Read: Legends, edited by Robert Silverberg

When I browse my buying history at the Amazon cartel website and go to the very first order, I see it was January 1999. I was working in Germany then, and it was my first commercial transaction on the internet. Amazon was still young, fresh and traded only books. It was easier, as well as cheaper, to get English books there; so I thought, to hell with security, I give my credit card number to this internet dealer.

A week or so later the book came, together with another one about Object Oriented Databases. The latter I read (no wonder, two weeks later I had my diploma examination), the former I put into the shelf. Just for know, for sure.
It got moved into new apartments thrice; but last year when looking for reading material for our holidays in Italy I at last put the 700+ pages hardcover into the baggage.

I did not regret it. I am not an experienced reader of the fantasy genre, but the mixture of styles in this book is superb. It took me a year to read them all, though, but that is only due to the book's heaviness (literally) and the fact that the stories are totally independent. Eleven stories, some by even to me very well-known authors (Steven King - never read anything of him before, Terry Pratchett - really one of my favorites, Robert Silverberg - himself, George R.R. Martin - and his Song of Ice and Fire) some I did not hear before. All have their own style, from quite classical medieval fantasy settings like Martin's, a genre mix with strong Western elements in King's short novel or the epic Science Fiction criminal plot of Silverberg. All eleven have in common that they all do without fantasy pathos, they have well-drawn heroines and heroes, earth-bound, or wherever bound to, characters and fantastic yet never absurd story lines.

I can recommend this book especially to fantasy beginners like myself. I have read much of Tolkien (which I very much enjoyed), but I underestimated the richness of the genre. Appetite for more has come.

P.S.: The content of my second Amazon order, a mere two weeks later, also still waits to be read. It's somewhat daunting for me: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter. But it's time will come.