Update (Please read this first before complaining about my rating)

People keep complaining that my 1 star is unfair because some books were better than others. Here's how I see this work. I don't see it as different books the way one would read say an Agatha Christie novel. Each Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple mystery is a stand alone even if characters recur from book to book. They are meant to be read as stand alone novels and should be treated as such.

This book, on the other hand, is clearly a More...

I adore this series. I have read and re-read this book since high school. What can I say? It captured my imagination and has kept ahold of it for years. This was the work that Zelazny worked on through his career. I think it is what he wrote for fun. It isn't complicated but it is epic.

Imagine that there is only one true world and it casts "shadows" that make up the rest of the worlds. All are variations of that true world, Amber. Or are they? Another order vs chaos though this story focuses mor More...

The Great Book of Amber is trippy people! Roger Zelazny is unlike any other author I have ever read before. He is disinterested in details and gives cursory descriptions of areas and people. Instead he focuses more closely on plot and the thoughts of the main character. The plot always centers around the search for answers. The setting is quite unique and interesting to learn about. Zelazny never makes his reader go through info-dumps and I found it interesting to puzzle out the workings of his More...

This is all 10 books of the Amber series, but is not complete. It is nice to have them all in one place, but the book is a paperback & a bit delicate due to the size. Unless you're extremely careful, you'll only get a few reads out of this & it's a doorstop to put most others to shame. I prefer the smaller paperbacks for normal reading.

The biggest lack in this book is it doesn't have the prologue to Trumps of Doom, but only the HB issued by the book club had that, I think. It's also in More...

I read this book during huricane Ivan, when three of my four homes (My dorm, My Parent's house, and my boyfriend's house) were pretty much falling down around me. A very awesome guy named Barry lent me his battered copy...and by battered I mean well loved. This book filled a lot of space that could have been spent in what Floridians know as a huricane coma. No lights, no Phone, no tv, just snuggling,reading and occasional looting!
I't will definately take you at least a week to read this bad ma More...

4 stars is a misleading rating for this collection of 10 books. The first 5 (Corwin Books) deserve a full 5 stars. The Corwin books (1-5) are among my favorite fantasy books of all time. Thanks to fellow GoodReads member "Curmudgeon" for recommending them.

Books 6-10 (Merlin Books) deserve 4 stars each...not as good as their predecessors but still good books in their own right. Merlin, son of Corwin, is a much more sympathetic protagonist than his old man...and less interesting by consequence.

Tak More...

First read: It's hard to summarise such a long book, since the "Great Book" is a compilation of smaller tales; but it's one done so well that it's hard to notice the joins. Zelazny's created a world rich in politics and fantasy, and has framed it in a way that is easy to follow. Its protagonists will take a few moments to bring us back up to speed - particularly useful when there have been a number of murder plots and metaphysical conflicts within a short period of time!

It's a shame, then, that More...

Well, it took about two months, but I finished the "Great Book of Amber." I feel a little better knowing that it was technically TEN books in one, but only moderately better. It was partially due to things going on in the "real world", but for some reason this book was a fairly slow read for me.

My initial reactions after the first "book" were that:
1) I enjoyed the world/characters
2) I thought the author was very imaginative and had some cool ideas
3) I didn't like the narrative voice
4) The copy-e More...

When I bought this book, I had no idea who Roger Zelazny was or a clue about Amber. I only picked it up because I couldn't find any new releases by Tad Williams, Michelle West, or Janny Wurts. The book was huge and the synopsis piqued my interest. I devoured the book in a handful of days and fell in love with Zelazny. I've read this series so often that I'm on my third copy of the book.

The story is about a powerful family who have the skills to travel between alternate realities. Of all worlds, More...

agh, ten books 1200 pages i am obsessive and can't quit reading a book i have started even when i know it will be pointless to finish and i have already read 500 pages!
i do not know what these other people are talking about! the first i would say three books were pretty good, then it kind of lost its train of thought, hmmm really wish i had never started this epic tale i wouldnt have wasted three weeks (i mean three weeks!!!!) of my life. i could have read like six to twelve other books in the More...

