LogFAQs > #963512952

Muscles posted...

I already love Tolkien's world, and I'm a fan of the Shannara series from what I've read and looking for more great fantasy

If that's the flavor of fantasy you like, look into David Eddings.

He's got two main series (each broken into two parts) - the Belgariad and the Mallorean (5 books each, 10 books total), and the Elenium and the Tamuli (3 books each, 6 books total). The Belgariad/Mallorean books are a bit more traditional fantasy in the Tolkien flavor (and the Belgariad leans a bit young adult, with a kid protagonist, which makes it easy entry-level fantasy for a lot of people), while the Elenium/Tamuli books are a bit more complex and maybe shading closer to more modern fantasy.

I'd also recommend Roger Zelazny's Amber novels, though they're not just fantasy, but also have elements of modern setting, noir, and even a bit of philosophy. There's 10 of them, again divided in half (5 and 5, with two different protagonists), though you can probably buy them all in a single book (The Great Book of Amber combines them all).

The Fred Saberhagen Book of Swords/Book of Lost Swords series is pretty good (11 books overall) if you can find them, but it admittedly has a fairly weak ending, as it feels like he was tired of the series and just wanted to end it quick in the last book.

Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series is pretty good (it's one of my favorites), but really dark and kind of complicated, so it's not for everyone. It's basically divided into three series (the first two having 3 books each, the last one having 4), though the last series isn't really as good as the first two. For Donaldson I'd also recommend Mordant's Need (a series with 2 books - The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through), though those might be hard to track down these days.

For funsies, you could also look into the Lone Wolf books, which are set in their own fantasy world... with the added perk of being Choose Your Own Adventure style books where you play as the main character and can choose your skills, collect items, etc. And you can actually read those for free online:

https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home



Beyond that, there's the Night Watch series (if you're interested in modern fantasy, and don't mind reading "foreign" writers that have been translated into English). It's a Russian fantasy about how wizards and vampires and other supernatural creatures all exist in the modern world and secret police each other to stay hidden (the "Night Watch" of the title is the collection of Light Others who track down and deal with Dark Other criminals, and later books deal with the Day Watch that is basically the reverse). There are actually two movies based on the books, though the movies kind of diverge from the books' stories a fair amount.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwjw6wk-1fk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S6-VlssdUI



If you're looking for a bit lighter fare (ie, young adult fiction, a la something like Harry Potter), you might like The Dark is Rising series.

Piers Anthony is another writer with a lot of "light" fiction. His Xanth books are almost entirely built on puns and fantasy aimed at younger readers (and there's like a million of them), but he also has a few series that are a bit more mature. His Apprentice Adept series (7 books) is sort of a cross between fantasy and sci-fi.

The Death Gate Cycle is another interesting fantasy (7 books) written by Weis/Hickman, the authors who created Dragonlance and Ravenloft for D&D.

And there's always the Dragons of Pern series - Anne McCaffrey started writing it decades ago, and her kids have continued it after she died - it's technically sci-fi (it's set in outer space, in the future, on an alien planet, with genetically engineered dragons), but for most of its stories it's very much presented as pure fantasy, because the people in the books have completely forgotten about most of the technology and knowledge they used to have, and live at a roughly medieval level of technology. And a lot of the plot revolves around people who fly around on dragons.

Most of these series are all famous enough and old enough that you could probably find more in-depth summaries of them if you wanted to, or find Wikipedia or Goodreads summaries of the plots. I've mostly avoided talking about the actual plots because for some of them, it's best to avoid too many spoilers.