Hey guys so I'm a super amateur at fantasy and reading in general, but the past few years I have been intrigued by the genre wrt tv. Iove got but didn't want to read it just yet. So far I have only read Hobbs farseer series and really am enjoying it. I understand it is probably a bit more simple than what you guys read currently, but do yall have any recommendations for me on what to read next?

I am not huge into dragons or magic but don't mind if they are involved. I guess I probably like character driven stories with a bit of adventure 😳. I have heard erikson is great but just unsure

Quick list of books I enjoyed:

The Name of the Wind
The Lies of Locke Lamora
The Blade Itself
Harry Potter

Other books that are not A-tier but still something I enjoyed:

The Prince of Thorns
The Way of Shadows (pity the sequels are much, much worse)

Something I'm planning to read:


The Way Of Kings
Gardens Of The Moon
A Wizard Of Earthsea

If you don't want to start ASOIAF yet, you could read 'A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' by Martin. It's a collection of 3 stories that take place ~90 years before AGOT.

Name of the wind ainec.

Thanks I'll check those out

Name of the Wind definitely.

Other stuff I recall liking but it's been 15+ years since I read:
Guy Gavriel Kay (his stuff tends to be more historical fiction than high fantasy)
The Last Unicorn, The Princess Bride: different in many ways but both are very meta/postmodern fantasy)
Earthsea trilogy is definitely in the high fantasy mold and magic heavy, but on the shorter side and very well written, a good intro to the genre imo

+1 to Name of the Wind

I was and still am COMPLETELY lost with Aryas storyline, why did she leave? I assume her training was 100% complete? I understand she wanted to go home, but thought there would be more to it.


Book 6 will coveriit better i guess

she left cause she had to after deciding not to kill the actress (and any "good" people im guessing)?

and also realized she was/and still wanted to be arya stark with the play.

nothing to do with the books obv

makes sense, at first I thought the actress really did something bad. didn't know the assassins killed innocents.

They kill whoever they get paid to kill right? They're assassins. Either that or they get some kind of sign from the many faced god when somebody asks them to do a killing.

Mistborn is a great series by Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson is the McDonald's of fantasy writing.

hell no

fantasy writing is fantasy writing

as far as fantasy writing goes, hes one of the best restaurants in the world. Easily.

Stormlight archive is elite

Agreed. Unfortunately will take us a long time to get the conclusion for that as well.

think words of radiance is by far the highest book on goodreads.com (4.76/5 with 83 000 reviews).

one of the highest of any genres too (bias or not)

Haven't read Stormlight, but Mistborn was the definition of mediocrity. Terrible characters, poor pacing, cool magic system.

recently read his The reckoners trilogy from Sanderson (basically random people with weird superhero powers), really liked it. Felt different from other "fantasy" stuff.

Anyways, I'm a fan. Mistborn wasnt really in my favourites of his. Still give it at least 7/10 probably more though.

Maybe I'll give Stormlight a try; I thought Elantris was decent.

I gave up on Mistborn after the prologue.

I've tried to read Malazan twice now and both times failed to make it though the character appendix at the start of the book

I loled but the character appendix was incredibly tilting for the opposite reason: it wasn't nearly in depth enough. Toll the Hounds in particular you're reintroduced to a cast of characters you haven't seen in 5 books and the appendix is lacking to the point where it's obvious that the author was straight up trolling. I can see how Quick Ben could have an almost blank entry since by this point everyone will know who he is, but there's other characters that just about no one would remember, and they'd have a one word entry like "mage" or "trader" or something like that.

Might be exaggerating a bit there since I haven't read it in years, but it's close enough.

Also obligatory: If you're going to tackle that series good malazan reread of the fallen as a companion piece and you'll enjoy it 10x more.

yeah the appendix is mostly intentional humor

*about to finish the 8th book. God I love Kruppe. Iskaral & co have hilarious dialogues too.


It's crazy how Erikson's writing has evolved over the years/books . I can almost feel Erikson descending into insanity (in the most genius way) as he throws out huge paragraphs about humanity and stuff. If I'm not completely focused on the reading I forget what was said and described for a few pages

You underestimate Sanderson, he can write several books per year. Before SA3 he has been busy with so many different projects but he has said that soon he will focus more on SA.

Sanderson can write several books per year, but most are YA novels. And honestly I felt the last Mistborn book read more like a YA novel.

*ok i was exagerating by a lot he doesnt actually write 4-5 books per year.