Great Fantasy Books

[Drizzlin]

R.A Salvatore
The Dark Elf Trilogy (with the main focus on the first book, Homeland)
- If you fall in love with a tree  hugging Dark elf, then read the rest of the series.

War of the Spider  Queen (6 book series by 6 different authors, all approved by R.A. Salvatore)

R.A. Salvatore writes his fight scenes better than I have found in any other fantasy novels. He paints a picture of the battles like no other. Either way I am also a dark elf junkie...*grins*

[Kenderfriend]

Alright! I love fantasy books...
This is gonna be a long one. :p

Some of my favourites are JRR Tolkien (LOTR, Hobbit, Silmarillion etc.), Dragonlance by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Terry Brooks is pretty good with the Shannara books...

Hmm... Piers Antony's Xanth is quite funny, but sometimes I thought there were a bit too many puns.

Orson Scott Card is also a very good writer, I've read the whole Alvin Maker series... it's good and very different in my opinion. It's actually American History but with a fantasy twist.

No-one can leave out 'The acts of King Arthur and his noble knights'... that's a classic, it's an amazing book and if you like fantasy and haven't read that... read it! Remember, without Merlin, there wouldn't be a Gandalf.

P.S. Sorry folks but I just hate Harry Potter, it just annoys me for some reason. . . *hides under the table*

[Interia_Discordius]

George R. R. Martin ranks top on my fantasy book list, though it's certainly not for a younger audience.

[Kenderfriend]

Not sure if anyone's mentioned it here, but I'm currently reading the Deverry series by Katherine Kerr, great stuff and right up my street as it's a very celtic-ish fantasy.

[Pseudonym]

Joe Abercrombie - do yourselves a favour! (NB. Not for our younger, more impressionable players)

[RollinsCat]

Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series.  Wizard noir.  Can't be beat.

[Shiokara]

I am shocked that no one has included Terry Pratchett in this list, but perhaps I just missed it. Anything from him is good, and you can usually follow his books across five categories throughout: the wizards, the guards, Death, the witches, and other (for books like Going Postal and Monstrous Regiment). All good.

Also, this may seem a shock, but the guy who wrote The War of the Ancients trilogy for Warcraft is not bad. Richard A. Knaak I believe his name is.

And, hm, when my mom used to read fantasy more often she really enjoyed Charles De Lint.

[EdTheKet]

Thing with Terry Pratchett is, in my personal opinion of course, that if you read a couple of his books in a row (I read 8 in a row), you don't want to read any more.

They did crack me up though, so it's been a few years now, maybe I should give them a try again!

And as a side note, there's a new volume in the Wheel of Time, but people probably know this already!

[Carillon]

For those who liked the tension between modern world and fantasy/supernatural in Jim Butcher's wizard noir series with Harry Dresden but want a female protagonist, try Kelley Armstrong.

Kelley Armstrong is the author of the Otherworld series. In terms of authoring, she's still quite young in the game, and has only been publishing novels since 2001 or so. However, in eight or nine years she's cranked out ten novels in the series, and there's another coming.

What I like best about Armstrong's fiction, I think, is that she has not yet become stale or static. Just when you think you have her pinned down, she'll change the game again, and you'll find yourself staring into yet another corner of her vivid imagining of a modern supernatural world.

[miltonyorkcastle]

John Scalzi:
Old Man's War
The Ghost Brigades
The Last Colony

Admittedly more sci-fi than fantasy, but easy and short reads, thought-provoking and entertaining.

[Zoogmunch]

I liked the characters alongside Raistlin too.

Playing good old DnD a friend of mine being the DM brought a Soth Knight character into play late one Sunday evening. Unfortunately we ( ten of us) had all read the books, realised what/who it was and ran for our lives. No paper tearing that night at least but one mad DM!



the Alvin Maker series is pretty good.

[Chazzler]

A tip for the Mature audience, all of Robert E. Howard's novels about Conan the Cimmerian have been released in one, big, ~1000 page book. Get it.

It's called "Conan - The Complete Chronicles"

[cbnicholson]

Mentioned in other thread..but Lois M. Bujold's Sharing Knife Series, and Curse of Chalion.