Lord of Light is hard to describe without spoilers up to the last third of the book, so I won't even try. You have been warned: hic sunt ~~dracones~~ spoilers. Even adding this book to my "space monks" list is technically a spoiler.

Very Zelazny – I had hoped, after liking Lord of Light a lot, that something similar would work equally well. And it's somewhat similar, superficially. Egypt religion instead of Indian, but regardless, high-powered gods with their own agendas, all that stuff.

I wish I could have liked Nine Princes in Amber. It has a lot going for it: It is Fantasy, but very nonstandard, all the while playing with the default Fantasy tropes. It's unapologetically weird. I adored the weirdness. I could even have lived with the lame storytelling device of "protagonist loses memory, brings reader up to speed", if only …