The Great Book of Amber collects all ten novels of Roger Zelazny's Amber series, a swashbuckling tale of magic and wonder that ranges across parallel worlds. The central conceit is that there is an infinite set of parallel universes, spanning just about any possibility you can think of -- but they are not all created equal. Somewhere in back of it all lies the golden city of Amber, ruled by scheming immortals who regard themselves as lords of creation, and their land as the one true world, of wh More...

A great many fantasy series aspire to the epithet "epic"; most manage to achieve only "scattered", "bloated", or at best, "mildly confusing". Roger Zelazny's ten volume series comes close to achieving what the amount of words promises, but ultimately degenerates. Divided into two cycles of five novels each, the series chronicles the history of the fictional world of Amber and its struggle against the agents of Chaos. The first cycle is narrated by Corwin, of the royal house of Amber, while the s More...

The name Zelazny is used in conjunction with words like "Classic" and "Quintessential" high fantasy. So I went into this dictionary-sized tome with high expectations of fantastic locations, rules, and characters. I got the first two.

The idea of Amber, being the only "real" world, with countless other "shadow" worlds branching off (think alternate universes, but not quite), is a great concept. Unfortunately, I'm a big fan of strong characters and their growth, and I just didn't find that here.

Non More...

This large tome contains all 10 volumes of the Amber Chronicles. The series is divided into two major story arcs, each consisting of five books. The first story arc is excellent. Zelazny weaves a compelling story. I found the opening particularly good. The way Zelazny starts the story, it does not even seem like fantasy. Just as you start to wonder whether or not he is ever going to get around it, he brings the fantasy element into the story with a bang.

The second story arc is mediocre. The stor More...

I enjoyed the plot and I'll probably read through all the novels in the series, but I can't recommend them because I'm not a fan of his style of writing. The concept of the books is interesting and I just wish it was executed better. It was difficult to keep from skimming over the action scenes and the "walking" scenes because to be frank, they weren't interesting and didn't seem to add much to the story. I also took offense to the absurd number of ellipses he used and the amount of typos in my More...

I love completed series. I love omnibus editions. I love fantasy. How come I did not love this?

In fact, I only got though the first 5 books and did not want to read the last 5. I can not ever remember stopping in the middle of a series. Ultimately, there was not a single character that I cared for. All the characters were stereotypical and flat. Besides recovering from amnesia there was no character development. The female characters were especially weak.

Plot? I can't even remember. Just a dysfu More...

I'd read the original Chronicles of Amber a couple of times years ago. I recently had a yen to re-read them. I've never gotten a chance to read the Second Chronicles of Amber (books 5-10), so I picked up this convenient volume that includes all of them (1-10).

The individual books aren't super long; in the original mass market paperback size, they were around 200 pages each. Quite reasonable, not like the insane tomes of today.

I always thought the cover art was coolest on the Avon editions: http: More...

This volume can be broken down into two five-book story arcs - the first story centers around Corwin, prince of Amber, and the second story centers around his son Merlin, prince of both Amber and Chaos. Amber is the "one true world" on which all others are patterned, and the royal family of Amber capable of traversing these worlds by force of will, as well as possessing many other magical talents and traits. The fantastical setting, however, takes a backseat (or at least a sidecar) to the real m More...

Only read books 1-5: Nine Princes of Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn, The Hand of Oberon, and The Courts of Chaos. I did this based on Michael saying the ending was bad, my own aversion to reading a huge freaking collection of books, and, later, reviews saying the second half was worse. Woot.
Definitely, fantasy, but had sci-fi elements! Weather control, parallel universes, weird dream-realm future predictor. All the characters seemed really similar. Like, when everyone is immortal More...

