So I grew up very sheltered and isolated from society and as a result missed out on a lot of pop culture and other common things. I love to read, and I really enjoy fantasy and DnD and those types of things and I’m trying to find and catch up on the great fantasy books/series that every fantasy lover/nerd should know. I’m not as interested in sci-fi, but I’m willing to read the “great” ones too. What would you recommend?
Series I’ve read: The Lord of the Rings The Witcher The Dark Tower The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Dungeon Crawler Karl
Update to add also read: Wheel of Time Most of the Stormlight Archive The Hobbit
I’m just starting my first Discworld book.
Edit: Thanks everyone! Keep them coming, I’m going to make a list with all the suggestions and start working through them.
If you’re into early 20th century pulp fantasy, I highly recommend Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars and Robert E. Howard’s Conan.
Most of the classics have been well covered at this point. One of the best books (and authors) I’ve read lately and would argue is a modern classic already is M.L. Wang’s Sword of Kaigen. It is a stand alone fantasy novel set in a world similar to Avatar (the last airbender) where magic is elemental and controlled nationally. It covers the story of a young man and his mother and father, defending their village against overwhelming invading forces.
Wang’s strength is in her character building: everyone is highly complex, multifaceted, and nuanced. Despite the tropey premise, the story manages to completely subvert the standard clichés and covers themes of nationalism, propaganda, grief, forgiveness, patriarchy, and identity. It also has literally the best redemption arc of any book I’ve ever read. Please go read it if you haven’t already!
There is an unfortunate lack of female authors in this thread so I will post two recommendations:
- I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
I’m not familiar with Jacqueline Harpman, but Left Hand of Darkness is quite fun. Not at all what I expected going in.
I’ll add Lois McMaster Bujold and her Curse of Chalion to the list. Great book.
Terry Brooks, Shannara series (wiki/goodreads)
It’s a rather extensive fantasy series and covers a prolific amount of time instead of focusing on a few characters and events (over 40 books and thousands of years basically).
Earthsea.
Red Rising by Pierce Brown is really popular. I’m only just started the 4th book so nobody spoil it for me. So far so good.
Some that I didn’t see listed
Tad Williams Memory Sorrow Thorn trilogy. It starts really show, but if you make it through the first fifty pages it gets really good.
Tad Williams Otherland series is also really good, but kind of blends sci fi and fantasy.
Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
The Awakeners by Sherri S Tepper. All of her books are good, but again some of them mix sci fi and fantasy, but The Awakeners is straight fantasy.
Wheel of Time is an incredible experience, if you ever get to it and like it (especially the last few books) I’d also recommend Brandon Sanderson’s first era of Mistborn books! The second era gets a bit too convoluted imo
Mistborn’s getting a set of movies, and Sanderson’s storm light archive a TV show (also great books).
Since you like D&D, my rec goes to Erin M Evans’ Brimstone Angels series. It’s set in the Forgotten Realms, the default setting for 5th edition and the setting used in both the recent D&D movie and the Baldur’s Gate video game series. Brimstone Angels stars two tiefling twins and their dragonborn adoptive father. One of the twins accidentally stumbles into a warlock pact with a devil, and the series is largely about dealing with the consequences of that.
It’s so well written with excellent characters. And when the final two books (five and six) go to the dragonborn kingdom of Tymanther, an area and culture comparatively unexplored by FR canon, Evans gets to really bust out her worldbuilding chops and put her background in anthropology background to good use.
The good thing is, IMO you don’t need a very big investment to decide if it’s right for you. If you get through the prologue of book one and aren’t interested, it’s not for you. Evans does an amazing job of condensing her style, tone, and themes into the prologue of her books specifically for that reason (and because the first few actual chapters are often slightly different in tone).
If you’ve read the 2014 PHB, you’ve already read some of it. The quotes in the tiefling section and dragonborn section come from the prologue to the first book and from the 4th book, respectively.
Brimstone Angels is a lot tighter than some of the sprawling epic fantasy recommended elsewhere. It’s comparatively easy reading compared to some of the great recommendations others have made like Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, or Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. It could make a good palatte cleanser between books like those, if you’re so inclined. Though I found myself wanting to binge the whole thing.
