What else to read except harry potter, lotr and George R.R. Martin?
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fantasy essentials
What else to read except harry potter, lotr and George R.R. Martin?
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Head.
Ursula Le Guin knocks every other fantasy hack out of the water
Agreed. It’s embarrassing, really.
La Morte d'Arthur; Sir Thomas Mallory
The Chronicles of Narnia; C.S. Lewis
Earthsea stuff; Le Guin
Bloom thought the same. I haven't read her yet, but my impression from an excerpt I did see was her exceptionally Shakespearian tone had predisposed him to preference.
The Evenings by Gerard Reves.
Bogmail by Patrick McGinley.
The Aubrey-Maturin series, the Flashman papers, Sharpes' Rifles, and Forrester's The General.
Ian Fleming's essays about sin and travel.
The White Plague, Oath of Fealty, and the Jack Vance Demon Prince series.
>The Aubrey-Maturin series
>discworld
these are far and away the best itt (aubrey maturin isn't really fantasy but it will give the same type of satisfaction)
>but it will give the same type of satisfaction
Maturin is rincewind.
for the first eight or ten books in the canon, maturin is obrien's self insert mary sue. he's honestly the worst part of the series to that point, he's the best in the world at everything he tries at and his flaws are all totally irrelevant or portrayed as noble and tragic. it gets a lot better as the series goes on, but he's one of obrien's biggest blunders in the first half
this is coming from a big fan btw, and even tho he's a lot more simple i unironically enjoy rincewind as a character more in certain books (sourcery, the last continent, his cameos in later books like unseen academicals and the science books)
Discworld
I wasn't too impressed by The Colour of Magic. Are any of the others worth reading?
yeah, the first two are pretty lame in retrospect. its when he starts doing character work that it gets good. id say start with either equal rites (if you want the intro of the best character in the series), mort (if you want an amazing take on Death) or guards guards (if you want a police mystery with great characters) and just go from there
I love his prose so much, but I feel like I just get exhausted when I try to read a full book of his, which is wild given how short they are. I've read about six, starting from beginning in publication order.
Have I not been reading the right ones?
The first, let's say 5, aren't very good by his own admission. I don't really care for Pratchett but if you know the gist of his shit, just read the good ones in a given series and don't worry about missing anything. I started with one about Granny Weatherwax.
i think reading in publication order is a mistake. pick one of the character threads from within the series and go from there. the best three imo are the witches (technically starting with equal rites but really getting going with wyrd sisters) death (mort) and the watch (guards guards). since they're all pretty short i'd recommend reading the first one out of all three of these series, and whichever characters you enjoy the most, that's the series you should continue
the wizards are great fun once the characters get solidified, and the moist books are brilliant, but those come much later in the canon
Impossible to appreciate without being inundated with fantasy tropes already. It's like watching Monty Python without knowing anything about England.
Zothique short stories by Clark Ashton Smith.
Conan short stories by Robert E. Howard.
The Blade Itself By Joe Abercrombie.
On the lighter side:
Dragonlance trilogy By Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman.
Midkemia books By Raymond E. Feist
Ultralights:
David Eddings - anything
none, those three cover all possible literary needs
i was under the impression the picture attached to your thread was a man receiving oral sex from (presumably) a woman, but when I fully read the text I realised I had been the victim of a humurously intended optical illusion
however; am I to assume that this is a man reading a book; merely because the text says so? whereas my natural instinct, all my experience, assumed without doubt that this was in fact an act of fellatio, and not--as the text insinuates--that he this man was reading a book
I reject this attempt to trick me and take me for a fool. My own mind made its judgement long before words (that are always so treacherous), implanted into my mind the idea of wrongness and falsehood-- that I am a fool.
The Scar by China Meiville
Chronicles of Narnia
Mistborn series 1
Memory, Sorrow and Thorn
Tigana
A Wizard of Earthsea
A Spell for Chameleon
Malazan
Prince of Nothing
Chronicles of Narnia
Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
Chronicles of Amber
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Elric of Melnibone
It looks like someone's giving him a blowjob what the hecking heck?
I keep a ranked list of every fantasy book I've read. I'm probably forgetting a few but there you go
Wrong pic sorry
>Tiermaker
>Atocriciously shitty taste
Like pottery, m'lad, like pottery
>90% of those cover's art.
Dude...your taste is so bad I'm rethinking being on a board with someone as moronic as you...
Zelazny (amber series, lord of light, etc.)
Glen Cook Black Company books
Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana and Lions are Mt favorites)
Eddings' Belgariad and maybe the Malloreon if you like the first ones
It gets panned a lot here but Wheel of Time is really good once you get into the meat of it around book 3-4 and is good enough before then.
I love Octavia butler's Doro books too (wild seed and the sequel with the daughter) butntheyre not necessarily fantasy.
I've heard good things about Octavia Butler, but every cover for her books in Barnes and Noble is outrageously horny. Wat do?
https://thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest/fantasy/books
Unironically shilling this website, yes.
>except harry potter, lotr and George R.R. Martin?
That's quite literally it unfortunately. If you need something with swords in it Musashi the novel is quite good, but on the whole its a slop fest of a genre, and not because fantasy is inherently immature or escapist or any gay IQfy reasoning along those lines, its just remarkably dull on poorly written in general.
Tolkien has some decent short stories and there are some good folktales out there from various cultures, but thats as close as you're going to get if you have any taste at all.
Memes to avoid: The Shadow of the Torturer, Patrick Cuckthussses books, Stormlight slop, and Black Company.
Robert E Howard? Lovecraft? Clark Ashton Smith?
I hate fantasy probably more than you but those three are great.
Lovecraft gets a pass, the rest is slop.
Why? His books feel like they were written by some slightly above average high school kid. They have no interesting characters in them, no world or character development, no moral dilemmas. They have uh... some octopus people and aliens? That's the reason people like it?
I'm not going to defend him, but he's alright. He's certainly better than the slop that passes for le "kino" in garbage IQfy fantasy threads.
George MacDonald is very, very good. Phantastes, Lilith, and Princess & the Goblin are all exquisite works.
Y'all mfs need Deryni.
Read my book, Blood Meridian!