Lots of good recommendations, I’ll be taking a few notes for sure…
Here are my 2 cents worth for some of the series listed so far:
Lloyd Alexander Chronicles of Prydain
An excellent YA coming of age series, with some real emotional depth. Based on Welsh mythology I found the setting really interesting when I read it - quite different from what I was used to.
Terry Pratchett Discworld
A set of overlapping series and standalone books. Very light and funny (although the lightness can be a bit deceptive as there are always pretty heavy themes going on in the background). Personally I think there’s been a bit of a drop-off in enjoyment since about The Truth but that’s just me.
Fritz Lieber Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser
Rightly considered a classic of the genre but wildly uneven. Written over many decades there can be some quite bizarre shifts in tone if you read the stories in chronological order. I found the last volume to be the weakest. But the good installments are excellent. As others have pointed out Pratchett’s *Discworld *started as a parody of these stories.
China Mieville The Baz Lag books
Can’t remember if the series has an ‘official’ name. Very good and extremely ‘un-Tolkien’. Some interesting meditations on freedom and authority, perhaps the most ‘political’ fantasy I’ve encountered.
Steven Erikson Malazan book of the Fallen
Epic and complicated. I agree that the succesion of ludicrously overpowered characters can become a bit tiresome but by and large the series has been worth it so far. Some parts are just superb in their own right. I’ve only read one of the companion books by co-creator Ian Cameron Esslemont *(Return of the Crimson Guard) *which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Jack Vance *Tales of the Dying Earth *and Lyonesse
Two of my favourites by a criminally overlooked master. The Dying Earth is earlier and more ‘fantastical’ I suppose. Vance’s ability to conjure up landscapes and histories with a bare minimum of description is amazing. I think Lyonesse is the better written of the two but am fonder of the Dying Earth. There’s a recent anthology of tribute stories called Songs of the Dying Earth which is also worth reading. As one of the contributors there notes - “In a better organised world vast plazas and lakes would be named after him”.
Finally one which I didn’t see mentioned:
Bernard Cornwell The Warlord Chronicles
Better known for his historical novels (particularly the *Sharpe *series) this is Cornwell’s take on the Arthurian legend. I guess you could argue it’s not strictly speaking a fantasy series but it’s a well-written epic tragedy in my opinion.
That’s a shame. Gene Wolfe is a wonderful writer, and a master of the unreliable narrator.
Try Soldier of the Mist, which has sequels but can be read as a standalone. It’s sort of fantasy-Memento, but is more accessible than some of his other works.
Wolfe’s vocabulary is indeed large, although I wouldn’t call it natural-sounding. He uses a ton of archaic verbiage. In the Soldier… series, all the location names are period-specific, which required me to use an historic map of the area as my bookmark. Very little of what he writes is an easy read.
Thanks for mentioning this series, I didn’t number two was already out. Already added to my hold list at the library!
I read the first one and merely thought it was okay, but nothing special. My brother insisted I at least give the second a try and by the point that a werewolf massacres a police station I was hooked. Harry Dresden’s power levels get goddamn ridiculous by the later books, though, and his Charlie Brown woe-is-me shtick has been getting on my nerves for the last few novels.
As for something out of left field how about Michael Swanwick’s Iron Dragon’s Daughter and The Dragons of Babel? The second is more easily likable but the first is what got the ball rolling (you can still read number 2 by itself if you prefer, they’re both standalone stories). It’s basically a standard fantasy world but combined with a postindustrial setting, kind of like Lord of the Rings set in a world after the Soviet Union collapsed (#1 is apparently very popular in Russia, what with the grim industrial aesthetic). Like I said, #2 is less grim and I actually prefer it to the first.
Story-wise, Iron Dragon’s Daughter is about a human girl who was replaced by a changeling and who grows up in fairyland. There’s a poignancy in it that I like. I remember a scene where the protagonist encounters a typical exploited ogre who works in a factory, then she reads an encyclopedia entry which says that traditionally ogres were found as highway brigands menacing travelers. The disconnect between the ogre’s D&D origins and its present status as another cog in the machinery of industrialized capitalism just got to me.
