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Not particularly great ones, anyway.

I started it a few years ago and got halfway through it. I can't remember exactly what I disliked about it, but I really did. Either the prose was too much tell and not enough show, or else the main character felt like a Mary Sue.

To me, first-person present tense always comes across as teen wish fulfilment. Like they're narrating their daydream or fantasy.

I think it became a thing when Stephen King wrote in "On Writing" that adverbs are bad. Except he uses them himself too (apparently; it's been ages since I read anything by him).

And indicates that they never actually read the book, where he's called "the Creature" (you know, as in "create", the whole premise of the book being Man aping God's work?). And Kurtz from Heart of Darkness a bogeyman? An awful person, definitely, but the narrator spends half the book looking...

With these things, I always get the impression that they're based mostly on "Look how many literary books I've read!"

Or they were just wiping the slate clean.

I'm just checking them out on Kobo, and they're only EUR 2.99 each, or free with Kobo Plus. I'll give them a try.

A nap sounds pretty good.

I could have pressed the point - even at 17 I knew about Tolkien and the background to LotR - but I also knew how counterproductive it would be to piss off the person with so much influence on my final grade.

My English teacher (pre-university, final year) wouldn't give me credit for reading LotR, because "well, it's a children's book, isn't it?"

Also Elizabeth H. Boyer, although her books are almost impossible to get hold of now. In the 1980s she wrote a series of fantasy books called "The Isle of Skarpsey" or "The World of the Alfar" that take place essentially in Iron Age Iceland, with a parallel world of elves.

The Capetion succession wars of 14th century, as told in The Accursed Kings by Maurice Druon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Kings

If you get the chance, read Sometimes the Magic Works, which contains Terry Brooks's thoughts on writing and his perspective on writing and publishing The Sword of Shannara.

I was about to mention this. Shannara is the series that codified the tropes of what became the fantasy genre. Up to and including the notion of trilogies. People disparage Shannara, but they don't recognise that it's similarities to LotR are what created fantasy as a genre.

I read them, and I thought they were awful. And that was in the mid-1990s, when I was prepared to devour anything RJ wrote. The writing is nowhere near as vivid and vigorous as REH's, and to my mind RJ just didn't get the character or the world. For instance, there's a scene where a strange...

He has a collection of short stories as well, called "Engraved on the Eye (which includes "Where Virtue Lives"). They're quite diverse, but consistently excellent. "The Faithful Soldier, Prompted" and "Iron-Eyes and the Watered-Down World" are among my favourites.

I really wish I could recommend Saladin Ahmed's "Throne of the Crescent Moon" (and the prequel novella "Where Virtue Lives") as modern sword & sorcery with a non-Western approach. Excellent writing and storytelling. Unfortunately he's joined the growing list of authors who start series and...

Presumably he didn't intend to be a very hands-on kind of doctor. Edit: there's a "lay on hands" healing pun in there too, but I can't be bothered to work it out.

Yup, I still read Conan. At least the REH stories. I've tried reading some of the pastiches, but they feel flat by comparison. I've also recently been rereading Jirel of Joiry, Solomon Kane, Lankhmar. The modern equivalent of old-fashioned sword & sorcery seems to be grimdark, and I enjoy Joe...