OK, was just wondering what everyone's favourite author's are.
Personally, I like older writers, people like William Shakespeare, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Bronte.
Does anyone else have a fave writer??????

Iasac Assimov (factual & fiction), Stephen King, Clive Barker, HG Wells.

I tried reading a Shakespeare "comedy" and didn't laugh once.

Dostoevsky (esp. The Idiot) and Emily Bronte (esp. Wuthering Heights), and Dickens (esp. Hard Times).

James Joyce's Dubliners is good writing but it takes some getting into.

Originally posted by nick2
I tried reading a Shakespeare "comedy" and didn't laugh once.

I have problems reading Shakespeare, i just can't make the language come 'alive' in my head and I can make head nor tail of it.

When I hear it done by a decent actor though, I can understand it no problem. I'd recommend getting to a theatre to see some, the comedies can actually be very funny when done well.

Originally posted by nick2
Iasac Assimov (factual & fiction), Stephen King, Clive Barker, HG Wells.

I tried reading a Shakespeare "comedy" and didn't laugh once.

Just to say I agree with the above (especially CB) with the exception of Stephen King.

Dostoevsky

Poe

Graham Greene

Haruki Murakami

J G Ballard

I've read Wutering Heights, i was engrossed in it for ages, i think i've read itabout 5 times n i only bought it 4 months ago.
Some of Wiliam Shakespeare's stuff is overated, but Othello is a great play and Macbeth is my all time classic.

Redrobbo, Have you ever read Emily Bronte's Poetry of Solitude, that's an amazing collection of her work!

Originally posted by Fantomas
I have problems reading Shakespeare, i just can't make the language come 'alive' in my head and I can make head nor tail of it.

When I hear it done by a decent actor though, I can understand it no problem. I'd recommend getting to a theatre to see some, the comedies can actually be very funny when done well.

I love Shakespearean language.

Originally posted by robbie
I love Shakespearean language.

Me too. It can be hard at first but it is what make the plays what they are.

I can't manage chaucer though.

H.P. Lovecraft,
Dostoevsky,
Tolkien,
J.K. Rowling (yeah, I know).

Lovecraft , Poe and the odd bit of Shakespeare for me but i find it hard to get to grips with Shakesperian language :)

Originally posted by Quietrose


Redrobbo, Have you ever read Emily Bronte's Poetry of Solitude, that's an amazing collection of her work!

Have to confess I haven't heard of Emily Bronte's poetry.
(makes mental note to drop hints to partner about Christmas present list!).

I enjoy poetry a great deal. So, if we can include poets as authors, I recommend the collected poems of e e cummings. It's my desert island choice of book (but still waiting for Sue Lawley to invite me on the programme!).

I'v often fancied reading a bit of HP Lovecraft, but I think it might be just too weird.

Have enjoyed Emile Zola amongst others.

Anne Rice,
Clive Barker,
Shaun Hutson,
Jeffrey Deaver,
James Patterson,
Kathy Reichs,
Ian Rankin,
Val McDermid, most of Stephen King's to name a few!

Stephen King (before he became verbose and boring)
Clive Barker (his shorter stories)
James Herbert
Edgar Allen Poe
HP Lovecraft
Poppy Z Brite

Chaucer is wonderful, persist, it really is worth the effort.

Katherine Mansfield, her short stories are full of the those tiny observations that we can all identify with, Psychology is my favourite.

Jane Austen - sublime.

There's a brilliant book by Isaac Asimov that explains Shakespeare beautifully! If anyone knows of it please post the title for me.....(my lamentable memory, sigh) I'd love to read it again.

Sci-fi: Bob Shaw and Larry Niven

Owt by Bill Bryson

Still trying to replace all the James Thurbers I lost

So much good literature out there it's easier to think of bad books.......Mills & boon!