Only downside is, last time I looked, you literally cannot get the first book in paper. It’s ebook or audiobook only, since it’s been out of print for a long time and second-hand copies go for instance amounts. When I looked, the rest of the series was easy, but that may have changed; it’s been like 8 years.
No speculative fiction recommendation thread is complete without mention of Peter Watts’ Blindsight. Truly alien aliens, and some very interesting exploration of the nature of consciousness.
It’s not a book but I think everyone should watch land before time
Thanks for bringing back a mix of childhood joy and trauma
Earthsea.
Earthsea is beautiful. There aren’t very many books, and they were written across 50ish years. They evolved with the genre, allowing readers a clear window into how we got to the modern works of Jordan, Sanderson, etc.
There are six, which, by modern standards isn’t much. The first three came out in a four year time span and was an attempt to answer the question, “What was Gandalf’s youth like?” This was before Tolkien answered these questions publicly.
Twenty some odd years later, she wrote Tehanu. It was, from what I remember, an attempt to answer her critiques who said she had written a series where magic was not accessible to women. Then ten years after that she finished with two more books. The first of the two was a bunch of short stories that fill in some corners of the stories prior.
Discworld (Terry Pratchett), no question.
Very much Discworld. I shouldn’t have had to scroll this far down to find this shame on all y’all. The Night Watch series and The Witches series are my favourites and I do recommend reading series’s in order to but you can start practically anywhere if you want. Just remember the very first two books aren’t anyone’s favourites but are still good.
I mean, they mentioned they’re already reading Discworld…
I found this reading order quite helpful:
Edit, better version:
It’s my turn to ask this question, it seems, but if this image low resolution and very compressed?
I found a better version, updated.
Wtff… I remember the colour of magic being fun and knew there was more but that’s wild
The Colour of Magic was published in 1983, The Shepherd’s Crown was posthumously published in 2015 with up to three books published in some years. It’s an incredible life’s work.
If you liked The Colour of Magic, I’d strongly recommend continuing reading, it’s usually considered one of the weakest novels in the discworld, being the first book he wrote while still having a day job.
The good thing is, there are these sub series as you can see in the picture following specific characters with some cameos from the other series, so no need to read all of them (although recommended, because they’re great). Even within these series, every book is basically a standalone story with minimal spoilers if you read them out of order and zero confusion if you don’t remember what happened in the last book.
I’m a really fast reader and I had a slowish day at work yesterday. I read The Colour of Magic start to finish yesterday morning and really enjoyed it. I’m almost finished with The Light Fantastic now.
They get better
Oglaf 😆
Excellent suggestion.
insert joker laugh
I need an Oglaf omnibus.
The hobbit is great. I loved every page of it. Just don’t base your opinion of the movies if you’ve seen them, and not read the book. How the fuck did they shit out a 3.5 hour long turd from a 15 page chapter in the battle of the five armies. Holy shit.
Yes. You may have seen the movies but the books are works of art. I still don’t think I’ve read a better written book in my life. The hobbit is especially fun to read.
I read Tolkien growing up and it kind of set an unrealistic expectation for the quality of literature I would encounter later in life. I was constantly disappointed after that.
Earthsea, as someone else has already mentioned, was one of the few series that measured up.
Howl’s Moving Castle was fun, as long as you don’t take it too seriously. It’s not meant to be serious.
I’m reading Wheel of Time now, and it’s just okay. It’s good as far as these things go, and I’m invested in the plot, so I’m gonna finish the series, but it’s just not a masterpiece in my opinion.
Some of the characters are well done, some of them are kinda cringey, and only some of those are cringey on purpose. Some of the running jokes are funny, but some just sound like what an old british guy in the 90s would think is funny. Some of it didn’t age well.
Some of it gets really repetitive, too. Like, I swear, if he says someone looks like a bird again, I’m gonna lose my mind. It’s always someone from the brown ajah, too. And I think he overuses the ta’veren device to rationalize some kinda stretched plot points.
