What do I need to read?

[kennahijja]

My f-list is wise and perceptive and well-read, so here's the problem:

I'm badly out of good books. That, and my birthday isn't all that far off, so I would have an excuse for hitting Amazon. But as it is, I'm even out of books I know I desire madly. Hence, I'll ask you. What would you rec? What excited you recently?

What *do* I like? Fantasy, horror, SF if it's character-driven and not technology-heavy. Slashy, dark, unusual, stylistically beautiful, erotic. Other genres if the themes fit.

Examples that rocked my world... Carey's 'Kushiel' series, Friedman's 'Coldfire', McMaster Bujold's 'Miles Vorkosigan' series, McKillip's 'Riddlemaster' trilogy. General fondness for MZB, Guy Gavriel Kay, C J Cherryh, Octavia Butler... Storm Constantine, apart from the undisciplined plots. Liked Lynn Flewelling's 'Nightrunner' series for the slash, but otherwise it's too cliched for me... Not much into the Tolkien clone type stuff...

Suggestions will be lovingly huggled! :)

And if anyone ever stumbled across a list of homoerotic fantasy novels, I'd so love to see that :).

Comments

[siamkatze.livejournal.com]

I was going to rec Robin Hobb's Farseer/Liveship/Tawny Man series, as well as Sarah Monette's Melusine and sequels, but I see others have done so already. I can only second it! Very, very worth it.

To add something new, I'd also like to rec the First Law series by Joe Abercrombie. It's fantasy, not slashy, but the characters are so well written that they make up for it. I also wrote some short review-sort-of-things on my LJ for book 1, book 2, and book 3 which might or might not make any sense...

PS: I'm so bookmarking this post! I will have to check out everything people mentioned here.

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

I hear you about the first two! And everybody else as well :).

Thanks for the second, too - nobody's mentioned it so far, and I've never heard of them, but it looks intriguing.