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.
Earthsea.
Discworld (Terry Pratchett), no question.
Oglaf 😆
Excellent suggestion.
insert joker laugh
I need an Oglaf omnibus.
Brandon Sanderson books, specifically the cosmere stuff are all pretty fucking good.
My favourite is probably Mistborn but I know a lot of people prefer The Stormlight Archives. All worth reading!
Sanderson is a great airport read.
I wouldn’t recommend it outside of that context. It’s nothing special.
He’s great at coming up with magic systems but he’s basically a very talented YA writer.
I’ve heard great things about Malazan. I should probably pick that up.
I just finished Gardens of the Moon. In order to keep track of everyone, I made my own wiki. It felt like watching Eriksson play a war game.
I’m taking a break as the style isn’t interesting to me. I hear his writing becomes more intimate and visceral in the rest of the series. Looking forward to this in book 2. Sort of wish I started with book 2 since none or few of the characters carry over.
If you continue with the series, just about every character carries over. Malazan is crazy intricate and complex. I’ve read the ten-book main series a few times and notice new connections every time through.
Malazan, Malazan, Malazan. Literally the result of two bored archaeologists and their DnD campaign while they were out on a dig.
It hangs with the best in terms of humor, tragedy, epic scope, and heroism. It does not hold your hand, in fact it will delight in letting your hand go while leading you through a dark room. Deeply philosophical, challenges and embraces tropes in equal part, absolutely interesting magic system(s). It is hardcore hopecore, it champions the little guy, empathy, and the bright mind over the slow. Main series is finished, 10 giant books. Also a bunch of others outside that series by both creators.
Be patient with it, some payoffs take a while. Read Gardens of the Moon and then Deadhouse Gates to see if it’s clicking. It isn’t for all.
I feel like this might be a terrible suggestion to start with. It has ruined fantasy for me. Nothing else I’ve found has come close, the worlds feel half baked, the stories mediocre, the characters forgettable, the scale a fraction of Malazan’s.
Erickson can get me more attached to a throwaway character that is introduced and killed off in a handful of pages than some authors can to their main character.
Glen Cook’s Black Company novels come close for me. They’re smaller scale, but they’ve got some heft. Erikson has said the series was a huge influence on him, too.
R Scott Bakker kinda scratches a similar itch, though it’s much more bleak.
More bleak than the Chain of Dogs, the Children of the Dead Seed, Beak’s candles, The Snake?!
I have had Bakker on my radar but I have to be in the right mood for fantasy.
Much more bleak. Erikson has more in the way of heroics in the face of the bleak. Bakker you get more of human flaws ushering in doom. It has a similar sense of scale, the world building is top notch. But the passage of time and intelligence are much less forgiving in Bakker’s world.
I’ve done numerous rereads of Malazan, none for Bakker. Though it’s just as deserving, if not more so. It’s just… a lot less uplifting.
Series?
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Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy
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Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain
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Discworld, especially the Night Watch books
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Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series
Individual Books:
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Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown, or anything else she wrote
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Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock and Howl’s Moving Castle, or anything else she wrote
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Philip K. Dick, “Galactic Pot-Healer” (Dick straddles the line between science fiction and science fantasy, but this one’s firmly the latter)
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Madeline L’Engle, Many Waters
I’m sure I’ll think of more but my break is up.
I came here to say Chronicles of Prydain. I read them over and over as a child and they are so magical and well written, it’s a shame they aren’t more well known!
Wait wait. You’re starting with Engel’s “Many Waters?” Isn’t it book 4 in a series where book 1 (“A Wrinkle in Time”) is considered a classic?
It’s been a long time but I remember liking book 2 a whole lot. I never did get book 5, though I think there is one?
not “starting with” but it’s functionally a standalone and the most “fantastic” of her novels
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Kingkiller chronicles so everyone can peer pressure rothfuss into finishing the fucking thing
He won’t. Just toss him as a lost cause like George RR Martin and Scott Lynch and move on. You’ll feel a lot better when you finish a different series that took way less time than what Rothfuss did writing his only 2 novels in the series.
I like the books, superficially they are a treat, the prose is brilliant, the words feel nice on my brain.
But reading just a little bit deeper than that, you start to realise the story is pretty empty. The characters are hollow. The first two books are pretty much the same story loop over and over again. The characters making the same mistakes and learning the same lessons over and over again.
The way the author writes female characters makes you seriously worry about the authors relationship with women, and if he even knows any women.
I read the first book because I’d heard praise for it. It was either during that one, or the next book what I thought:
- orphan
- gifted magician
- professor who hates him
- professor who likes him
- male friend
- female friend
- and some others that I can recall after so many years
…fucking hell. I’m reading a retelling of fucking Harry Potter!
Yeah. It’s full of really common pop-fiction tropes. But the writing is so beautiful you don’t notice it.
It really jumped the shark when in the second book the guy who is a virgin and can’t talk to girls suddenly became the god of sex and literally out-sexed the sex nymph who had been sexing men to death for years.
Did it? I think one of the points is that the narrator isn’t particularly trustworthy.
Yes but also is that just Rothfuss’ excuse when fans call him out about plot inconsistencies? Because that’s how I heard that “explanation” came about.
Oh I didn’t even know Rothfuss ever brought it up explicitly. It’s a conceited character talking about themselves, so it seemed expected to me.
I think Rothfuss/Martin and others are pressured too much. No matter what they produce, it will never be good enough to satisfy the hordes of loudmouths.
