Has anyone got any good recomendations for books to read.... i really enjoyed lotr, the legend by david gemmel and the sovereign stone trillogy/

i know its cheating a bit , cos you had to do it all the hard way. but i'm on limited resourses.

thanx

could you tell me what book to start with... i'm just looking th RA Salvatore site, Books:
"The Icewind Dale Trilogy" is the first listed, is this the one to start with..?
thanx

a book I lately read and very much enjoyed was three men in a boat by jerome k. jerome. it's somehow weird, but soo funny... and you'll soon have finished it, I think...

I find Katherine Kerr's Deverry series almost on par with LotR. The world is kind of Middle Ages/Celtic, and her writing is very realistic. Through her writing you can feel the mud and cold on her characters and smell the rust on their armour. Being Celtic, the series is also told as a cycle in which the spirits of the main characters are reincarnated through time in a series of mini-stories slotted into the main tale. They have no recollection of their previous pasts, but spirits will recognise each other, so lovers in one life will always feel close to each other later, and enemies will always feel enmity. As the series evolves you realise most of what is going on, is spirits trying to correct a wrong that occurred in the first incarnation.

They can be read as a four book series:- Daggerspell, Darkspell, Dawnspell and Dragonspell but if you get into them the story was continued in another four book series, A time of excile, A time of omens, A time of war, and A time of Justice. Beyond that the story extends into The red Wyvern, The Black Raven and The Fire Dragon. I am still waiting for the final book of the whole series, The Golden Falcon, to be finished. Unfortunately over the past fifthteen years or so that Kerr has been writing these books she has had problems with her publishers that have caused huge delays in some books being written. She was on book five when I first read them and I've been eagerly awaitng the next book each time.... (its now been five years since the Fire Dragon was published and I'm still waiting for the Golden Falcon to find out how it all ends.)

I agree with Miruvor that the rest of the other Tolkien books would be a good choice, and once you've managed to pull yourself out of ME to read something else, you migh twant to try The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix, The Dark Is Rising Sequence was not bad either.

I realize that what all these suggestions are gonna result in is probably Sarawyn sweeping the library empty, so I'll end my suggestions here.

I read the Deverry series, and i didn't feel that way at all. I had the impression that if Konsalik would write fantasy, he'd come up with something similar to the Deverry series.

Imo, Guy Gavriel Kay's works are most on par with JRRT's works. After Kay assembled the Silmarillion together with Christopher Tolkien, he wrote the Fionavar Tapestry, which is a Tolkienesqua high fantasy story with both elements of the Arthurian legends and Nordic mythology included. Very interesting. His other works are all standalone books which are usually stories with a slight fantasy touch, based on real periods in human history.

It all depends on what you want in a book. If you want fast paced action (entwined with a slight touch of humour) - read Feist or Jordan. If you want action mingled with (a lot of) humour, read Eddings (but only the Belgariad, as all his other stories are just a recycled version of the Belgariad). If you want to read something similar to LOTR, but lighter - read Brooks.

I'm currently reading the Sword of Truth series by Goodkind, and i find it quite enjoyable and much better than other fantasy books from after 1990. It's of course as predictable as an arm wrestling contest between the Hulk and Captain Crunch, but still there's always a final twist that makes you jump up from your seat.

I've decided that untill i can find some decent books to read, i'll just go and read lotr again...(just dont get sick of it, its amazing...!!)

yea, terry pratchett is really a great author. I mean, I've only read one of his books by now, but I loved it and there are certainly more to follow... his style of writing and his humour are really unique. a very interesting book I read a few weeks ago is the scarlet letter by nathaniel hawthorne, I do recommend it to everyone.

Oh, so the Discworld is actually a series of books, and not the name of a music shop in Inverness. You really learn something new every day.

If we are recommending books, I suppose I should make my recommendation. After I first read LotR, and after I had read Tokien's early works and the Silmarillion when it was first published, I cast about for another fantasy that would satisfy me. You can imagine I was hard to please after all that Tolkien. Still I did find one. The author is Patricia McKillip. The series is the Quest of the Riddlemaster. It is a trilogy: 1) The Riddlemaster of Hed, 2) Heir of Sea and Fire, 3) Harpist in the Wind. They were marvelously written with a great storyline and very intriguing characters. McKillip's finesse with the language is not quite what Tolkien's is, but she came the closest to him of anyone I had read then or have read since. She has written some other books, notably The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which is also quite good. I hope you can find these and enjoy them.

How about George MacDonald?

I've also found Robin McKinley interesting.

I came across some Discworld stuff in a library a few years ago and -- it did look interesting -- I'll have to go back and check it out more closely after seeing the recommendation here.

Part of my problem is that I am realizing I can only hold so many fictional parallel universes in my brain at once; and then my brain likes to connect them all and I come up with weird bridges from one story to another.

I can also recommend for younger readers, or to read to the young, Lynne Reid Banks' The Indian in the Cupboard series. There are three or four books, all having to do with the magic cupboard and key.

Aye. Ye are right Eva. I just cant find "Eric" or "Night Watch" here. And "Thud" was a bit too expensive for my pocket when i saw it in England. Now im back home in Croatia, and i wont be seeing "Thud" any time soon... if your lucky you can mybe find half a dozen discworld books here, and thats all...

I would definitely have to recommend Janny Wurts' Wars of Light and Shadow series, of which the first book is entitled Curse of the Mistwraith. So far there are seven books out, and all are excellent, though just like the Harry Potter series, once you get to the fourth book, they keep getting better and better.

Another book (if you don't want to read an entire series) would be Brandon Sanderson's Elantris, which is an extremely captivating novel that stands on its own - no sequels.

Other than that, readers who enjoy sci-fi/fantasy might like The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams, which is the first of a series. But I would not say it is as good as Wurts' writing.

One author.


Ted Dekker.

Black
Red
White
House
Obsessed
Saint
Showdown
Three
Blink

and these are just a few...

The fifth book in Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Cycle is Tales from Earthsea, (2001) contains five stories that cover periods before, during, and after the the times of the previous books and serve as a bridge to the sixth book in the cycle, the novel The Other Wind (2003).

I enjoyed them all.

That ought to be The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft.

After waiting for every new Feist and Kerr book to come out over the past twenty years my son recently introduced me to a different genre, Simon Scarrow's Eagle series. These are based on the Roman invasion of Britain, and although not the best written books that I have ever read, certainly give a feel for what it must have been like to be a Roman legionary in those days.