What other fantasy books do YOU read?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

Sorry to be stubborn, but read the sci-fi novels of Iain M. Banks. You don't crave for others after reading them...
(And yes, you are frustrated when he does not write a sci-fi novel in a year X...)

Unimaginable fantasy, incredible characters, especially female (that confessed also by my female-feminist friends who dig the books wholeheartedly), never really know what's going on and the worlds are just astoninshing!

Oh, you are quite right that Banks (by any name) is a superb writer of great stories, great characters, entirely unique take on everything, whether he writes under "M" or not. Consider Phlebas was one of the best reads I'd had in along time, and I'm currently on Feersum Endjinn. He does something incredible to and with language and his power of invention is awesome. It might just be me, but possibly I prefer his "mainstream" stories--Whit and The Wasp Factory, which more probably to me belong under the rubric distopia.

Which raises the point of why I hadn't mentioned him... Most of the authors named here I think belong to a particular kind of Fantasy, one that I would call a sub-genre of the larger category of Speculative Fiction, which to me combines both science fiction and fantasy, all kinds of fantasy and not simply the fairy kind mainly represented here.

But let's not split hairs or definitions! There could well be dwarves in space I have not read of--or have forgotten. It's a sad state that reading new books sometimes pushes older ones out of the memory pool.