felt contrived and over-used, and detracted from an otherwise decent storyline.

I'm curious about what might happen next but I'm not sure I'm reading or willing to listen to more...

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A MAN WHO BELIEVES HE IS DOOMED TO FAIL

TENDS TO FAIL
There is a lot of stuff in this book, thrown at you every other paragraph. There are so many things, that we get told a lot of stuff, but not much showing. I lost count of how many times while our hero is running from various enemies, that he remembers back to an earlier time. This of course is an author's way of info dumping. Several authors have done this and I wish they would quit. If you are going to have a action scene, don't break away to remember the past. Who does that anyway? Last time you where in a car accident or something scary, did you start reminiscing about the past?

I also could not get into the story or care about the characters.

one highlight is Ray Porter. This is one of his earlier works and seems a little more subdued than his later works.

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One of the best audiobooks I've heard

I'd read this book when it first came out, but never followed through with the rest of the story. When I saw it would out on audiobook, I thought I'd take a listen, as a refresher before starting the next book.

I was blown away.

I couldn't listen often enough I wanted to devour it all in one sitting (not possible - it's a giant book!). The voice talent was amazing. He did all the different characters, emotion, inflection so beautifully it had me marveling. His talent along with the author's made this a thousand gold stars. Love, love, loved it.

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I just couldn't bring myself to care.

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I might. The story was far too tedious for me. I just didn't care about the characters enough. I could tell that the author is talented, however something was just....missing. I don't feel that I am even interested in the next book of the series. I rely greatly on the reviews by Audible customers, but this is one time I did not agree.

Which character – as performed by Ray Porter – was your favorite?

Ray Porter is a mighty fine narrator. He was the best thing about the book. It was easy to differentiate between the characters, so any one of them was good.

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I find the idea of endowments repulsive

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Yes and no, the protagonists aversion to endowments is encouraging

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

The idea that some people would actually grant endowments willingly. Seems unlikely.

What about Ray Porter’s performance did you like?

Character portrayal is believeable

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Not likely

Any additional comments?

I'm still in the middle of the series. The endowment stuff may get rectified before the end.

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