[j. d. worthington]

If you've not read the other Elric books, there's another posting for the correct reading order of the stories within the series. And if you're talking Moorcock in general -- ooof! Depends on what you're looking for. If for dark and brooding, the Erekose, Corum, and Hawkmoon books in straightforward fantasy; The Ice Schooner, The Black Corridor, The Shores of Death, Dying for Tomorrow (Moorcock's Book of Martyrs; story collection), Behold the Man, Breakfast in the Ruins.... Ironic comedy: The Cornelius Quartet (The Final Programme, A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassin, The Condition of Muzak), The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century, etc.; for a wide variety within a series, there's the von Bek books, beginning with the fantasy of The War Hound and the World's Pain, on through such things as London Bone (story collection) and Lunching with the Antichrist (story collection). For outright comedy, there's the 5 books of The Dancers at the End of Time. For contemporary novels with a tinge of "magic realism", Mother London, King of the City, the Pyat novels (Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands, The Vengeance of Rome -- though these can be a tough read; Pyat is not a likable character, he makes Elric at his nastiest look like a sweetie, seldom outright violent, but what a can of worms for a mind!!! But they are beautifully written).....

I once set out my own preferred order for his books, but that tends to vary with each reader. The Hawkmoon books -- at least the final three -- tend to thematically tie everything together with the end of the Eternal Champion cycle, but reading them before you've read some of the others really doesn't matter; in Moorcock's "multiverse" (I use the quotation marks in deference to Chris) there's an element of chaos and randomness, so that things don't necessarily happen in the ordered pattern we might perceive -- that's part of the philosophical underpinnings to his work. If you'd like a list of his fiction, pm me, and I'll send you such; the man's prolific, so if you get really interested, you've got a lot of reading ahead. Otherwise, just pick and sample.

Ones to avoid unless you're a true Moorcock nut: Sojan, Elric at the End of Time (except for the two Elric short stories), The Golden Barge (though I must admit to a strong fondness for this; it was Moorcock's first -- written -- novel), perhaps the Michael Kane books, as they're pastiche ERB, though more Moorcockian as they go on, becoming infused with his more serious concerns (and they're very short reads).