Dragons of Babel is about a farm boy enslaved by a dragon who is kicked out of his village and becomes a traveling grifter and con artist. It’s got a lot of really great ideas, like the immortal stone lion who boasts about his attentiveness to his sleeping mates by saying that he would plant an orchard around his mates and would return almost as soon as the forest that grew from that orchard had died out. If you will only read one of these books, I recommend this one.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a Tad Williams book that wasn’t over long and plodding. I still can’t believe I read all of the Otherworld books. I think I may have been desperate for reading material.
The first Pern trilogy from McCaffery is good. The quality drops off very quickly from that point, however.
You can’t go wrong with LeGuin, though. The Earthsea books are not just good; they are at times beautiful and haunting. Quick reads too, unlike many other sci fi/fantasy series.
Fritz Lieber Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Me too on these. They are fun and very good.
C.S. Lewis. Narnia and Space Trilogy, which is fantasy the same way Martian Chronicles is.
Tolkien. The Silmarillion if you can enjoy it’s style is more amazing than the Lord of the Rings. If you can’t get into it’s style, don’t try it. In my opinion the best fantasy I’ve ever read and one of the best things I’ve ever read.
Mark Twain. Letters from the Earth.
LeGuin. There are at least five EarthSea books and at least one short story.
George MacDonald’s Lillith
Conan. Get “Red Nails” and “The Elephant Tower”.
T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and other Artuhrian stories.
Several years ago I read and adored Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avolon, a retelling of Arthurian myth from the perspective of the women in Arthur’s life. It really had a huge impact on me at the time.
There are other books that follow and precede it in series form, but they aren’t nearly as good as this one.
Oh, wow! I didn’t know Swanwick wrote a sequel to The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. One of my favorite books! (Albeit bleak and awful.) Amazing author who hasn’t written nearly enough.
I wasn’t hooked until close to the end of the book. Abercrombie spends a lot of time – maybe too much time – introducing and fleshing out the main characters.* But the action really starts toward the end, and the rest of the trilogy has no slow spots.
*Especially Glokta and his physical impairments. The guy never took a step without Abercrombie describing how painful it was for him.
Well, it’s not a sequel per se, it’s just set in the same world. None of the characters from the first book come back. I’m still not sure if it’s set in an industrialized fairyland or in a parallel universe ruled by elves, what with the brand names to be found everywhere. I mean, there’s an elf princess who we first encounter in a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt and who later gets ticked off about her Gucci dress being ruined.
The bleakness of the first one got to me as a teenager and made me dislike it; it was only much later that I was able to appreciate what Swanwick was doing. Speaking of which, are there any other books in this elfpunk genre or does Swanwick stand alone?
I guess China Mieville kind of fits with his marriage of fantasy and its traditionally conservative outlook with left-wing politics but I can’t seem to get into his writing. I’ve tried really hard but his writing style just doesn’t click for me. His list of socialist science fiction has some pretty good stuff, though, as well as a few clunkers.
Just finished Assassin’s Apprentice by Hobb. I liked it quite a bit and will definitely continue into the sequel when it comes in at the library.
I also tried:
Briar King - Quit very early on. Not very interesting.
**Blade Itself - Read over half of it and then realized I had no excitement about going back to it. Quit
**
Soldier of the Mist - Was pretty good and my first Gene Wolfe book. I read it, but found myself skimming along for the last 1/3 or so. I did like it, but thought it could have been better.
Still open to new recommendations and more agreement and disagreement about any series already mentioned.
I decided to give this one a try. What would be the point where you’d say “If you don’t like this by page X, you aren’t going to like it?” I’ve liked most of the series recommendations you’ve ever given me, but I’ll admit this one isn’t grabbing me. I’m on page 60 or thereabouts.
Modesitt in general is an acquired taste. I never got into his Order and Chaos series, which is kind of huge at this point. The Spellsong Cycle I’ve read the first three (are there more?) and while I liked it well enough to get through all three, I wasn’t exactly transported, so to speak. I first read the original novel, “The Soprano Sorceress,” when I was heavy into Wicca and stuff like that, and Anna just runs complete roughshod over what I considered the ethical use of magic at the time. It jarred me.
And can I just say one name, which really breaks my suspension of disbelief every single time it’s printed? “Jimbob”.
Oh god. See, I keep seeing it, thinking “I should tell someone about this!” and then managing to block it from my mind UNTIL YOU RUINED THIS FOR ME, JAYJAY!
I mean “Barjim” makes me laugh a little bit, but Jimbob? JIMBOB?
I can get over it, though, if the book as a whole is something I’m likely to settle into.
