I'm too eclectic.

I like fantasy novels and not enough come in for me to get the ones I want.

I have not bought books for a while, though.

There are a few series ends I should track down.

I have books all over the place. I started reading a Forgotten Reams series by Elaine Cunningham, Elfshadow, Elfsong, Silver Shadows, Thornhold, and (I think) The Dreamspheres. I've read the first three but haven't read Thornhold yet, though I have it somewhere.

I had a book by the sister of Anne Rice, apparently, but I had it for years and finally decided to toss it since I hadn't really looked at it. I've started checking out reviews of some books since I need to trim my collection a bit, and preferably add books that I'd actually read.

The last book I bought wasn't fantasy actually. I dug up a copy of David Malouf's The Imaginary Life after looking around for a couple years (read Remembering Babylon in Uni).

I have bookshelves filled with fantasy novels. XD

What is the Imaginary life about?

I'm not entirely sure. It was recommended to me by a classmate while studying Remembering Babylon, which deals with a white man raised by aboriginees in colonial Australia, who then finds his way back into a whilte settlement.

My bad, it's called An Imaginary Life. Here's the inside cover details from Amazon:

"In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it."

I recall from my Ancient Greek Relgion class that Ovid was generally considered a writer of smut at the time. His stuff was considered improper or banned reading for students, which naturally means that everyone had to get their hands on it. ;). Thus, his works still survive and what might have been "proper" or "worthy" reading has disappeared into history.

le high. How fares thee?

Hello, all. ^.^

Hummm. I do not recall a lot about Ovid, but that does sound like an interesting book.

I haven't read much of him either. I only know that he wrote the story about Apollo and Daphne, adding cupid to the story. Apollo was struck by cupid's arrow after he insulted his bow. Apparently Ovid like to make fun of the gods and show them as prone to the same foibles that human's had, or so I've read in the odd time I've looked it up.

Every Greek and Roman myth showed their gods as fallible.

Yeah, but apparently Ovid was a little more blatant about it. I don't really know. I have never really paid much attention to the Greek and Roman playwrites, beyond a couple reditions of The Iliad. I just know -vicariously mind you- that the story of Apollo and Daphne doens't normally feature Cupid. That was Ovid's doing.

Not so much fallible I think, as being laughable at the same time. He would turn them into fools. Not being exactly respectful in his treatment of the deities, he likely pissed a lot of people off. Most of academia it would seem.

I would read stories of the myths, but not the actual plays or ancient poems.

Socrates ticked off a lot of people of his time, too.

Not to familiar with the philsophers, though with what little I did read, I wasn't terribly impressed with Plato either. I know more about more current philosophical theories but still not that much.

I have not actually read much philosophy.

I have studied ancient history, though.

Ah. Yeah, I'm not big on history, though I've taken a couple Ancient religion courses, Greece and Egypt, which covered some stuff given how religion featured in daily life. Some of my favourite things to read are just plain myth books, and they don't need to be fancy. The Illustrated Guide to Myths is one that I like because it covers many cultures and is sorted by type, such as creations myths, gods and animals, world ending myths, etc. The info they give is sparce, only a page or two on any particular myth unless it's really big, but so far it seems to be accurate.

I've also picked up a books on stories from Africa that I'm reading on occasions. The Woman Who Married a Lion it's called, by Alexander McAll Smith.

*Gets dragged in by Quiet*

I think this is my first post in this sub-forum....

Anyway, on the subject of philosophy, I'll admit to having a bit of a chip on my shoulder to the whole field. Philosophers just seem so self-aggrandizing (going all the way back to Plato's Philosopher-Kings) the way they make their work so ridiculously difficult to read and comprehend, when the ideas themselves aren't actually that complicated. It's just so elitist.

As for mythology, it's all just so... strange. The stories are full of literal Deus ex Machinae, but, it is a different form of story-telling, so I've never held that against it. They just don't function on the level most "stories" do today, which is largely due to the mutable nature of the myths. Not to mention, you're talking about a cultural tradition reinterpreted hundreds and thousands of times over its lifetime, not a single crafted narrative. Still, really weird plot devices in most myths.

And, as for book recommendations, I've literally never been able to sell someone on Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen (despite raving about it to everyone I ever talk to). It is the most beautiful, moving, majestic piece of literature I've ever encountered, all the more so for being a fantasy series. I cannot possibly recommend it highly enough, though I imagine the length (ten books, roughly 1k pages a piece, half as much again in spin-off books) is off-putting to a lot of people. Never stopped me, though, I've re-read the whole things four times now.

How big would that be compared to Wheel of Time? Never read Jordan but I know he was popular, and that the series had a mass amount of novels. Peirs Anthony's Xanth books too.

I think that's part of why I like some myths and folklore, the strangeness of it compared to typical stories. When supernatural critters are involved, along with beings of supernatural power and might, it's interesting to see how it get's worked around. Things like the Ocean being salty because of a perpetually grinding salt mill (Finnish myth of Vainamoinen) are intriguing to me.