help

[magician2magici]

hello

how are you all ?
well ,
tomorrow we'll have a very big book afair at egypt , so i need your urgent help please here..

i have read the lotr , harry potter , and chronicles of narnia , but that's all i have read till now..

i need you all to tell me what is the best books , series , triologies to search for them at the afair tomorrow and buy them ..

waiting for your recommendations..

salam.
el-saher>>

[Anarchon]

Repeating myself, I'll say G. R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.

But also (very different titles):

The Lies of Lock Lamora by Scott Linch

Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie,

The Chronicles of Lucifer Jones by Mike Resnick

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

The Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb


and others....

Classics:
Titus Groan (Gormenghast) by Mervyn Peake
Dune by Frank Herbert
Nine Princes in Amber (Amber chronicles) by Roger Zelazny

And others...

[Pravuil]

G.R.R.M is great, but so to is Steven Eriksons books. It all depends on what you are looking for in a book and what you deem as quality, magician. So, please, I can clearly approximate you enjoy fantasy...but what else are you interested in? There are some pretty interesting hybrid fantasy novels on today's market.

[magician2magici]

anarchon :
thanks alot , you were so helpful..

i've heard of a name here so much , tad williams , is he good ?

pravuil :
thanks too for sharing your thoughts..
well.. for me , i like adventures , adore so much the authers who pay attention to human feelings and social situations , i guess i like high fantasy , sword and sorcery fantasy and contemporary fantasy ..

what can you provide me in these things ?
also i insist on good plot ofcourse ,

salam to both of you..
el-saher >>

[ctg]

Originally Posted by magician2magici

attention to human feelings and social situations , i guess i like high fantasy , sword and sorcery fantasy and contemporary fantasy ..

You should try to look into TSR selection of the novels, or these days Wizards of the Coast. Here are the few of the best and most well known from those series.

Dragonlance: Chronicles - by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
1984 Dragons of autumn twilight
1985 Dragons of winter night
1988 Dragons of spring dawning

Dragonlance: Legends - by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
1986 Time of the twins
1986 War of the twins
1986 Test of the twins

Forgotten Realms
1988 Spellfire - Ed Greenwood
1993 Realms of valor - James Lowder (ed)
1995 Realms of Infamy - James Lowder (ed)
1995 Once Around the Realms - Brian Thomsen
1995 Realms of Magic - Brian Thomsen (ed)
1996 Realms of the Underdark - J. Robert King (ed)
1997 Realms of the Arcane - Brian Thomsen / J. Robert King (eds)
1998 Realms of Mystery - Philip Athans (ed)
1998 Evermeet: Island of Elves - Elaine Cunningham
1998 The Shadow Stone - Richard Baker
1999 The Dream Spheres - Elaine Cunningham

Forgotten Realms: Dark Elf - by R.A. Salvatore (very good series, one of my favourites)
1990 Homeland
1990 Exile
1991 Sojourn

Forgotten Realms: Elminster - by Ed Greenwood
1994 Elminster, the Making of a Mage
1997 Elminster in Myth Drannor
1998 The Temptation of Elminster

Forgotten Realms: Icewind Dale - by R A Salvatore
1988 The Crystal shard
1989 Streams of silver
1990 Halfling's gem

Forgotten Realms: Paths of Darkness - by R A Salvatore
1998 The Silent Blade
1999 The Spine of the World
2000 Servant of the Shard

The list can go on and on, and there is no point on continuing it. You find your own list and your own favourite authors, but I do hope that you have a good hunt and gather and get your own selection of good books that last until another book fair comes into the town.

How is it in Egypt, do you get enough of Western fantasy books there?

[chopper]

Originally Posted by magician2magici

anarchon :
i've heard of a name here so much , tad williams , is he good ?

ey up chap

tad's not bad. "war of the flowers" is a very good standalone novel, if you want to try his writing style; after that i'd advise the much longer "memory sorrow & thorn" trilogy that starts with "the dragonbone chair".

