Reading Tips from Hansi

I have been on a huge book buying spree lately, buying books way faster than I can read them and yet I am still always on the lookout for a good book. Pretty much all the books I have been getting lately have been either in the mythology or the fantasy style genres, with some exceptions (one example being a huge collection of Lovecraft's stories I just got which I guess falls more under the dark fantasy/horror category). Some of my latest purchases have been Moorcock's Elric Saga, The Poetic Edda, Jordan's Wheel of Time, and Howard's The Coming of Conan. And yet there are still many books which I am still interested in and will probably get pretty soon here, such as Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and Tad Williams' (who is actually from my hometown San Jose, CA) Shadowmarch series.

Since there are so many books in the Scifi-Fantasy section of the bookstore, sometimes its hard to know what is good and what is crap. So I try to get tips from various sources to help me decide what books I would enjoy, and one of the sources that I have a good deal of trust in is Hansi Kürsch, from Blind Guardian. Hansi uses the books he reads as lyrical inspiration for just about all his songs, and since I like his songs so much I figured I might probably like the books that inspired those songs. Some of his sources are more obvious ones that I have already read such as Lord of the Rings and other works by Tolkien, and others are ones I have never heard of. So for the purposes of this blog and for my reading enjoyment, I have used wikipedia to figure out all (or most all) of the literature that Hansi has used thus far as subject matter for his music, and here is the list:

The Bible

Tolkien's work - LOTR, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion

Stephen King - It, Dark Tower Series, The Talisman, The Tommyknockers

Michael Moorcock - Eternal Champion Series

Norse Mythology

Welsh Folklore

Frank Herbert - Dune

Peter Straub - Floating Dragon

Poul Anderson - The Mermaid's Children

The German Legend of Faust

L. Frank Baum - Wizard of Oz

J.M. Barrie - Peter Pan

Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland

T.H. White - The Once and Future King

C.S. Lewis - Chronicles of Narnia

Robert Howard - Corum Novels

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman - The Death Gate Cycle, Dragonlance

Homer- The Iliad, The Odyssey

Old German Folklore

Gottfried von Strassburg - Tristan and Isolde

Virgil - Aeneid

Walter Moer - A Wild Ride Through the Night

Tad Williams - Otherland

Robert Jordan - Wheel of Time