Originally posted by Splodge_CRB
There's a brilliant book by Isaac Asimov that explains Shakespeare beautifully! If anyone knows of it please post the title for me.....(my lamentable memory, sigh) I'd love to read it again.



"Guide to Shakespeare" by Isaac Azimov. It was easy really!

Originally posted by robbie
Dostoevsky

Poe

Graham Greene

Haruki Murakami

J G Ballard

I've tried reading Murakami but i find his books really hard to fall in love with. Everything seems so cold and inhuman. It's got to be just me, as he seems to be very well-loved by a lot of people whose opinion I respect - which book would you consider a good starting point, robbie?

Some of my fave writers:

F Scott Fitzgerald

Kurt Vonnegut

James Joyce (good call slimsid, Dubliners is genius)

John Donne

Michael Hardcastle :P

Originally posted by redrobbo
"Guide to Shakespeare" by Isaac Azimov. It was easy really!


Ta Redrobbo!:)

I really do have the worlds worst memory, just ask thingummiebob

You wouldn't believe how many books I've read over and over again.........

Originally posted by Greenback
I've tried reading Murakami but i find his books really hard to fall in love with. Everything seems so cold and inhuman. It's got to be just me, as he seems to be very well-loved by a lot of people whose opinion I respect - which book would you consider a good starting point, robbie?

Some of my fave writers:

F Scott Fitzgerald

Kurt Vonnegut

James Joyce (good call slimsid, Dubliners is genius)

John Donne

Michael Hardcastle :P

either Norwegian Wood or The Wind-up Bird Chronicles.

I don't get much time to read at the moment but,
I am reading my way through Anne Rice's vampire chronicle's and at this rate it will take me the rest of my life :) mr Honeyplanet keeps spoiling it for me cos he has read them all, being a bloke and not having to worry if he sits and reads allday grrr

Good:- Camus, Beckett, Joyce, Sartre, Kafka, Greene, Dickens, Wordsworth, Keats, Clare, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Goethe, Burgess, Hardy [Thomas, not Oliver], Waugh, Manley-Hopkins, Rimbaud, Betjeman, Alan Bennett, Houseman, Proust, Flaubert, Ballard, Robbe-Grillet.

I cannot abide anything by those perfectly dreadful Bronte sisters. Aside from J.G.Ballard, I have no time for science fiction. I am not keen on anything Russian either. I absolutely detest William Burroughs with his ludicrous 'cut-ups', obsession with buggery in Tangiers, and kiddie fixation. As Sam Beckett said of him, 'That's not writing, it's plumbing!'.

There's nothing wrong with the Bronte's, old boy. I feel quite protective towards Emily!

Mmm, let's see what's on my bookshelf.... in terms of the classics, I apparently like Ivanhoe, Hard Times, Great Expectations, Tess of the D'urbervilles, The Woodlanders, Child of the Jago, Heart of Darkness, all the sherlock Holmes stories.

I like historical stuff - I have Bedes History and Geoffery of Monmouth's History of The Kings of Britain. I've got loads of Bernard Cornwell books, including his Warlord and Grailquest trilogies, and I've got a few Edward Rutherfurds as well.

Can anyone recommend any good contemporary writers of fiction who set their stories in Arthurian times?

Funky Dave,
We shall agree to differ re the Brontes. I can't think of any writers of fiction set in Arthurian times [not my bag, to be honest], but I can think of a good novel set in post-Arthurian 'Dark Age' England that you might appreciate. It is called 'The Saxon Tapestry', by Sile Rice [1991], published by Hodder and Stoughton. The story is woven around Hereward the Wake, and tells of the last flowering and tragic end [Norman Conquest] of Anglo Saxon England. At the time of its publication the book received such great reviews in the 'serious' papers that I bought it to see what all the fuss was about. It is a brilliant feat of imagination, and brings the period vividly to life, 'capturing the mournful cadences of Anglo Saxon poetry in a sensuous and rhythmic prose', as the sleevenotes say. I have heard nothing of the author since, and I do hope the book is still in print. It really is quite remarkable.

