Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you what kind of person you are. Well, maybe not, personally I do not suscribe to this kind of DIY-psychoanalysis, but you are welcome to try. So here is a list of my favourite books and short stories. I would try to put them in the right order, but I’ve read that the sun will in fact go supernova on our collective posteriors at some point so I am not sure if I’d have enough time.
1. The Man Who Painted to Dragon Griaule, Lucius Shepard, 1985
2. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954-55
3. The Dark Tower, Stephen King, 1982-2004
4. Discworld, Terry Pratchett, 1983-hopefully a long time in the future.
5. The World According to Garp, John Irving, 1978
6. The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle, 1968
7. I See By My Outfit, Peter S. Beagle, 1965
8. The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay, 1995
9. The Alphabet, David Sacks, 2003
10. A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby, 2005
Now here’s an incomprehensive list for you. No Stephen Donaldson. No Steven Erikson. No Jasper Fforde or Tom Holt. No J. K. Rowling and no Patricia McKillip. Gnargh! What about Gaiman, Arthur C. Clarke or Auster? Or (dare I mention them? I guess I should, seeing as they got me hooked on writing back in the early nineties) Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony and Hal Foster. Simply imagine this list to be about 90 mentions longer and we’ll be just fine.
Verena Kyratzes 
Pingback: Tell me what you love… (Part One: Novels) « Jonas Kyratzes
Can do. Soon. Maybe tomorrow.
Huh. I want to try this. So here we go (and some good recommended reading!):
1. Exiles, Melanie Rawn
2. Dune, Frank Herbert
3. The Dark Tower, Stephen King (Verena, you have amazing taste)
4. Sister Fidelma series, Peter Tremayne
5. Star Wars: X-Wing books and comics, largely Mike Stackpole
6. Redwall series, Brian Jacques
7. Jack of Kinrowan, Charles de Lint
8. The Black Swan, Mercedes Lackey
9. Deerskin, Robin McKinley
10. Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
Do you game enough to do this with games? 🙂
Argh! Solaris by Lem. I knew that I had missed something.
These lists are always completely different depending on precisely when you ask somebody to give one. It’s like when Stanislaw Lem wrote that a person could write an entirely true and painfully honest account of their lives every ten years, and each book would be unrecognisable but for the name on the cover.
Nevertheless, I admire you for being able to cite Tolkien, King and Pratchett on a list like this. Whenever this kind of conversation comes up I always find it so hard to beat down the inner-prick, who’s whispering: “quick, think of something they’ve never heard of.”