ddickinson: I enjoy a lot of the older books, especially around the era of HG Wells and up to the mid 20th century. I'm a big fan of fantasy and Sci-Fi, but I will give most books a chance, except for a few, such as romance novels or all these zombie books we are getting now. I also try to avoid books that are too Americanised (no offence to the lovely American here, but sometimes I get tired of the whole American being the center of the world and always saving the day while insulting every other nation).
I'm not sure I really have any firm favourites, I love a lot of the classics by some wonderful authors, like Wells, Dickens, Tolkien, Orwell, etc. But I enjoy a lot of modern authors as well. I am also a sucker for Warhammer 40K books, even though they are not that well written for the most part. The whole future world crossed with World War One and Two has always appealed to me. I probably read more Sci-Fi, philosophy, poetry, and history stuff recently, but when I was growing up it was a lot more fantasy novels. A lot of what I read is historical stuff, as that is my number one passion.
Do you have any firm favourites?
Edit: Finally I can post. Damn those GOG bears! :-)
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moonshineshadow: I have some favourites. For fantasy there are the books of Brandon Sanderson. I really like them since they all have so many good ideas in them and are really different from each other. Not that normal kind of fantasy setting you often have in books.
And also "The Raven" series written by James Barcley. I really like the characters there and the story itself.
Of course there are many other fantasy authors with great books (Brent Weeks, Tad Williams, Trudi Canavan, Anne Bishop, Peter Brett) but those mentioned above are my favourites. Beside from the obvious fantasy classic Tolkien ;-)
For historical novels I really like the books of Ken Follett and Rebecca Gablé (not sure if the latter one has books translated into other languages, she is a german author)
I'm currently reading the Magician's Apprentice. (well, currently is a bit of a stretch... i'm bumbling through it with the speed of a slow snail because i keep getting distracted with other things. *sigh*)