I read most of these authors when I was young, doing Shakespeare at school (which comes in handy for crosswords) and now don't go back to them except for an occasional Jane Austin.
As I have had a library ticket continually frrom the age of 8 which is 60 yrs ago, you'll see I have got throughh an awful lot of reading.
My current reading matter is detectives/ thrillers,
ie Lee Childs, James Lee Burke, Nicci French, Dennis Lehane to name a few.

hazel

Is that the lee childs from the new york punk scene in the early 70's?

Has Jeffrey Archer not got a mention yet?:hihi:

Originally posted by carcrash
Is that the lee childs from the new york punk scene in the early 70's?

...and is Nicci French the lady who covered Total Eclipse of the Heart in the early 90s and (allegedly) had a bit of a fling with a certain tanned football presenter?

Pop stars aren't half multi-skilled these days. You'll be telling me the lead singer of Iron Maiden is a qualified pilot next!

Originally posted by Greenback
...and is Nicci French the lady who covered Total Eclipse of the Heart in the early 90s and (allegedly) had a bit of a fling with a certain tanned football presenter?

Pop stars aren't half multi-skilled these days. You'll be telling me the lead singer of Iron Maiden is a qualified pilot next!

Thats the first Maiden joke I've heard since moving up to sheffield 12 months ago.... You just made my Year!!!

Most of the writers I really rate are relatively unknown.

A great favourite of mine, and somebody who is highly respected by many writers "in the know" (Iain Banks has listed him among his favourites) but seems to be virtually unknown to everyone else, is M John Harrison. After I posted a review of one of his books on Amazon several years back, he wrote to thank me, and since then we've met a few times. He's a lovely bloke and one of the most intelligent, knowledgable people I've ever met.

Angela Carter was my wife's favourite, who she introduced me to when we first met. She is a conjuror, she can string two or three words together and, in so doing, create the most amazing sights, sounds, textures and, especially, smells which didn't reside in any of those words in the first place. I just don't understand how she does it. Leonora Carrington sometimes affects me in a similar way.

I'm glad somebody else has mentioned Katherine Mansfield here, she is vastly under-rated in comparison with many of her contemporaries.

I've only read one book by Joris-Karl Huysmans, "Against Nature (A Rebours)", but it stunned me with its erudition and its descriptive powers, and I will be reading a lot more.

But the writer who I think is probably the greatest living today, and who will be one of the classics in centuries to come, is George Saunders. His short stories are funnier than anything I have ever read before, but also extremely dark, disturbing, and (despite their surreality) true-to-life. He gets right to the heart of everything which is wrong with America today, so accurately that you don't know whether to laugh or cry and end up doing both, and he is the true inheritor of Kafka and Gogol's talent. In years to come I'm sure we'll speak of our meaningless jobs becoming "Saundersesque". At least, we would if it weren't such a bloody mouthful.

Oh, I'm also very impressed with David Mitchell, particularly with the noticeable growth in his writing powers from book to book. I can't wait to see what he's coming up with in a decade or two's time.

Originally posted by DanSumption
Most of the writers I really rate are relatively unknown.

A great favourite of mine, and somebody who is highly respected by many writers "in the know" (Iain Banks has listed him among his favourites) but seems to be virtually unknown to everyone else, is M John Harrison. After I posted a review of one of his books on Amazon several years back, he wrote to thank me, and since then we've met a few times. He's a lovely bloke and one of the most intelligent, knowledgable people I've ever met.

Wow, really? I've only ever read 'Light' (which I thought was fabulous) but I've got the Viriconium series sitting on my shelf waiting to be started. His intelligence definitely comes through in the novel I read, but it wasn't too heavy and fair rattled along to a brilliant conclusion.

