So I am continuing with the authors and books that fall into my comfort zone but not necessarily brilliant by themselves. I am quite picky (if you had read the post before this, there are only two authors that I named as my favourites) so there are more substantial number of authors that I diligently follow for laziness of venturing for ‘new’ authors or sometimes just because I’ve grown attached to a particular character or underlying world and excused sometimes quite mediocre writing (I’m not saying every author in this category is mediocre but compared with what made it to my favourites, this category is simply massive so there’s bound to be one or two of the latter authors or books that made it to this category).
Egh… sorry for the long preamble again, I just can’t help myself. So continuing with the actual list, besides Margaret and the Forgotten Realms label, I also enjoyed the following works:
- R.A Salvatore’s Cleric Quintet and Demonwars Saga (all right, I had already mentioned him in the first post but these are his work that actually drew me because of some specific part of his writing), particularly the first three books of the later series that present a somewhat different experience to most other fantasy books
- David Eddings’s Belgariad, Mallorean, Elemium and Temuli, each of them a quintet. I read them while I was a teenager and I liked his humorous dialogue and how he was able to add in side-plots that kept one riveted even though I could always see his ending miles away. I also dislike how the main characters always come out on top because of some fundamental flaw in the ultimate villain in his book, which to me functions much like an anti-climax. In that sense, I’ve always felt like he was writing for the YA market but really he was an author before the rise of YA.
- Tamora Pierce’s Immortal Quartet, The Trickster series and the Beka Cooper series, books on the Circle universe except the latest one called Battle Magic. She is another YA author. I find some of the ideas in her books refreshing but in general, I prefer a more in-depth exploration of more mature themes about life philosophies and human truisms in books so in this area she will never be able to satisfy me fully just by the virtue of her niche.
Okay, I have to stop here again and continue next time because today I just don’t feel in the writing mood much. It’s 30 degrees plus over here.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 