Given what you say you liked and didn’t, I’ll tentatively second MrDibble’s rec of the Empire trilogy by Janny Wurts and Raymond Feist. It’s very traditional sword and sorcery fantasy, BUT it is headed by a really really powerful central female character, has a lot of gender politics and thoughtful treatments of power and abuses of power, and it’s set in an Egyptian/ancient Greek-analogue world instead of the usual european-ish one.
Thanks!
I very much hope my pointing out suggestions that I’ve read and not enjoyed doesn’t make people feel like they should be scared to recommend something. I swear, I’m not going to hunt anyone down and yell at them if they suggest something I don’t like. 
Nope, it actually makes it easier to narrow down the recommends. I work at a public library and purchase our fantasy/sf collection. I do a lot of recommending of books to people - staffers and patrons.
I rarely have anyone throw a rejected book at me. 
I do like it when people (like you are) say what they do and don’t like, and WHY. So many people don’t think about the WHY and that’s what helps me to find similar things to either avoid or pursue.
Very cool. I’m happy to give any other details that help narrow the field.
And if anyone has similar or relatively similar taste (like Miss Woodhouse upthread) and you want to give more details about what you’re looking for, please feel free!
I’m a ginormous fan of half of Mieville’s books. He’s often off, writing books that just don’t do anything for me; but when he’s on, my god, he hits all my buttons exactly right. That said, if you don’t like things that are nauseatingly grotesque, stay the hell away from Mieville :).
A couple of modern fantasy novels that I enjoyed:
Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway. It’s funny but not a comic novel, if that makes sense, with some truly wonderful heroines. The attached review aptly describes it as an “ambitious, crowded, restless caper, cleverly told and utterly immune to precis.” Gangsters, spies, WMDs, clockwork, like Le Carre if Le Carre thought the whole thing was worth laughing about.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North. Apparently the idea’s been done before–the protagonist is born in the early 20th century, lives a full life, dies, and wakes up as himself as an infant in the early 20th century with full memory of his previous life–but the author does some very cool things with the premise. It was possibly my favorite fantasy of last year.
I always rather liked Raymond Feist’s one-off Faerie Tale, about contemporary folks interacting with a take on the classical fae. Sort of like Like Charles de Lint only, you know, good :D.
More of a feudal Japan-ish world, I’d say.
I would definitely recommend that spoke and he second one in the series I believe it’s called The Wise Man’s Fears. they are two of the best books I have ever read
Try Martin Scott’s Thraxas series and Ben Aaronovich’s *Rivers of London / Peter Grant *series.
Thraxas is comic to a fault–and I do mean fault. How many jokes can you milk out of a barbarian woman’s chainmail bikini before it stops being funny? (hint: zero)
That book ended both the book club I recommended it for and my unstinting trust in the World Fantasy Award.
De gustibus and all, though :).
Yes, much more Japanese than anything else, with also some Aztec-ish bits.
Have you read any of Wen Spencer’s books? Her Elfhome series might appeal to you. How about Garth Nix’s ‘Abhorsen’ trilogy?
Second this one, it’s a fun series with very likeable characters.
Well yes, that’s the point of him mentioning it. It’s satire.
I can recommend an author named John Moore. Most of his stuff is out of print but not too hard to find second hand. Heroics for Beginners, Fate Worse Than Dragons, Bad Prince Charlie. They are light-hearted romps, including parody of fantasy tropes.
Yeah, but it’s been the target of satire since the 1980s at least, in pretty much exactly the same way. His jokes about it were tired and boring, in my opinion. And in any case, in post 30 jsgoddess mentioned not liking humorous books in general.
I’m not really a fan of parody or satirical fantasy. Not saying they can’t be high quality work, I just don’t tend to want to read it.
Then Joe Abercrombie’s stuff is doubly unrecommended for you, I think :). He’s an excellent writer, but his Blade Itself books function as the most vicious satirical takedown of fantasy tropes I’ve ever seen, both hilariously cutting and appalling at the same time. I’m not entirely glad I read them, and I like bleak fantasy a lot.
I wonder if you (and people who like grittier stuff than I do) might like some of the books I’ve been ditching early:
The Powder Mage series by Brian McClellan, starting with Promise of Blood
The Warded Man, by Peter Brett
Prince of Thorns, by Mark Lawrence
Empire in Black and Gold, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Iron Thorn, by Caitlin Kittredge
Besieged, by Rowena Cory Daniells
Incarceron, by Catherine Fisher
And then some I feel like I wouldn’t normally like, but did (though I haven’t read further in any of these series):
The Thousand Names, by Django Wexler
A Shadow in Summer, by Daniel Abraham
Blood Ties, by Pamela Freeman
The Black Prism, by Brent Weeks
And for anyone reading who might share tastes with me:
Sisters of the Raven, by Barbara Hambly
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by NK Jemisin
*House of Shadows, *by Rachel Neumeier
Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman
Oooh Serafina, I liked that one. If you liked that, you may like The last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde. May being the operative word; Fforde is a somewhat humorous writer, but there’s a possibility you may not find that a turn off.
I may also suggest Deathless by Catherine Valente, and A Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia, both featuring heroines navigating russian myths and fairytales in communist and capitalist russia, respectively.