Books & Blogs Friday: My New Favorite, Robin Hobb

So I have a new favorite fantasy author - her name is Robin Hobb. In order to explain why I think she is so awesome, though, you should probably know a little bit about the way I read and the type of books I prefer.

I love loooong books. 500 pages or so is a minimum for something I feel like I could really get into. Bonus points if it's part of a series. I read so quickly (I have read over 1000 pages in a day before - once it was Stephen King's It, probably one of my top 5 books ever, and once it was Swan Song by Robert McCammon - each of them is about 1100 pages or so) that in order to feel that I have any time to immerse myself in the universe of the story at all, it needs to be quite lengthy.

This is a huge reason why I adore Stephen King, and many of my other favorite authors - Sara Douglass, Robert Jordan, Melanie Rawn - also write lots of really long novels (King doesn't do many series, but I forgive him because he is fantastic). I have been getting frustrated with Sara Douglass lately because the first two books in each of her series tend to be very good, and then the last book or two tend to blow goats. Nothing like getting all invested and then having the story become practically unreadable on you.

I've also been angry with Melanie Rawn for awhile because she started this awesome series called The Mageborn Traitors, and then only wrote the first two books in the trilogy (and it is VERY OBVIOUS at the end of the second book that another is required). Yes, yes, she suffered a meltdown from clinical depression while writing the second book in the series, and is afraid that if she writes the third that she'll go back to that place. I understand I'm supposed to be sympathetic. But all I can think is WRITE THE BOOK, DAMMIT!

So the beautiful thing about Robin Hobb is that she has 4 complete trilogies and another trilogy with the first two written. All of which are long enough to fit in my minimum page length for a novel. Hooray! Then I found out yesterday that she has also written ten novels under a pseudonym, Megan Lindholm. Double yay!

I do not like reading nonfiction of any kind, or most "literary" fiction. So anything recommended by Oprah's book club is probably not up my alley. These days, I prefer fantasy and science fiction exclusively. I used to force myself to read literary fiction, and since I have a BA and an MA in creative writing, I can appreciate it on a technical level, but I realized at some point, the time I have to do the things that I want to do is so limited that I shouldn't feel bad about saying no.

C on the other hand, is more on the sci fi side of things, and he also prefers shorter books (a lot shorter, maybe half the length that I like) and will even read short stories, which I have ZERO interest in at all. I have discovered that our friend Logan has identical taste in books to me (previously, the only such person I've located is Dalyn) and he has a lot of books that I've never read, which is awesome. He also has, not identical, but very compatible TV taste as me, which is another post entirely :-)