CBG Fantasy Book Rankings [Discussion]

[LordVreeg]

I gotta say, I'm surprised at how well rated Memory Sorrow & Thorn is. It was the first series of books that I put down without finishing. Of course that was a lot of years ago, so I may like it more now.

Also, as I said in my vote, more of you need to read The Black Company (Glen Cook) and the Malazan Book of the Fallen (Steven Erikson)

Oh, yes, the Black Company books do indeed rock.  They get high praise from me.

[Acrimone]

Oh, yes, the Black Company books do indeed rock.  They get high praise from me.

I'm currently working my way through them, but they seem pretty good so far.  I'm taking a short break from it, though, to read something my wife recommended: The Excalibur Murders.  Don't know what I think about this yet.

[SDragon]

I'm still surprised more people haven't read the Alice books, personally.

By the way, what's a good Pratchett book to start with? My local library has some, but I don't think they're in order.

[Llum]

The first one I ever read was Guards Guards, its the first book with Vimes in it, pretty good. The first Discworld book is The Colour of Magic.

The thing about the Discworld is that there's several different groups of people that are followed in the books.

The Witches, The Watch, Moist von Lipwig, Tiffany Aching, Ricewind are all main chars in multple books. So people who like one group (The Watch) might not like the books of another group.

[Newspaper]

The ranking thread is nice, but I think it would be more helpful to have a thread where people posted with their favorite books they think others would enjoy. Then you could tally how many people suggested the books so people can see "Hey this book was suggested by five people. I should look into reading it."

[SDragon]

Has anybody ever read the Everworld Series? It's a YA series by K.A. Applegate (of Animorphs fame), about four from the suburbs of Chicago who inexplicably meet up early one morning, notice a girl whom they all have some connection to, and... get (literally) dragged into a nightmarishly primitive alternate universe known as Everworld. Now, of course, they have to find a permanent way back home... if they can survive long enough in such an intensely foreign reality.

[Llum]

I've never read it, someone I knew a long time ago read it and said it was pretty good. I've read most of Animorphs (the same person I knew was obsessed with them), they're not that bad. Cliche but still throwing a few curve balls.

My favorite book I ever read by her was the Elmist or Tales of the Elmist or something. Its the origin story of the Elmist a sorta cosmic being who upholds good.

Well Newspaper you could always just check and see who voted for what book, so if several people rank it highly you can read it.

Most of my favorite books are science fiction so I won't mention them here, but some of the best fantasy novels I've read are The Black Company by Glenn Cook, His Dark Meterials by Philip Pullman, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin and The Hungry Cities chronicles by Philip Reeve (bordering on science fiction but its more science fantasy). WoT is also good.

[the_taken]

The very first novel I read was The Hobbit, awesome. My mother read it to me, then I started over and read it for myself. Best time I ever spent reading a book.

I tried to follow up with The Fellowship, but there was something different about it. It just seemed to drag on. I put it down a few pages into the realization that some forest was deciding to have different path today. Didn't touch anything close to a novel for a year.

6th grade, some spoiled brat ripped his animorph #2 in half and left it, and #1 on the ground outside his school. I collected most of the series 'till one of the mains became a butterfly for good. I also read a bunch of Babysitter's Club and Boxcar Kids on the side.

Hidden in the school library I found "Wizard's First Rule". This one was nice, but I stop liking the series after the third book. I kept reading 'till the sixth cause it was the closest thing to porn I had access to. The climax of the sixth was really awesome, but everything in between just isn't worth it. Did Goodkind finish the series, or is he still trying to drag it on with more anti-communism propaganda?

High school gave me access to much better books. Like Xanth and Pern, as well as Encyclopedias. Now I own a really big thesaurus, just cause I like flipping thru it and finding random alternate words.

My random picks you'd probably never have bothered with otherwise:
Thieves and Kings by Mark Oakley: This is comic book series that's been cut short, but what little there is has that childhood charm everyone will enjoy. Poetic and epic, this is a neglected treasure.
Speed of Darkness: The authors name escapes me. Third of the first run of StarCraft novels. The first feels like a really good fan-fic, while the second is bad one. Speed of Darkness is a heart tugging tragedy and enhances the SC setting. A movie adaptation would make me weep.
Reboot: I know it's a TV series. Watch v1.09: Wizards, Warriors, and a Word from our Sponsor
Actually, you can get allot of crazy ideas from watching reboot, since they did every trope they could in 4 short seasons and a couple of made for TV movies.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

The ranking thread is nice, but I think it would be more helpful to have a thread where people posted with their favorite books they think others would enjoy. Then you could tally how many people suggested the books so people can see "Hey this book was suggested by five people. I should look into reading it."

The table actually does tally how many people voted for the book (though not how many gave it good votes).

Feel free to create such a list  ;)

Actually, I don't know that I'll continue updating it much longer. It was a nice project, but I've got lot's of other projects, too.

What would be really cool is if there was some way to make polls work such that the rankings could be automatically generated and each member could vote on every series, so that no one had to maintain it by hand.

[Newspaper]

I understand it was designed to be helpful, but I always felt rankings were more likely to turn people away from a book rather than try it and make their own opinion. If people would support it I would gladly make a list where people post their top three 'gotta read this book'.

[Superfluous Crow]

Well, i can only speak for myself, but my list of "gotta read" books would shift around quite a lot as i read new things.

[Furor]

Robert. E. Howard
George R.R Martin
Gene Wolfe
Storm Constantine
Mervyn Peake
Robin Hobb
Raymond E. Feist

All of them a bit more realistic and dark, more mature fantasy than say Harry Potter or some of the other fluffy, pointless garbage they market. I'd put R.R Martin, Howard, Peake and Wolfe at the top, with the rest trailing after as great...but not earthshakingly so.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

Only three works might be kind of limiting. Even three authors restricts things a lot.

My three favorite authors are Frank Herbert, George R. R. Martin, and Brandon Sanderson.

[Superfluous Crow]

Is Sanderson that good? Hadn't really heard of him before it was announced he was going to finish WoT

[Matt Larkin (author)]

Ishy and I have very different opinions on the matter ;)

I absolutely loved Mistborn (you'll see it's one of the few books I gave a 10). While he thought Elantris (Sanderson's first book) was weak.

One of the many things I loved about Mistborn, is that each book feels complete, but by the end of the last you see things in the first a whole new light. Little threads planted so carefully, memorable, but seemingly unimportant until you realize it holds everything together.