In this period of big stress (yes, the exams are coming soon!), everyone needs a bit of entertainment. If you like reading and want to discover new things (while practising your English of course), I would advise you the series that captivated 60 million readers for the last few years: the Sword of Truth novels by Terry Goodkind. Yes, this is fantasy, but no, it doesn't look like "Lord of the rings" at all. Although many elements place it in the tradition of fantasy (great adventure taking place in a fantastic world full of fantastic creatures and magic), many others give it extremely original features.
Unlike in the "Lord of the rings", you won't see good 'half characters' involved in an ideal war against bad, black monsters. The characters, protagonists as well as less important people, are described in a realistic way; they can feel wrath, lust, love, compassion, and not only good and noble ideas. People are not essentially good or bad but they can make mistakes and have their parts of dark and light, be they on the side of the protagonists or not. Then they are not involved in ideal wars where everything happens on the battlefield where the bad will be cleanly killed: every opponent will try all the tricks he can think of to take the advantage, much like it would happen in real wars (doublespeak of the leaders, epidemies, infiltrators...), and each camp will use strong arguments to jusify its opinions and the place it takes in the conflict.
The aim of Goodkind is to describe this fantastic world in the most realistic way possible; the series forms a big coherent text, and each book always gives new bits of information about the characters and about the world they evolve in (in the same kind of way as the Harry Potter books).Through the books is also distilled a certain philosophy of life, which would make many Christians and Puritans jump, but which is, I think, very interesting and true (for example one of the wizards says that many people are ready to believe anything they hear because they think or because they fear it's true). Nethertheless, these books are really meant for adults: you can also find in it matters of sex and some passages can prove rather shocking, given that a war occurs and some ill-intentioned people make use of torture (but most of the time those passages serve a well-defined purpose)...
So the first book, called "Wizard's First Rule", is about a young woods guide, Richard Cypher, whose father has just been savagely murdered. As he goes in the forest to find clues, he encounters a young woman, Kahlan Amnell, who claims she comes from the other side of the magic (and normally unbridgeable) border separating their two countries. She desperately tries to find a mean to get rid of the tyran that conquered her land and was acclaimed there as a savior. There begins a long journey to find the only man who can stand up...
For those interested, here is a link to the official site of the author, as well as another site with nice quizzes on Goodkind but also Harry Potter, Dune etc.
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