Brain Assassin

It really is, I promise. Yeah, I’ve been away for some time but I had to spend some days with my par­ents, cel­e­brat­ing my grandma’s 90th birth­day. Any­way, long time no post. And so I asked myself what would pos­si­bly be worth some com­plain­ing? At first, I didn’t come up with some­thing inter­est­ing but then, all of a sud­den, a recent expe­ri­ence just invaded my cur­rent train of thought: Buy­ing a book. I like to read and read a lot, lit­er­ally scores of books a year. I pre­fer Fan­tasy and Sci-​​Fi because that’s where there are no bound­aries. The only limit is imposed by the author of the respec­tive book and that’s why any author in these gen­res can let his imag­i­na­tion loose.

Unfor­tu­nately, I’m a bit picky. You know, been there, read that. I’d like to read some­thing new and I seri­ously dis­like – hate would be to strong an emo­tion for fic­ti­tious things, wouldn’t it? – read­ing the nth install­ment of the same old plot cre­ated by Tolkien, for instance. I don’t like the clas­sic good vs. evil sto­ries either and I can’t, for the life of me, fig­ure out why so much of the epic fantasy/​sci-​​fi stuff has to be so homo­ge­neous. Thus, I can’t just walk into the next book store, take a look around and buy a bunch of books. If it only were so easy.

I reg­u­larly scout the local book­store for new mind food but that’s all there is to it. I don’t buy thin books and I sel­dom buy sin­gle nov­els. I like epics and that almost always involves three or more vol­umes. Any­way, I gather some intel, take some pho­tographs and then it’s up to my usu­ally reli­able source of infor­ma­tion, the inter­net, to help me make my deci­sion. I check out sffworld.com and the forum for reviews and some addi­tional thoughts. I like to see some fel­low read­ers to actu­ally rec­om­mend or damn the book in ques­tion. It’s not that I don’t take chances. Some­times I for­get all about these “rules of buy­ing” and just grab a book that looks inter­est­ing to me. The odds are fifty-​​fifty and that’s the usual result of pick­ing books with­out fur­ther investigation.

I’ve tor­tured myself over the past few weeks because I’m run­ning out of stuff. I needed some new input and I had to look really hard to come up with some books. First off, I was able to grab a copy of The Fate of the Fallen, Vol­ume One of The Song of the Tears – Ian Irvine’s con­tin­u­a­tion of the Three Worlds Cycle. Arguably one of the best series in the whole fan­tasy genre. Next I chose Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover to accom­pany the rest of my sci-​​fi nov­els. Finally, my Ama­zon order was con­cluded by R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Noth­ing series. I don’t know much about this one but I hope it’ll end in a pleas­ant sur­prise. For now, I’m already look­ing for­ward to hav­ing these books in my pos­ses­sion