I’m going through the Malloreon by David Eddings on audiobook, and right now the last book isn’t on Audible, so I’ve been taking a detour through the last two books in the overall series: Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress.
This post or review is a quick reference to those books, how they fit in, and as with some of my other postings, whether they’re worth reading in 2026 and how they relate back to the series. It’s also interesting to point out that some of this, especially with Belgarath the Sorcerer, is a response to Wheel of Time being started.
There is a general critique of the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies (this reference is even dating me at the moment) that a good editor could make a great science fiction movie from the two and cut out a lot that didn’t work. I think I have the same general comment for most of David Eddings’ books in this series.
In general the Malloreon seems forced, and a way for him to write more books into what I assume was a well enough received first series with The Belgariad. It was a really quick turnaround, the stakes were raised again, and it seemed like more of a repeat than it needed to be. It also seemed like he really started to hit his stride again at the three-quarter mark of the series. I wished he would have put more time between them, not picked up with the same characters, and started over. Maybe, in a way, since this was an influence on Wheel of Time, R. Jordan thought of the pattern as a way to repeat events, rather than whatever D. Eddings thought he was doing here.
He keeps hitting his stride with Belgarath the Sorcerer. I thought a lot of it was interesting, and it was a nice first-person walkthrough of all the events leading into the Malloreon. My issue though is it should have been standalone rather than this shoehorned thing of Belgarath narrating the account, and it being directly after the events in the Malloreon. It worked, but it really takes away from an otherwise good story, and the callbacks to current events aren’t really needed.
Two of my big takeaways here were a few comments about wolves, and a few comments about the magic system. The wolf one was that they can communicate with each other, but they don’t have names and that a name doesn’t have a meaning to a wolf. Which is the opposite of Wheel of Time. The other one was that people who learned magic on their own would break the rule that they can’t unmake something, and end up destroying themselves. Which kind of complements Wheel of Time in a way that magic users there don’t have long lives if self-trained, or would go mad.
I think that if you as a reader made it through the Malloreon, it’s worth giving Belgarath the Sorcerer a read. It puts things together, fills in the history, and kept my attention and was interesting to go through. Going back to my Matrix comment, I really wished the two main series were a bit farther apart from one another and not as much of a repeat, but they are what they are.