Ain't gonna lie, my reading tastes aren't that deep. I can and have before read things considered "deep" by others. But I'm older now and I don't have a lot of spare time.

So, I've had many writers die (Robert Asprin, Zelazny, etc.) and had to move on. Right now i'm enjoying authors like Terry Pratchett (who has, unfortuantely, passed on as well) and of course Spider Robinson, but I'm still reading folks like Jim Butcher, Larry Correia, Kevin Hearne, Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, A. Lee Martinez, Carl Hiasen, Simon R. Green and others.

Problem is, I've caught them all up.

So, I'm on the eternal quest to find writers I enjoy and get into their books. I used to enjoy books in the Xanth series, but they became a bit too juvenile for me.

So, as a break from the unrelenting and depressing Political season, I've been searching out new authors. Not having a great deal of success.

As well, I'm not reading a lot of comics anymore. DC gutted everything yet again and I'm just not reading as much anymore, which is depressing since I love it.

Of my many thousands of books, both novels and comics, I've become...well, meh.

I know there are writers out there that I would love to read, but finding them is the problem. Amazon is so specific that you have to hit the nail on the head, and I don't get to browse at the bookstore, and frankly, if I did it would suck because all we have anymore is a fucking Barnes and Noble. Their selection sucks.

Bummed about it.

I know they are out there. Its' finding them that's the problem.

I'm happy to help as much as I can, Rick. I actually started typing up a recommendation for Peter Allen David's Star Trek: New Frontier prose novels, before I remembered that ST is just not your thing (but you might consider mentioning that series to Carol, if she hasn't read it already.)

Now, having said that, there's a lot more to PAD's prose career than just ST:NF, even though I confess have read very little of his prose outside that, because I haven't yet caught up on all of his ST:NF books to date (there've been more than 20 published to date!)

Off the top of my head:

X-MEN: GIFTED - Basically a prose retelling of the early installments of the Joss Whedon/John Cassaday run on the X-Men comics, but I think PAD's version blows the original out of the water, and there's enough plot tweaking to make it stand entirely on its own.

TIGERHEART - PAD's whimsical take on the Peter Pan mythos. I couldn't get into this one, but that was a few years ago now, and I will probably give it a second chance soon.

SIR APROPOS OF NOTHING - PAD's satirical take on the King Arthur/Knights of the Round Table mythos. IIRC, the first installment came out 20, maybe even 25, years ago, and he still does the occasional new installment, so I'd say, go for it.

HOWLING MAD - The Holy Grail (see what I did there) of PAD's prose novels, a wholly original tale of a wolf bitten by a werewolf who...no, I can't say any more, except I've never heard a bad word said about it. It's also one of his earliest prose novels, perhaps even the first, I'm not quite sure. But omeday, I'll find a copy. Hope you have better luck than I have.

More prose and/or comics author recommendations as they occur to me.

Rick, have you tried Googling "If you like..."?
I did it for Terry Pratchett

Fanny, I actually have read some of PAD's prose. Psiman, I think it was. There was a cartoon duck that went "quackers"if I remember correctly. But I'll look them up.

LT, I actually hadn't done that for google. Amazon throws some out though.

Do you have a particular genre? Or are you looking to try something you wouldn't normally read?

I remember you liked Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (a favourite of mine too) but can't at the moment think of anything comparable to recommend.

One author that favourably surprised me is R.S. Belcher. He's written a few supernatural books, one about long-haul truckers who fight evil beings (The Brotherhood of the Wheel), one dark urban fantasy (Nightwise) and two supernatural westerns (Six Gun Tarot and The Shotgun Arcana). The last two really captivated me and I've never been a fan of westerns.

If you have a Kindle, you can download samples of books for free, which is a great boon and money saver.

Librarians are also very good at recommending books based on what you've enjoyed before.

Of late, I've been picking up Sci-fi masterworks books. They are fairly short and often short stories. So, I'm able to get a pretty quick look at the author to see if I want to pick up more. There's always plenty of gaps to fill in my reading.

I get them at the library, so it's free and I can request more. The other plus point in a town with no book shops is that I can also pick out a random book to read at the same time. I give them 50 pages, to see if I'll read on. It's another good, and free, way to find things I wouldn't normally get.

Like Rick, I find Amazon an utter pain to have a good old browse through(I'm much the same about comics too). I've a couple of second hand book stores a drive away, so I browse through those when I get the chance, mostly picking up things by genre.

I will recommend that you read some H.P Lovecraft and Robert E Howard stories (Conan basically). Lovecraft's stories are short and mysterious so I think you will like them. It will also help you understand Internet memes, as Cthulhu is part of pop culture now. I little warning that Lovecraft was a man of his time so there are aspects that are not politically correct.

Howard's works are kind of the opposite in that regard. I fell in love with the barbarian archetype after I read the novelization of the movie (my father has it). The thesis seems to keep striving even when things seem hopeless, so there are happy endings. He weaves together a pseudo-history that feels like it could actually have happened.

I'll second Emily's recommendation of Robert E. Howard. He was a truly underrated craftsman, with both passion in his convictions and a solid command of writing technique.

Good ideas all. Thanks everyone. Cramer, I'm just looking. My tastes do run to scifi/modern fantasy, mysteries, novels like the stuff from James Lee Burke and JA Jance's JP Beaumont. And I still dig my how to books. I'd love some good histories about some of the stuff mentioned in some Clive Cussler works. Some good geography stuff as well.

But honestly, my reading time is so limited I tend to cull down to the bedrock.

I keep trying new authors like J. F. Lewis, Stephen Blackmoore and John Levitt, but they aren't sticking with me.