Originally posted by Greenback
Wow, really? I've only ever read 'Light' (which I thought was fabulous) but I've got the Viriconium series sitting on my shelf waiting to be started. His intelligence definitely comes through in the novel I read, but it wasn't too heavy and fair rattled along to a brilliant conclusion.
Yup. I first encountered him via Viriconium Nights (a collection of short stories, which are scattered throughout the current Viriconium collection). I'd say that he really found his stride and started doing his "mature" work halfway through the Viriconium series (and I think MJH agress with this - he is bemused that Millennium SF Masterworks republished his book "The Centauri Device" as, although it was very influential, he doesn't rate it all that much). So the first two books in the Viriconium collection (The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings) don't quite work as they should, the other two (In Viriconium and Viriconium Nights) do. At the time he was trying to "deconstruct fantasy" by writing anti-fantasy fantasy novels, what he sometimes calls "fantasy without maps" where the world is created in the reader's head and shifts continually on the page (it's this strange incongruity which initially drew me to Viriconium: on one page we seem to be stuck in medieval fantasy, on the next somebody switches on an electrical appliance). When you read Viriconium, I'd suggest doing so backwards: you don't lose anything, there are certainly no "surprises" given away and the plotlines are (intentionally) "sine die" anyway.

This anti-fantasy is to some extent is what he is still doing, his target is escapism, adults who read Harry Potter books, cosmetic surgery, Loreal "Because you're worth it", that sort of thing. The Course of the Heart is about a fantasy world which doesn't exist; the novel's protagonists, who live in drab houses on the edge of the Peak District, are continually trying to find a gateway to this alternate reality they have heard so much about. In doing so they waste their entire lives seeking something which isn't really there, and they slowly kill themselves doing it. Similarly, in Signs of Life a woman is obsessed with the idea of becoming a bird. She has genetic surgery which gives her feathers and hollows out her bones, but robs her of her humanity and her health. And, pointedly, she still can't fly. Meanwhile her boyfriend despoils Yorkshire beauty spots with toxic waste, the byproducts of the same vanity industry. Both these books are now published in an omnibus edition, Anima (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0575075945/sumptionorg-21).

Even his most ostensibly "realist" book, Climbers (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0753819554/) (so "realist" it won a book award previously only ever given to non-fiction about climbing) is about this same theme: people who live humdrum lives and try to escape it by scaling a cliff-face at the weekend, but this escapism somehow drains them and they end up questioning "what's it all for".

Yeah, his books can be rather bleak too :) which is why I was rather surprised a the ending of Light, something I mentioned in my Amazon review (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0575074035/customer-reviews/2/ref=cm_rev_next/sumptionorg-21).

One other thing about being "stalked" by M John Harrison - it really annoys me that Amazon no longer let you put your email address in reviews. Presumably they do this to combat spam, but I get loads of spam anyway and I could cope with it. As well as being emailed out of the blue by one of my favourite authors, I was once contacted by a couple of Czech-Americans who had read my review of Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141184280/sumptionorg-21) (another excellent piece of literature). They had done a new translation, as they didn't like the Cecil Parrot version, and they wanted to send me a copy to see what I thought of it. It was indeed better than Parrot's, my copy of which I subsequently dumped.

Good reading? Anything you enjoy really. Try Dickens and Orwell...........sad, but even after all these years...........nothing much has changed...........

I'd agree with a lot of the foregoing, including J.G. Ballard (probably one of my all time favourites since I read The Crystal World when I was about 9 or 10), Angela Carter (though I prefer her earlier books to the later ones), and Haruki Murakami (I reckon you'd do well to start with The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; a bit like Ian Banks's The Bridge in its use of a two stranded narrative) and even M. John Harrison: first read him well over 30 years ago and I'm in the middle of Light at the moment, having just finished Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder; you wait ages for a novel about quantum mechanics and two come along at once etc.