I've read these books over and over, so one might ask, why 4 stars? It's not against Roger himself. People don't understand the fact that he never got to finish his series. He died before he could bring it to a conclusion. It lost a star for bringing the Corwin Saga and Merlin Saga under one roof. Bad move. They have different voices, different angles. It's like mixing ice cream and ketchup. Both have their places and both taste good for what they do and imply, but together? Bleck.

The Corwin Sag More...

The greatest sci-fi series ever written in my opinion. Zelazny uses vivid uber-specific detail to paint graphically tedious worlds while pacing perfectly an intricate tale of family intrigue and subterfuge worthy of Agatha Christie. Prince Corwin and the other royals are each distinct and real. This is a bucket list book.
The story revolves around Corwin of Amber, the one true world of Order on one end and the Courts of Chaos on the other which all others are "shadows" including our own, and his More...

I describe the first book of this series all the time to people. Why? Because it is ingenious! A challenge of fantasy novels is to introduce the reader into a complex new world that is not always that similar to our own before the reader gets bored and bogged down with description so heavy they drop the book and don't pick it back up. In TV and movies writers do this often by introducing a character that is just as new to the world as you are. It gives the reader someone to relate to and a reaso More...

This is, by far, one of my most favorite reads ever!!!! It's also a CCF Top Pick selection.

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It is hard to find all ten of Zelazny's classic "Amber" fantasy novels together. Here you have them in a beautiful trade paper book! Roger Zelazny's chronicles of Amber have earned their place as all-time classics of imaginative literature. Now, here are all ten novels, together in one magnificent omnibus volume.
Witness the titanic battle for supremacy waged on Earth, in the Courts of More...

Roger Zelazny's Amber books are some of the first true fantasy I can recall reading - I certainly couldn't have been more than about 14. And I'm still reading the genre 30 years later, so you can tell they made a bit of an impression; they were always some of my favorites. Must have read them a dozen times at least. So while it seemed like it was time to go back for a visit, I'm not exactly the most unbiased reader in the world. (I find going back to your old favorites a bit of a trepidacious ex More...

The start of this series is great, but jeezum crow, what was HarperCollins thinking with the format of this edition? They went through all the trouble of getting the rights and printing the thing, but the fifteen-pound tome is physically difficult to read, laughably inconvenient to transport, and inexcusably devoid of any kind of supportive structural writing--like an introduction, a foreword, an about the author, an about the series, or even a table of contents!

Wikipedia tells us that the Great More...

A masterpiece
Clearly one of the best series I have read.

I read the first 5 books about 10 years ago (1995), however, I didn't like them.
A few month ago, I gave it another try and I just could not put the book down. I guess I was not ready for the The Great Book of Amber 10 years ago. Some of my friends kept on telling me that only the first 5 are interesting and then only the first 2 books, the rest are boring, especially the 5 last books. I must totally disagree with them. I enjoyed equally thr More...

The Great Book of Amber is certainly hefty, but a very enjoyable and intelligent epic fantasy nonetheless. The volume is split into two five book story arcs, with the first arc vastly superior to the second (it probably would've gotten five stars on its own). Zelazny throws in a bit of something for every reader; pop culture, philosophy, computer science, and morality.

The first story arc starts with a bang in a mental institution, where a man wakes without his memory. He's clever, arrogant, and More...

This "book" is actually a collection of 12 smaller ones into a dictionary-sized volume. It follows the machinations and crises of magic and politics that surround a royal family in a fantastical world that is tangentally connected to ours. The compilation was a good move on the publisher's part, because based on the breaks the books did not have good climaxes and relied heavily on cliffhangers, but compiled together the dropoff wasn't as much of an issue. The author did a wonderful job worldbuil More...

I am not much of a science fiction reader. I can't even remember why I picked up the first book in the series, but I was hooked. The book includes intrigue, time travel, great battles, magic, even unicorns, and yet it's not set in a completely unrealistic or unreal environment. At the time I found the first book in the Amber series, The Great Book of Amber wasn't available. I bought each book individually and devoured them. Zalazny,while an excellent writer, moves things along at a fast enough p More...