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Your top 5 fantasy books/series


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  • 2 weeks later...

While I'm not as well read as I would like to be, I do have a current list as to what they are:

1) Mistborn sagas. I only recently finished the two eras but I think they're great books. Not much else to say

2) LotR. I'm not quite through Return of the King but they are a perfect example of fantasy, in my opinion.

3) Harry Potter. These books were a large part of my life and I have gotten to the point where I can open any of the books to any page and know exactly what's happening

4) Percy Jackson. Also a large part of my life and like with HP I can open any book and know exactly what's going on.

5) Magisterium. Not much to say other than I like them

Not quite what I want the list to be but it'll change. Especially when I get around to reading Wheel of Time, Name of the Wind, and the Stormlight Archive

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  • 4 months later...

1. The Stormlight Archive 

2. Lord of the Rings

3. Death Note (I don't know if this counts because it's a manga, but it's one of my favorites. Reading this was very out of my comfort zone, and I'm still not exactly sure why I decided to read it in the first place. It's a lot darker than what I normally read, but it's absolutely genius. I love it.)

4. Kingkiller Chronicle 

5. Harry Potter (I need to reread these... They were the first series I ever read, so I always include them on the list because they're nostalgic.)

Honorable mentions: Six of Crows duology and Percy Jackson

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Time to see if my opinions have changed! Let's see here...

On 12/22/2014 at 3:41 PM, Ooklara said:

1) The Titus Books, better known as the Gormenghast Trilogy. by Mervyn Peake. They represent a high literary point in fantasy literature that I have not seen replicated since.

2) Aegypt by John Crowley. Technically magic realism, comes pretty close to Peake's books in my opinion. In fact, I often refer to John Crowley as The One True Author. 

3) The Lord of the Rings by Name Escapes me B) First introduction to fantasy literature.

4) The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever- Stephen R Donaldson. Opened the door for me to expand my literary horizons. 

5) Eh.

So, 1 & 2 will hold their places fairly firmly for a while. 

I would probably bump Lord of the Rings down to #4, give #3 to the real MVP: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. 

Really, 3-5 are just formative works for me, what helped determine what I would read afterwards. I think Titus Groan and Gormenghast are the zenith of fantasy literature currently, but that's probably because I don't want to admit there are John Crowley books that are better or haven't run across the true zenith published recently. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Just to wade in, here's my current list (3 out of the 5 were recommended by @Ammanas, his recommendations are great!) :

  1. Malazan Book of the Fallen (and if you want more Malazan, then The Kharkanus trilogy and the Collected Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal broach). Erickson's writing takes a bit to get used to, but he is a keen observer, a deep thinker and a master of amazing endings. 
  2. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (including The Last King of Osten Ard series). Tad Williams is a gifted storyteller, he has created a fully realized world, filled with great and believable characters and the story progresses logically but along completely unexpected paths. 
  3. Journey to the West. The Chinese classic tale of the monk Tang Sanzang's journey to India to retrieve the Bhuddist sutras with his 4 stalwart companions, one of then being Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. This is one of the greatest stories ever told, but if you don't want the 2,300+ page version, then the Arthur Waley abridged translation is exceptional. 
  4. The Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. Though his life was tragically cut short, the Conan stories he produced mostly for Weird Tales in the 1930's still stand as some of the finest fantasy ever crafted. His obsession with the idea that civilization is an aberration and is always on the brink of returning to Barbarism is given a powerfully entertaining and compelling symbol in the character of Conan. If you like how Hercules is portrayed in the classic Jason and the argonauts (with Ray Harry Hausen's brilliant stop motion animation), chances are you'll like Howard's Conan. Howard was also a poet, so his prose can be very florid and dramatic, but his descriptions of action sequences are always exciting, and Conan goes through a series of different roles in the books, from thief, to tribal chieftain, to captain of a band of reevers, to king. 
  5. The Wheel of Time. I started this series in high school, and didn't finish it until nearly 20 years after I started it. Jordan's description of environment and imagination to create these environments is some of the best in fiction, and the intrigues, meetings and machinations of the dark friends and Forsaken are fantastic. Also, it has a great magic system. I'm not going to lie, when Crossroads of Twilight came out I was wondering if maybe I had wasted my time, but I will be a life long Brandon Sanderson fan for how he pulled order out of chaos and finished the WOT in just 3 books. Towers of Midnight and Memory of Light are 2 of my 5 favorite Wot books, and Perrin went from one of my least favorite POV characters to one of my favorites. 

 

 

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