Now that I have gotten around to fixing up my Reading Corner page, I figure that I will put up my first relevant post for it today. And the first post will be… about my book tastes of course.
Firstly, I have not yet figured out how to do category pages. So I have to repeat some of the things I’ve already talked in the paragraph now up on the Reading Corner page. My main staple for reading are fantasy and then mystery, with a preference towards book aimed at adults as opposed to YA. I love readings series because they give me a longer time to immerse in the story but I usually don’t have the patience to pick up a series containing more than 5 books. Consecutive trilogies, though, are something that I’m quite comfortable with. And then, I tend to classify books into two categories: serious and light reading. Mystery books in general tend to be under my light reading list. I was not particularly adventurous in searching out new authors, preferring to stick up with authors and series that I’m comfortable with. I’m only now starting to change a bit in this area since some of my ‘comfort writers’ are no longer stocked much at my local library or I decided to not continue following their work.
Now, after this somewhat long preamble, onto the actual lists.
My all-time favourite is the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. I read the Hobbit as well of course (which was what got me into LoR in the first place) but as a short prequel, I was less attached to it.
Coming second is the Midkemian books by Raymond E. Feist. However, I was quite sad that the turn at the plot he made just before the Conclave of Shadow series turned me off his books because it got the story back into the “all the mischiefs happening in the story are driven by the Gods” which I had come to view as a cliché in the fantasy genre and dislike (although I did read this series). His strongest work are definitely the Riftwar and Serpentwar Sagas.
Beyond is sort of a fuzzy area where I have a lot of what I term my “comfort writers” and their work are sort of hit-and-miss for me. The foremost I will mention is Margaret Weis whose Dragonlance Chronicles first got me into reading fantasy and by that fact alone holds some kind of special sentimental value for me. However, I regretted very much that I’ve ever decided to take up reading the Dragon of the Summer Flame rather than stopping with the original trilogy. I’ve also her Darksword Trilogy, her Deathgate Cycle and her Rose of the Prophet trilogy. The only one that I sort of liked was the Rose of the Prophet one, the ones were so-so to me. The other major label that I had read was books in the Forgotten Realms world which multiple authors contributed to and I had grown comfortable with. But I must say the quality of books belonging to it I found to be rather sub-par on average. The strongest author among them is probably R. A. Salvatore and his Drizzt series. I found some of the books or individual plots a bit odd sometimes but he made up for it for producing enough books about Drizzt that I had warmed up to the character. I liked the Harper series belonging under this label too, not because they are quality work (they tend to be part of the sub-par ones in my opinion) but because this is one of the rare open-ended series in fantasy there was (or I could find) with each book in the series being a standalone story by itself.
That’s all for today. I will continue with more of my comfort writers in the next instalment. In fact, there will be more instalments to come on this topic. Feel free to leave comments about your thoughts on the authors and books that I mentioned in this post.
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