>I thought the movies were a little cheesy, and didn't really
>deserve the Oscar hype. Not that I'm totally gaga over the
>books, I'm just that ambivalent towards the films.

It probably doesn't hurt that the bar for fantasy movies is set so low by years of horrible fantasy movies.

Still, I find that in book form, Tolkein has a lot to say about things I don't find very interesting and very little to say about things that could potentially be interesting. For example, there's considerably more text about the mating habits of hobbits than the battle of Helm's Deep. I think the movie does a better job of reversing that ratio.

>I dunno. They get progressively weirder. King takes the easy
>way out and uses some techniques that let him have happen
>pretty much whatever he wants to have happen. It's like Q in
>the ST:TNG series. The character exists just so the writers
>can create all manner of bizarre story lines.

I never got into Star Trek in any form. . . just never interested me very much. I assume that some inherent survival instinct declared that tacking that on to everything else would increment my geekery score to the point of being unable to breed.

>>I have a love-hate relationship with Moorcock.
>
>I read them in high school, which is to say 15 years ago, so
>I'm hard-pressed to remember much about them. I know I
>enjoyed them at the time.

An awful lot of the stories are of the form "Elric is wandering around, happens across some sort of problem, and solves it by summoning forth one of the many Gods that serve him for some reason. You've never heard of this particular God before in the books, and you never will again."

Or to put it in a different context, a lot of the stories are of the "Monster of the Week" genre, not unlike non-main-plot-arc episodes of the X Files.

All that being said, it doesn't get much better anywhere than the Elric stories I really like -- it just feels like there's a lot of bland filler.

>Donaldson's "Thomas Covenant" books.

I managed to finish the first one of these, but just couldn't make it farther -- I find the protagonist alternatingly bland and extremely unlikeable, and not in a good way.

>Le Guin's "Earthsea" books. (These are really short.)

Never read these, but her "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (I may be butchering the name slightly) is one of my favorite short stories. I probably should check those out.

>Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" books. (I started reading these
>last year and got bogged down in the middle of the 1st book.
>Also, they're less "fantasy" and more "historical fiction".)

I did enjoy Cryptonomicon, but I wasn't sure I wanted to read more about some of the same characters. I'll probably read these someday, but I'm always a little wary of Stephenson (though I mostly like his works) because his books have a tendency to abruptly run out of pages without having reached an ending.

>Friedman's "Coldfire Trilogy". (Someone on Dio's recommended
>these.)

I read the first two books a few years ago and liked them; somehow never picked up a copy of the third. They're actually pretty good and there's a sort of anti-hero character that I enjoyed.

They occupy that strange territory between sci-fi and fantasy, though. Strange alien life-forms that approximate magic or something along those lines.