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You know, I am going to have to pick The Wheel of Time over The Sword of Truth. I am not dissing Goodkind's ability to successfully plot and tie up stories over a totally epic canvas, nor his inventiveness for interesting devices, or even his ability to create (IMO) the absolute most horrific villains ever.

But I think that in terms of characters, Jordan is a better writer. A lot happens to Goodkind's characters, and the best of them can spend pages upon pages of internal processing before even a two-sentence speech, but I always feel like his dialogue and interactions are a little wooden. Jordan's characters just flow a little more, I think.

I also am an enormous fan of Jordan's attention to the differences and divergences of cultures in his world. I really feel like different places are different in his world: people dress differently, have different values, see things differently, whereas in Goodkind's lands, some people are more evil, and some more good, but I always feel like everybody's kind of cut from the same cultural cloth, no matter where they're from.

BTW, I read Zelazny's whole Chronicles of Amber during the year I lived in Israel-- I was desperate for English-language fantasy/sci-fi fiction, and I found a copy of the complete Amber in a little bookstore with a single shelf of English books, and snapped it up. It was, given the context, diverting, but I confess I found it deeply uncompelling. I never got attached to the characters, I thought the plot was a confused jumble, and though some of his ideas were spectacularly original, he just never seemed to make them pan out in ways I found engaging. If I had picked it up in America, I probably would never have finished it.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)