"otherland" is interesting, but not absolutely neccessary.

one of my personal favorites is "The Barbed Coil" by J.V Jones.

good luck

s

[magician2magici]

ctg :
hi ..sorry for this delay , i was busy at the fair..
thanks ofcourse for these selections , but unfortunately i've not found any of them , ive foung g.martin but not the previosely mentioned novel , this one carries the name : a feast for crows..

i guess this can tell you about how far your writings away from the eyes of people here , and there is a good reason ofcourse for this , for example the last novel of wroling has been priced here to be 250 egyptian pond , if you can imagine you pay 250 dollars or your country currency to get one novel in the same situation you can by at least five of the best novels in your native language , i guess that's why there is no fantasy market around here ..
sad situation , to be honest with you i want to change it , this year at book fair lotr has two translations from two different publish houses at egypt , this is a good measure ofcourse , without looking to the date differencce between the release of the original ones and the arrival of the translated ones here , i feel good towards it ..

any way this is the reality , hopefully i didn't forget anything..

hi chopper,
thank you for your suggestion , but too i couldn't find it too

any way i have bought too a big novel named : the return of merlin by deepak chopra
i hope it's good one ,
also i have giant novel for tad williams but written in deutch so i couldn't read its name , but is he a german auther ? is there any translation of his works ?

thank you all..
salam..
el-saher >>

[Lith]

I don't think Tad Williams is German. You probably found a German translation.

Will Amazon ship to Egypt? Or is there an Egyptian version of Amazon or similar? I imagine even at their prices (when you include shipping), you'd still come out ahead of what you mention, and with a better selection.

The really sad part is you can find a lot of fantasy, at least in my corner of the country, for dirt cheap on the used market. Not usually the best in the field, but the pulp stuff is easy to come by.

You might also look into e-books. A greater number of them are coming out every year, as well as being able to find the old stuff on Project Gutenberg for free. If you can stand to stare at a screen, that is.

[magician2magici]

or maybe print some pages every day to read them lith
yep , i'm thinking about amazon , but their procedures are really complicated and takes lot of time and money ofcourse..

i envy you of this second hand market , here at the fair i've searched alot with no clue , i hope i can find little ater all..

thanks for sharing lith..
salam..
el-saher>>

[chopper]

hello there m2m, i know this is an old threqd but beqr with me as theres a point...

im in morocco at the moment, celebrating my sisters wedding, but ive found time to heqd out on my own and do some shopping. if marrakesh is anything to go by you really cant get much "foreign" (ie english language or translated_from_english) literature here on the african continent. of course south africa is probably a different kettle of fish, but theres one recommended bookshop in the guides to marrakesh for anybody wanting non-arabic literature: ive had a browse, and aside from plenty of dan brown and john grisham, plus a few other staples of airport bookshops (plus a french edition of Harry Potter), theres not a lot of meqt to chew on. i am legend (je suis une legende) was predominant for fairly obvious reasons, but otherwise there was only vol.3 of one of the Robin Hobb trilogies (again only in french so i cant even tell you which one it was).
so there we go, for all you guys who take our eqsy access to sff for grqnted, its a little different out this way.
qnd never miond the spelling mistakes; i'm on an arabic-style keyboard here and at the moment i cant even find the question mark, let alone deal comfortably with the different letter layout.

chopper

[quidscribis]

Ah, I was wondering at the q instead of a thing.

What you've described is pretty much what the bookstores here are like. The bookstores in Dubai and Singapore are much better than here by comparison, but still not with the selection of North American bookstores.

[chopper]

i still cant find the question mark, but i've gotten used to the swapped a and q. which means i'll still be spelling everything wrong when i get back home.

gah.

s

[magician2magici]

hi chopper
welcome to morroco

well , here is like there , that's so sad ofcourse

the reason for presece of so many french writings there is that people there speaks french so well , even better than arabic.. so the arrival of french books there is easy , but the non-french books hard to be found

i heard about a library here sells original books , i hope i can find fantasy there..

anyway i'm depending on e-books these days , lol

salam..
el-saher>>

[Daniel Hetberg]

Is there any chance online book sellers will ship to egypt at (somewhat) reasonable prices? Maybe if you order big bundles of books (teaming up with other people looking for english language books) you can distribute the shipping cost?


P.S.: Tad Williams is most definitely not german. Afaik all of his works have been translated (we're really good at that), but they were originally written in english.

[ctg]

Is there any chance online book sellers will ship to egypt at (somewhat) reasonable prices? Maybe if you order big bundles of books (teaming up with other people looking for english language books) you can distribute the shipping cost?

What do you think about opening a black-market trade route from Europe to Middle-East? Instead of them smuggling drugs and people to us, we use that same tool, and smuggle good books back to them.

You have to admit that two hundred fifty bucks, even when the USD is going down, is awful a lot for a book, yea? With few books sold to 'book' hungry customers, and we would be on our own.