It probably sounds like I hate it. I don’t. Well only a little. It’s a bit love-hate ever since my favorite character died (won’t say who but it was near the end of book five).
Character analysis (avoiding spoilers):
Some of the character development is pretty good though. Rand kinda turns into an asshole, but it makes sense because he’s under so much pressure. I hope the author uses that device to bring it full circle so he corrects himself. If he’s just an asshole for the rest of the series then that would be lame.
I really appreciate the flawed characters (namely, Nynaeve and Mat), both for the comic relief and their occasional redeeming moments. And how they’re always projecting whenever they criticize others really cracks me up, especially when the two interact with each other. Cause you know that deep down, as much as they can’t stand each other, either one would risk their life for the other in a heartbeat.
I started out liking Perrin, but I think the author dropped the ball on his development. He has some outdated ideas about chivalry, and at the same time Faile (as much as I want to like Faile, but she’s just kinda one-dimensional) she encourages some really toxic and even abusive traits. It might be deliberate on the author’s part, but I just think it’s poorly done. Perrin is one of the few characters who isn’t constantly lying to himself though, and I still like that about him.
Egwene’s character development is really good. She starts off kinda bland and tokeny, but around book four she really starts coming into her own, and I can’t spoil anything but I’m past halfway through the series now and her plot arc is probably the one I’m most interested in at this point. I’m legitimately so proud of her, and I think that part of the story is being handled well. It’s not just like some “magic solution on a silver platter” that’s the hallmark of bad writing. She still has challenges, but she meets them squarely, and her inner monologue is just so honest with herself. She’s probably the most relatable character in the series in my opinion.
And Elayne’s plot arc is fun because it’s usually lighthearted due to her innocence and naïvete, but she makes some really intelligent decisions on things that are within her wheelhouse, and she’s usually pretty honest with herself (usually). She’s a strong character though, even leaving aside the obvious nepotism, and sometimes her strength and intelligence clashes with her innocence and naïvete in some really interesting ways.
I don’t know who else I can talk about without spoiling things. I’m looking forward to Elaida’s downfall (so clearly forshadowed by her hubris), which she’ll deserve every bit of.
Some new characters have been introduced recently, and some old characters reintroduced, but I’m not gonna give anything away and honestly I still need to wait to form any opinions about them.
I will say, though, that there’s a lot that could be done with some of the different groups that are coming together (and clashing), but that’s another point where I think the author drops the ball. Some of them are just unrealistically hotheaded and arrogant, and it turns into this sorta clusterfuck where everyone’s trying to teach the others to respect them by asserting their dominance. It’s just really immature for the people who are supposed to be the wise leaders of their respective societies.
I mean, the machiavellian stuff makes sense within some contexts, like within the politics of the different nations, but that was always tangential or adjacent to the plot at most. Now it’s just starting to seem like the groups that are supposed to be the main good guys are just as foolish as the meddlesome side characters running most of the governments…
Anyway, that’s probably enough critique for now. I just don’t really have anyone in real life to talk about this stuff with so I’ve been keeping it all bottled up inside my head (and occasionally rehearsing my critiques in my inner
dialoguemonologue…)Yup. The movies are an abomination. I saw them once and I’ll never watch them again. But I’ve read the book more than a few times
I have read the Hobbit! I was so excited for the movies and when the first one came out I almost cried in the theater. I made myself watch the second one but never did watch the third one. The book is good enough.
Some of my best memories are of my grandfather reading me the hobbit at bedtime when I stayed with him for a summer.
I still can’t get over how they stretched that short of a book over that long of a trilogy of movies and still managed to not show enough of Beorn. All of the party arriving at Beorn’s house is one of my favorite chapters and it’s just… not there. The. Fuck.
Don’t even get me started on tauriel. I’m all for diversity, but she was entirely unneeded. A love triangle? Really?
i read that, but i dint quite grasp it at the time.
There are several ‘edits’ you can put together online that are actually way better than the movies. They cut out a lot of the nonsense and trim around excess to provide a 2-ish hour movie that feels choppy but good.
