"Grass" by Sheri Tepper is a recent acquisition. Absolutely stunning - I've got to read some more of her stuff. Thanks for the recommendation, Guest.

No nominations yet for Richard Matheson. "I Am Legend" and "The Incredible Shrinking Man" - both classics.

Donaldson is a good writer, but he's much too fond of repeating himself. He'll find a few favourite ultra-long, ultra-obscure words and then use them as much as possible throughout for no apparent reason. A writer who baffles with bullshit kind of annoys me. His Gap series suffers from that too - as an exercise in story-telling and characterisation, it's absolutely mind-blowing past anything else I've ever read, but he could really use a good editor/test-reader to cut out some of the crap. Mordant's Need is much more accessible than the Gap or Covenant series on that score.

David Eddings was fun initially, but I've got right sick of it now. Too much "let's build an N-part series of books to make some money" (where N is any number from 5 upwards)...

Kate, that's Fafhrd, not Fafnir! :-) You can get them as collections of all the stories now. The same with Michael Moorcock as well. Not greatly taken though - interesting from a historical view of "pulp" fantasy, but not the greatest stories.

Both Terry Brooks and Raymond Feist I'm kind of ambivalent about. The Shannara series has gone into sequel-meltdown, which is kind of a shame since the first two were pretty good. The first (Sword) was a blatant rip-off of LotR but good nonetheless, and the second one (Elfstones) was OK but with a stunning final battle-scene which makes me wish I was a film director. The rest kind of went downhill from there. Magical Kingdom was a bit the same - the first was not bad, but the rest just died. Feist is the same - "Magician" was good in parts (the arena scene is a particular stand-out) but some bits just sucked (the deus ex machina ending in particular), and I wasn't dead impressed with the other two either ("Silverthorn" and "Sethanon"). I've not read the rest of his Empire books after that.

I trust no-one needs telling to read Pratchett though! ;-)

Graham.