After reading your character summary, couldn’t you easily imagine Hugh Laurie in the (screen) role? Not that it will ever be adapted of course…
I don’t know. Even Greg House is more sympathetic a character than Covenant. I mean, it’s REALLY hard to “hit” sympathy with him…you can go from contempt to exasperation to rage to intense antipathy without once managing to land square on the “Sympathy” target.
Don’t forget hung, too, as well, also.
Dude, both bad places to start. COM was before Pratchett had figured out what he was really going to do with Discworld. Mort was just a big pile of blah - some humor in there, of course, but overall nothing special.
Try “Witches Abroad” and then “Lords and Ladies”. If you don’t like those, well, you’re obviously dead inside.
-Joe, prefers witches to the watch, and screw all you haters!
Oh, ditto on this one too. But don’t read the reviews or even the book description at Amazon – you’ll be spoiled.
I tend to agree. I first read them when I was in high school (at that time, the second trilogy was just coming out), and loved them. I tried to re-read them a few years back, and couldn’t get through the first book. Not only is Covenant a complete asshat (as others have said), but I quickly got tired of Donaldson’s use of strange (if not made-up) adjectives. How many times can you use the word “roynish” in a book? 
I enjoy these, as well, though, having re-read them for the third time last year, they do suffer a bit from being formulaic (Eddings himself has admitted that he was following many of the standard tropes in the genre). If a location appears on the map at the beginning of the series, you can be guaranteed that the party will have to go there at some point. And (particularly in the Elenium / Tamuli series, which are a different series), you get long sections in which the “hero” characters (and there’s always a group of like a dozen of them) sit around and show off how smart they all are as they discuss how to defeat their enemies.
I always thought Donaldson’s other series, the one with the mirrors, was SO much more boring and long and boring and long and boring and…well, you get the idea.
Are you familiar with the sport of Clench Racing?
In fact, the influence ran in exactly the opposite direction. Guy Kay assisted Christopher Tolkien in preparing the *Silmarillion *for publication. However, your basic point, that his later books are more original than Fionavar, is perfectly correct.
My suggestion for a fantasy series is *Temeraire *by Naomi Novak. It is the story of an alternate Napoleonic war, where dragons can carry troops of men around to engage in aerial warfare. It is surprisingly good.
If you liked the political intrigue in Game of Thrones, I’d recommend The Empire Trilogy (Daughter of the Empire, Servant of the Empire and Mistress of the Empire) by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts. The first book is the best, but the other two don’t drop off much in quality.
I enjoyed those, too. Sort of Horatio Hornblower meets Pern. 
ROFL! Sounds perfect.
Well, two things. One the series is in no way even close to being done, as the OP specified. Next, the books have been getting darker and more dismal, not to mention very drawn out. Fans have been outraged and discouraged. But yes, the first few were great and the concept was original.
Yeah, I didn’t read the last one because it was just getting too sad. Definitely suggest the first couple, though.
I just want to point out that Mort was highly recommended(most recommended, actually) as a starting point on the Dope, which is where I got my info.
I think the runner-up was Small Gods.
I’m sure I’ll get back to Discworld for a 3rd attempt, but lets focus away from that for now.
Small Gods is good, but it is by far the darkest and nastiest of the Discworld books.
-Joe
Just an update on Hobb’s series. Her current project is a fourth trilogy (The Rain Wilds Chronicles) about the dragons from Liveship Traders, set in the same world. Two books are out, and she’s working on the third.
It’s certainly sharp, but I wouldn’t say dark and nasty. Deeply philosophical, and takes a few readings to catch all the brilliance, but I don’t see how it’s nasty. And it’s not the darkest by far.
Also: I love Mort, but my recommended starter books are Guards Guards! and Wyrd Sisters.
Gene Wolfe has a couple of completed fantasy/scifi series. The Book of the New Sun (four books), The Book of the Long Sun (also four books), and The Book of the Short Sun (three books) are all set in the same universe. There’s the Wizard Knight series of two books - more ‘standard’ sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and the Soldier of the Mist series of three books and counting.
The overall theme of these books seems to me to investigate aspects of the unreliable narrator and human interactions with the divine, culminating in the Soldier of the Mist series where the protagonist, Latro, is a mercenary in the army of Xerxes who suffers a head wound which afflicts him with retrograde and anterograde amnesia.
I would only slightly disagree, in that the really good ones are VERY VERY good, the good ones are still very good, not so good ones are still somewhat entertaining. The worst I personally found of them was “meh,” rather than awful.
Thomas Covenant drove me bugfuck. The rest of the stuff was interesting and I slogged through, I think, the first two before saying “oh, fuck you,” and moving on to other things.
They are often derided, but if you want “light” fantasy, I like the Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey. She does go overboard sometimes with the “magical animal companion” theme, but at its worst its still enjoyable popcorn reading. At its best, its wonderful.
The Black Jewels series by Anne Bishop is fascinating, although a bit difficult to get into. I read it on the recommendation of my best friend. I started the first book (the first three were published as The Black Jewels Trilogy, but there are more) four times, and read to 25, 50, 75, and 100 pages, respectively. There’s so many characters, so many themes, and so much “WTF?” going on that it took me until the fourth try to get far enough for things to start to make sense, and once they did, I devoured them all. The last one, Shalador’s Lady, I read in one sitting, and immediately opened it to start re-reading it.
The Sword of Aldones, for all that it was apparently nominated for a Hugo back in '63, is one that comes to mind as kinda crappy. MZB at least partially agreed, since she re-wrote it almost 20 years later as the considerably better Sharra’s Exile.
Meh or awful? I could at least compromise on awfully meh :p.