Other favourites of mine: James Branch Cabell; Ed McBain; John Crowley; Georges Simenon; and lots of Golden Age detective story writers.

forget Gabriel Garcia Marques. I also have a fondness for a lot fantasy books (hides under the table)

Lots of "who's good" on here, not so many "who's not". Any suggestions?

I have to admit that if I really don't like a book, I tend not to struggle on too far with it, but perhaps that's my loss as many truly great novels only start to come together in the second half. Also, I have dismissed many things in my life (not only in the field of literature, but music and films too) which I've later returned to and kicked myself for not liking first time around. I remember, when I was about 14, telling my cousin that Jimi Hendrix was over-rated and boring, boring, boring, and recalling that opinion with embarassment only a couple of years later.

That said, I was bored off DH Lawrence for life by reading Women in Love for O-Level. I later quite enjoyed Lady Chatterley's Lover, but it seems to me that a lot of his reputation is due to the fact that he shook things up rather than the fact that he was any good.

And Martin Amis: this is an example of a writer I haven't given room to breathe. I've only read about the first two pages of his first book, The Rachel Papers, but I decided not to waste time on any more of his stuff.

I'm sure there are others I have hated, but I can't call any to mind right now.

not?

Pppy Z Bite and Anne Rice have already been mentioned :gag:

Bret Eaton Ellis

Jane Austin

Originally posted by timo
Funky Dave,
We shall agree to differ re the Brontes. I can't think of any writers of fiction set in Arthurian times [not my bag, to be honest], but I can think of a good novel set in post-Arthurian 'Dark Age' England that you might appreciate. It is called 'The Saxon Tapestry', by Sile Rice [1991], published by Hodder and Stoughton. The story is woven around Hereward the Wake, and tells of the last flowering and tragic end [Norman Conquest] of Anglo Saxon England. At the time of its publication the book received such great reviews in the 'serious' papers that I bought it to see what all the fuss was about. It is a brilliant feat of imagination, and brings the period vividly to life, 'capturing the mournful cadences of Anglo Saxon poetry in a sensuous and rhythmic prose', as the sleevenotes say. I have heard nothing of the author since, and I do hope the book is still in print. It really is quite remarkable.


Thanks for the suggestion Timo, I'll do my best to hunt that one down. But you're still wrong about the Bronte sisters!

Originally posted by robbie
Bret Eaton Ellis
Yes, somebody else I tried but just couldn't get into.

Ditto Kathy Acker.

But unlike Timo I do quite like William S Burroughs stuff (or at least I did when I last read any, which was when I was quite a bit younger). Some of it can be tedious and disorientating, but he does have a real talent for creating interesting scenarios, and The Western Lands is a wonderful book which grabbed me so much that I read it all in one day-long sitting.

I also find the later Irvine Welsh Stuff unreadable.

Not?

L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between bored me catatonic at school. E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series I found absolutely unreadable.
Irvine Welsh as well. And plenty of things written before about 1880, when I just tend to get lost in the turgidity of it all.

..........

Hermann Hesse

"German poet and novelist, who has explored in his work the duality of spirit and nature and individual's spiritual search outside restrictions of the society. Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Several of Hesse's novels depict the protagonist's journey into the inner self."

- Siddhartha (fiction)
- Demian (fiction)
- Narcissus and Goldmund (fiction)
- Glass Bead Game (fiction)
- etc

Krishnamurti

"Krishnamurti claimed allegiance to no caste, nationality or religion and was bound by no tradition. He traveled the world and spoke spontaneously to large audiences until the end of his life at age ninety. He said man has to free himself of all fear, conditioning, authority and dogma through self-knowledge and this will bring about order and psychological mutation."

- Awakening of Intelligence (nonfiction)
- Freedom from the Known (nonfiction)
- etc

Robert Anton Wilson

"Robert Anton Wilson (1932-NEVER) One of the most profound and important scientific philosophers of this century, Wilson has written many important works of fiction and non-fiction. His vast intelligence and sharp wit are sufficient to shock and enlighten the most heavily imprinted domesticated primate nervous system."