Maybe not, but if they’d actually work on it instead of stringing us along, maybe there wouldn’t be hordes of loudmouths.
Also…keep in mind, they chose the author’s life. I find it pretty tone deaf for a famous person complaining about what fame brings when that’s the path they pursued.
We’re never getting the last book. And my theory is that he just outgrew it. Or at least I hope that’s true, because the whole Denna storyline was just a bunch of incel bullshit.
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5
Firsthand account of one of the scariest events of the Second World War in the shape of highly entertaining sci-fi novel.
Must read for everyone.
Ok so since you’re doing sci-fi as well, Hyperion/Hyperion series.
DISCWORLD
Ah, I love recommendation posts.
It depends on what you actually enjoyed reading and why. I see you already have a lot of great suggestions. The only author I haven’t yet seen mentioned is perhaps Asimov, although you said you prefer fantasy to sci fi. That’s also my preference, however I find his short stories are worth reading and also low commitment for this reason.
One thing I find useful in recommendations is to know what else people have read and what they think about that. It helps me get an idea of which books I’m more likely to enjoy best or not, especially if I can compare their thoughts to mine about the same books. With that in mind, my thoughts:
Discworld is amazing. Pratchett is a great author. I like that he can write a story that on the surface is just a simple comedy/adventure, but if you are the type that also analyzes what they read you will soon see his stories go much deeper than what they appear to be. He will keep things entertaining and witty but also throw at you a piece of his mind for you to mull over and reflect on various aspects of life. Small Gods is one of my favorites.
I also really enjoyed Dungeon Crawler Karl, and I mean really really really. Hilarious. But it doesn’t have the depth Pratchett has.
On a similar vein, The Witcher- loved the characters and the story is very entertaining, but t can’t say I was blown away as with Pratchett.
I absolutely loved Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy. Now that’s some solid writing. The characters are so well fleshed out, unique, original. Somehow the world and the plot feel realistic, crazy as it sounds for a fantasy book. It may feel a bit slower in pacing than any of the three I previously mentioned, but not slower than LOTR which you have already read.
I can also recommend the first law trilogy, just finished it. There’s actually some standalone books and a second trilogy in that world, i’m reading ‘best served cold’ now which is also excellent and features some characters from the trilogy. Can’t wait to read the rest and dread the day i read them all.
Here are some series I can’t recommend enough:
Cradle by Will Wight — A young man born too weak to matter in a world where martial artists can shatter mountains and walk on air decides that’s not good enough. Starts small and intimate, then escalates into genuinely insane power fantasy. The progression system is crack cocaine. 12 books, all out, binge-worthy.
The Black Magician Trilogy by Trudi Canavan — A slum girl accidentally discovers she has magic, which is very illegal if you’re not from the right family. Gets accepted into the Magicians’ Guild under suspicious circumstances and slowly uncovers something rotten at its core. Cozy, character-driven, and surprisingly political.
The Lightbringer Series by Brent Weeks — Magic is literally made of light and color, and drafters slowly go mad from using it. Packed with political scheming, morally grey characters, and one of the best slow-burn mystery plots in fantasy. Weeks hid twists in plain sight for five books and sticks the landing.
The Licanius Trilogy by James Islington — Time travel, prophecy, and a magic system where using power costs you years off your life. Dense and intricate in the best way, the kind of series where you flip back to chapter one after finishing it and realize how much you missed. Islington clearly planned every page from the start.
All are fantastic series, happy reading! 📚
Titan, Wizard, and Demon by John Varley. The first book starts off with a bog-standard “first human exploration of Saturn’s system” bit, but starts going off the rails immediately. By the end, you’ll meet a 50 foot clone of Marilyn Monroe and think, “eh, I’ll accept that.”
It’s one of sci-fi’s more delightfully unhinged stories.
Completely agree. It is fucking unhinged and a great read.
Worm by Wildbow, 10/10 all the way through, which is incredible given it’s 7000 pages and written by an indie author.
It’s good, but even Wildbow themselves says it could use a thorough edit - which will likely never happen. Not to say you shouldn’t read it. It’s fantastic.
I dunno, I’m holding out that an animated adaptation will happen one day on the worm series. Maybe it’ll get the invicible treatment and get some edits then.
LOTR… Of course, since this is really the start of the genre as it exists today. So when you read it and think that it’s full of tropes… Continue thinking a little bit and realize that LOTR CREATED those tropes.
The Belgariad by David Eddings. I’ll come out and say it, David Eddings was a horrible person, but this series is worth reading. He’s dead now so you won’t be supporting him if you get these books. The followup series “The Mallorean” is not a must read, it’s basically a retread of “The Belgariad”. As are his later series “The Tamuli” etc…
The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson. A lot of people will recommend Mistborn, or the Stormlight Archive, but both of those series are just parts of a greater arc called “The Cosmere”. I would recommend starting with Elantris or Warbreaker, both of which are standalone books, but are in the Cosmere. Then go to Mistborn series 1, then tackle Stormlight Archive. Be warned, each book in SA is longer than LOTR in its entirety. But it’s well worth the read.
A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay: One of my wife’s favorite books. Not a series, but worth the read.
Memory, Sorry and Thorn by Tad Williams: Excellent series that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.
Destiny’s Crucible by Olan Thorensen: I liked this one a lot and continue to follow it, although it’s starting to get a little long.
The Riyria Revelations and Chronicles by Michael J Sullivan: Both of these series are great and worth the read.
