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I've recently finished reading a couple of books which I've found through rather different methods than I'm used to and thoroughly enjoyed. My normal method is "oooh... I know that author, I've read their stuff before", "recommendation from real life friend", "That's been made into a movie - the book will surely be better", "amazon (or similar) says it's similar and it has good reviews" and similar.

It's not often I find recommendations on blogs, but that's what happened with the first - Troll was a story I saw recommended on The New Gay (as blogged here).

Necromancer's Gambit was the only book in the Sci Fi/Fantasy section at Borders which made me want to look at it. I put it back as it was a little more than I wanted to spend on a complete unknown. Then noticed the posters advertising the author coming to do a signing later that day (Local author 8-). I returned and brought the book complete with signature.

So I'm now reading The Eyre Affair and probably introducing myself to Raymond Fiest (recommended by A. J. Dalton of Necromancer's Gambit fame) by cracking open Faerie Tale...

I have done Reviews of these over at LibraryThing and included them below for completeness. Yes, I am crap at reviews...

Alex
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Troll
This was a really odd book. The style of multiple narrators including excerpts from "other works" is not new (Dracula?) but it's unusual enough to make it interesting to read. Each section is also extremely short making it easy to slip into "one more chapter" mode and finish the book extremely quickly. By utilising this device to represent the main character's research into Trolls, Sinisalo ensures that we, as readers, are about as aware as the characters about the truth of Trolls in their world.

I really enjoyed this book.

Note for UK Readers - This is released as Not Before Sundown in the UK.

Necromancer's Gambit
This first novel (first published, first in a trilogy) is thoroughly enjoyable. It is packed full of humourous exchanges and situations without compromising the suspense and action. The first half of the book sets up characters and beliefs before Dalton ramps up the action and challenges the characters bringing together unlikely alliances and turning the characters' worlds on their heads.

As we went through this book I had multiple ideas of where it was going to end and where the next books would be going. Each of them was shattered in turn so, I'm looking forward to books two and three - if only to see how on earth Dalton can top the near destruction of reality.

The only small thing which leads me to think it should be slightly less than I've given it is the number of typos in there. Staggering numbers of spelling mistakes and missing spaces kept leaping off the page. But that is a personal thing.