- Prometheus Rising (nonfiction)
- Quantum Psychology (nonfiction)
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy : The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan (fiction)
- etc

John Varley

"John Varley is a multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for excellence in science fiction, and has also received France's Prix Apollo."

Definitely my favorite Sci-Fi author, if you like Heinlein you'll probably like John Varley.

- The Golden Globe (fiction)
- Steel Beach (fiction)
- Titan, Wizard, Demon Trilogy (fiction)
- etc

Robert Heinlein

"Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was one of the most influential and controversial authors in the science fiction genre. He was the first science-fiction writer to break into mainstream general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s with unvarnished science fiction, and he was among the first authors of bestselling novel-length science fiction in the 1960s. For many years he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the Big Three of science fiction."

- Stranger in a Strange Land (fiction)
- Friday (fiction)
- etc

Ernest Becker

"Dr. Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer, came to the recognition that psychological inquiry inevitably comes to a dead end beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche."

- The Denial of Death (nonfiction)
- Escape from Evil (nonfiction)

Howard Zinn

"Howard Zinn (born August 24, 1922 in Brooklyn, New York) is an influential American historian and political scientist, whose political philosophy incorporates ideas from Marxism, anarchism, socialism, and social democracy. Together with Noam Chomsky (with whom he has collaborated on several books and speaking engagements), Zinn is among the most well-known figures of the radical Left in the United States.

Author of more than fifteen books, Zinn offers a radical re-telling of United States history in his most popular work, A People's History of the United States, first published in 1980 and often updated. Zinn is also a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy, arguing that the U.S. military often commits acts of terrorism, and that since World War II "there has not been a more warlike nation in the world than the United States."

- People's History of the United States (nonfiction)

David Zindell

"David Zindell (born November 28, 1952) is a U.S. science fiction author with a degree in mathematics. Zindell's science fiction novels, beginning with Neverness (1988), work to overcome the dichotomy between materialism and spirituality, being in part a mathematical search for the Source. His fantasy series, the EA Cycle is a grail-like exploration of the evolutionary progress of consciousness."

- Neverness (fiction)
- The Broken God, The Wild, War in Heaven Trilogy (fiction)

Aldous Huxley

"Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) was a British writer who emigrated to the United States. He was a member of the famous Huxley family who produced a number of brilliant scientific minds. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, and travel writing. Through his novels and essays, Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social morés, societal norms and ideals, and possible misapplications of science in human life. While his earlier concerns might be called "humanist," ultimately, he became quite interested in "spiritual" subjects like parapsychology and mystically based philosophy, which he also wrote about. By the end of his life, Huxley was considered, in certain learned circles, a 'leader of modern thought'."

- Brave New World (fiction)
- Island (fiction)
- The Doors of Perception (nonfiction)


That's definitely a good start, expand your mind....

Peace,

Locker

Anyone read Rasselas? that was bloody awful! Give me Harry Potter any day!

Goddess!!!! You are a university student and should know better. It's Sydney Sheldon you should be reading girl!!!:loopy:

I always thought Ladybird had an excellent compendium of fiction and non fiction.
I haven't read much since then. ;)

Anthony Trollope, his Barchester series.

Fascinating. Reads like a dream.

The guy also invented the postbox! Genius!

Got to endorse:

JG Ballard. After reading Crash in 1989 I forced it onto a lot of my friends , who never spoke to me again. Result!

Heinlein - despite his inherent misogyny.

Jeff Noon - Greates British SF for donkeys years

Brian Aldiss - Grandaddy of British SF



Having not read a single piece of fiction since 2004 (which was The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert) I am about to launch myself into a discovery of Alan Garner (http://members.ozemail.com.au/~xenophon/bio.html) , upon the recommendation of a total stranger (no longer).

