Quote Originally Posted by Scotty_ffgamer View Post
Editra: Apparently I have the first book in the Wheel of Time series too. I feel like I've heard a bunch of conflicting things about that series and not sure if I want to get into a 14 book series at the moment, hmm.
It's probably worth reading for a die hard fantasy fan, but definitely nothing amazing. Robert Jordan is basically a poor man's George R. R. Martin, in that he creates this fantastic world and overplot, but then just struggles putting everything together, combined with frequently mediocre writing. And of course, he died before finishing it, which may end up making my comparison to Martin even more apt. To be fair, I only read the first... 8? 9? books, and it was well over a decade ago. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the books, but I would put a lot of the fantasy genre above it.

My old favorite I'll recommend is the Death Gate Cycle, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. They also wrote another old favorite of mine, DragonLance (or at least the main cannon portion of that seemingly endless saga), which features my namesake, but I'm not sure how well some of those books will have aged (outside of the Legends trilogy, which is timeless because it focuses on Raistlin).

A more mature, darker fantasy is The First Law series by Joe Abercrombie. It's very anti-hero focused, and I enjoyed it immensely when I read it in college.

As for what I look for, many of the same things I look for in JRPGs: engaging characters and plot development. Magic and dragons are pretty cool too.

EDIT: And how can I forget the only ongoing fantasy series I currently keep up with, Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles. Some of the best writing in modern fantasy novels.