I don't see much humor stuff anymore like Asprin's Phule and Skeeve, or maybe I'm just missing it.

Also, lots of skull-cleaving.

Gotta have plenty o'that.

Rick, I don't know if you've ever read any Stephen King, but he's really a tremendous writer. His books are much better than the movie or TV adaptations. They have humorous moments, but if humor is required as a prime ingredient, they won't be exactly what you're looking for. If you're open to horror with really memorable characters, give him a try and start with Salem's Lot!

Rick, check out Nick Harkaway. I've read two of his novels--The Gone-Away World, and I just finished Angelmaker. Humor, intrigue, some skull-cleaving.

I sold my hardback, first edition copy of Angelmaker to the used book shop last week for maybe a dollar. I should have sent it to you.

I've been a fan of Steven Brust since the 80s.

Jonathan Carroll has a similar vibe to Neil Gaiman (in fact, I discovered him through a Neil recommendation in a Sandman lettercolumn.)

I recently really liked Bradford Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. It's all I've read by him so far, but he's got quite a bit of stuff out.

And, as with Emily on REH, I concur with Lardy on Stephen King. He has a gift for characterization, which always feels effortless, unforced, and warm, and with each character having a distinctive voice. And Salem's Lot is the same King novel I'd recommend as a primer of all that is best about his writing.

I have liked one series lately. John Zakour i think it is. He does the Zachary Nixon Johnson series. Redheads, brunettes, blonds, blues....all in a fast paced media nuts society a hundred years or so in the future. He's got a holographic computer in his head named Harv that is gay, and a niece that could blow up the world with her mind but runs his office.

It's lightweight fun, though

I had forgotten about Christopher Moore. He writes some seriously twisted humor. His wrap ups are a little lacking, but the getting there is hella funny.

Random stuff;

David Brin's Startide Rising and The Uplift War are great. His other stuff can get a bit eh, IMO. He's got some great aliens, in a vast society, with plucky humans (and their few allies) very much the underdogs, upsetting applecarts and generally annoying the elder aliens in the room.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is hilarious and fun. Gonzo, but not totally over-the-top (except when it is!), and which some really funky science and some incredibly memorable characters. Later works of his get a little too caught up in his themes, IMO, although The Diamond Age is also pretty good.

If you liked Zelazny (who's my favorite writer), then you might also like a lot of Walter Jon Williams stuff. I discovered him with Hard Wired, and moved on to Angel Station, Voice of the Whirlwind, Metropolitan, Aristoi, Knight Moves, Implied Spaces, This Is Not a Game, etc. He's from the southwest (Arizona, IIRC, maybe New Mexico?) and some of his earlier work is informed by the culture around him, where a lot of people are nostalgic for jobs and roles (like cowboy) that don't necessarily exist any longer. He sort of takes that into some of his more cyberpunk-y tales (like in Hard Wired) or even harder science-fiction stories (like in Angel Station) by having some of the characters be smugglers facing their jobs losing relevance as whatever they were transporting becomes legalized or whatever, and kind of seeing their way of life disappear, and having to re-invent themselves. It's neat to see kind of timeless real world themes woven into such futuristic 'fantasy' stories. With every 'advance' into the future, there are people (and entire cultures) getting left behind, and he sort of touches on that in his stories.

Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East is a bit more fantasy than sci-fi, in places, but it's a little bit of both, and, IMO, absolutely the best of his books. He's probably more famous for his 'Books of Swords' series, but I kind of regard that as the necessary series to pay for the better standalones.

Alaister Reynolds has some great stuff, in his Revelation Space series. Later standalone books like House of Suns can get pretty cosmic, dealing with humans so far in the future that every member of certain 'Houses' has their own ship, and explores the universe, only meeting every couple of thousand years to swap stories and whatever. But the Revelation Space series is a bit more 'down-to-Earth,' and deals with colonies on Mars, etc. There's a race introduced called 'hyperpigs' that are a freak mutation of ordinary human pigs that were genetically engineered (to be more human-compatible) as a source of spare organs for an increasingly-long-lived human population in need of 'parts,' who developed sapience and were, grudgingly, accepted as 'people' and no longer a source of replacement organs, which end up being an amazing look at a new 'people' in a future universe that doesn't rely so much on aliens as other settings.

Charles Sheffields 'The Mind Pool' is a fun standalone, with some great aliens and some cool technology. I'm a sucker for imaginative alien races, and the Tinker Composite from this book (a swarm hive-mind) are amazingly cool.

Greg Egan has several great books, all standalones, with Diaspora, Quarantine, Permutation City and Distress being my favorites.

Almost everything by Peter Hamilton is a good read, from lighter fare like the Mindstar Rising trilogy (much more down to earth than my usual fare, but still great) to deeper high-concept stuff like the Night's Dawn trilogy. While I really enjoyed all of them, his two standalone's, Great North Road and Fallen Dragon have the joy of not being spread out over three books and telling neat done-in-one stories.

Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. have tons and tons of books, some great, some very much not great. Timothy Zahn's Dark Force Rising/Heir to the Empire/Last Command trilogy is perhaps the best Star Wars fiction I've read, and has the distinction of being the only non-Lucas content that's found it's way into official media (thanks to some of the characters and elements now being part of the Clone Wars cartoon).

Those are some good recommendations, folks. Some I've tried before and not really been interested in, but some others are completely new to me.

I mostly read non-fiction.

But I recommend "Ravensbrück : life and death in Hitler's concentration camp for women" by Sarah Helm. I also read her first book "A Life in Secrets:The story of Vera Atkins and the lost agents of the SOE" But I did not like it as well.