I have mixed feelings about Jeff Noon - I loved Automated Alice, but wasn't too excited by Vurt, it struck me as a bit Martin Millar-ish, very nice easy-to-read urban cyberpunk stuff, but a bit kind of hollow. Not that I dislike his stuff, I just don't like it as much as some.

Alan Garner is great - the Weirdstone of Brisingamen was one of my favourite books as a kid. And, bringing this back to my earlier rave, M John Harrison wrote a very complimentary review of his latest adult fiction for the Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1065274,00.html).

just to trivialise this very intelligent link, i think dan brown's bboks are very interesting and make me use my brain, which i haven't done for a while. but now its the sunny weather cant beat girly stories by adele parks, emily barr and josie lloyd and emylyn reads. and i actually think that cecelia ahernes ps i love you is one of the most moving stories i have ever read, regardless that its chick lit!

rant over, please continue with your authors ive never heard of :confused:

Originally posted by DanSumption
I have mixed feelings about Jeff Noon - I loved Automated Alice, but wasn't too excited by Vurt, it struck me as a bit Martin Millar-ish, very nice easy-to-read urban cyberpunk stuff, but a bit kind of hollow. Not that I dislike his stuff, I just don't like it as much as some.

Alan Garner is great - the Weirdstone of Brisingamen was one of my favourite books as a kid. And, bringing this back to my earlier rave, M John Harrison wrote a very complimentary review of his latest adult fiction for the Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1065274,00.html).

I agree with you about vurt - it was a fairly run of the mill book with some interesting ideas.

Automated Alice was good, Nymphomation was just brilliant, Needle in the Groove was sublime and Pollen (the almost sequel to Vurt) was poetic and very bendy.

Alan Garner is just plain weird. Have you been to the unofficial website? Like I said earlier, this time last week I had never heard of him - now I'm discovering something of a 'cult' has formed around his writing. Bit nervous about picking up his books, in case I get converted....

Until I read "Dead Air" I thought Iain Banks (with or without the M) could do no wrong, but I have to say I still rate him very highly, especially after reading his latest, "The Algebraist"

Another writer you can always rely on is William Boyd. Though I've only read "An Ice Cream War" and "Armadillo" I still think he is an excellent author.

Brazzaville Beach is an amazing book, the only one by William Boyd that I've read.

I do like Iain Banks both with and without the M.

Wasp Factory was like Crash by Ballard: repellent and resonant in equal measure.

The Crow Road was a fantastic, if sentimental, family epic whodunnit with so many subplots, the main story seemed almost inconsequential.

The Bridge is one of my favourite Banks novels. Dark, intense, surreal and gripping.

Feersum Endjinn, an M banks book, has a properly breathtaking scope and for once I am not rushing through the descriptive passages. Some of it is written in a peculiar argot, but once you start reading it aloud in you head, it becomes very natural.

And I am a great admirer of the Space Opera novels set in 'The Culture' - especially Look to Windward, Excession and the Player of Games.

Not really read any Banks since 'the business' which I found trite, dull and pointless. Glad to hear he is back on form.

The Mr Men series is the dogs dangly bits

Rudeboy,
Is there a 'Mr Sartre' or 'Mr Camus' [perhaps it should be 'Monsieur' Sartre and 'Monsieur Camus'?] in the Mr Men series? You'll easily spot them if they have been included. Both tend to believe that they are living within an absurd, godless universe of relativism, and both feel a great deal of 'existential' pain and despair. I can imagine that Mr Camus, in particular, might make a very good addition to the Mr Men series. I can see it now, 'Mr Camus thought a lot about things. One day he realised that if the worries of life outweigh those of death [From 'The Myth of Sisyphus'], one should commit suicide. Mr Camus considered blowing his own brains out'.

Yes, I can definately see merit in adding greater intellectual depth and rigour to the Mr Men series. J K Rowling watch out!

Hmm, yes, maybe Mr Priapic would be an interesting one too (though for adults only).