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I love books. I love to dive into stories with recondite characters, complex story arcs, and fascinating settings. I love getting to know the characters, getting to hate them, to love them, and to feel with them. Seeing how characters struggle, fail, succeed, rise above their potential, and change. I love being surprised by unexpected turns and twists, being outwitted by smart and clever story telling, being left out in the dark, unable to see what is really going on until the end, when the pieces finally start to fall in place. I love to experience the atmosphere of a situation, smell the grass underneath the characters feet, to undergo their stress and suspense. And I love to explore strange new worlds, to be taken back in time or to surrealistic settings. To visualize sunsets and eclipses. Rain showers and snow falls… And I love waking up after a book and recognizing myself. The world we live in. Finally, I love language. The art of composing words into sentences that paint the beauty of the content…

I guess you can see where this is heading. The more complex a story is, the more realistic a character, and the more versatile the setting, the better I like a story. I hate stereotype writing making it predictable what’s gonna happen next. And I hate plain black and white characters. There are plenty of books out there. I am especially fond of fantasy writing, but just as much high quality literature exists in other genres. The posts assigned to this topic are literature reviews and reading experiences that I gathered. Who knows, maybe it can help you pick your next read.

Oh, and let me give one final remark: if you can, read literature in the original language! The amount of information and beauty that is on average lost in a translation is significant.