skull_bearer | (no subject) (Reply)

List three books that have changed your life:

The Runes of Sorcery, Book 3 of the Runespell Trilogy, Jane Welch

Now, quite beyond that I read this during the Best Holiday Ever (Malaysia), it was the first real fantasy book I'd ever read, and opened my eyes that other people were writing about dragons beyond myths and legend books. The book itself is okayish for a fantasy book. I've read A LOT worse, but it's also a Message book about the joys of paganism, women and the evils of Christianity. It's not offensive but it is very heavy handed, particularly in the second book in the series (in my opinion the weakest). It also has this weird fixation on bestiality which straddles the line between tiltilating and OH GOD MY EYES (ze goggles, they do nothing...)

The third book is a lot better, being not only pretty good quest fantasy, but also a parody of quest fantasy where in the big bad almost beats the heros to the mcguffin because he worked out the pattern behind the clues and got to skip to the end instead of following the clues one at a time. It's very low magic, and we get to see a lot of the world, which is always fun.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

I've already written about this book at length, so I'll just say it's great and extraordinarily well-written and the sort of thing where you write better just by reading it. It had a BIG impact on my writing style.

The Ogre (also Le Roi des Aulnes), Micheal Tournier

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the reason I didn't like Les Beinveillants is that I'd read this book first, which does the same thing threee times as well in a quarter of the page count. It's the best exploration of WW2 Germany I have ever seen, as well as the most perfect form of magic realism, toeing the line between fairy tale and reality without ever passing fully into one or the other. Is it real? Is it all coincidence? No one knows. A friend of mine gave me the book and told me 'that's you', and really, I think at the time (I was really depressed) that as really what I needed to hear. The book was one of the things that turned my life around and started me getting better. It's awesome from its strange beginning to its ambiguous ending, and the journey between, taking us from Paris to a German POW camp to a castle run for the Hitler youth, all through the eyes of one of the best fictional characters ever realised, Abel Tiffauges.

It took a lot to unseat The Road from my all-time favourites, but this one managed it.