Harry Potter

I guess seeing this at the bottom of my list may be a surprise to the average person who has seen Harry Potter everywhere and on everything. To be honest I respect this series for its ability to bring kids into an amazing world full of imagination and wonder and to keep them hooked and reading. Every little kid should have a favorite book and I think Harry Potter was that book for many kids and still is today.

However, as an aspiring fantasy author(and someone who spends way too much time constructing worlds and thinking about how every absurd detail fits together to make a realistic, fake world(I know that doesn't make sense)), I am not a fan of the implementation of the fantasy elements.

Magic is convoluted and often makes little sense with new abilities thrown in at random times. I find this especially odd since the setting is at a school of magic, where magic should make the most sense and should be best explained. But I get it, I get it. Kids and most people don't want to know the details about how magic works and are perfectly fine with magic being, well, magic.

Wheel of Time

I wish I could put this higher. I seriously love this series so so much. It has an amazingly well constructed world, an incredibly intricate and interconnected magic system, and it has an overarching question about the nature of humanity that honestly can never and is never really answered.

And the main characters are also fantastic. I love how they all have these images and ideas hanging over them and the reader cannot help but keep reading to see those ideas fall and crash on the characters' heads or for them to reach up and find them.

But alas. This beautiful series has a major flaw, one such that I can't recommend it to most people even though I love it so dearly. Almost every female character in the series is extraordinarily similar and they often very annoying. And so the entire series has a shadow over it that makes it significantly less appealing to most readers, especially women. But I still think everyone should give it a shot. If the poorly written female characters don't completely ruin the experience for you though, then there is still a lot of fantastic plot, incredible characters(male), and well thought out fantasy elements for you to absolutely adore.

I hope someone can enjoy this series as much as I did(then I could talk about it with about it!!!)

The Inheritance Cycle(Eragon Series)

This was a book series that I really loved as a kid, and I imagine there is some childhood nostalgia playing into my love for it, but who wouldn't love a story revolving around dragons and magic? There is something truly magical about seeing things that you can barely imagine given a kind of life on the page. I feel this is especially true when talking about the powerful imagination of children, but I'd like to think this series isn't one simply for kids.

I guess I should note that this series had a movie made out of its first book, Eragon. But please, please, do not watch that movie. It was very poorly done and does no justice to the majesty and awe within the books. There is always something lost when you translate imagination into reality or film, and that movie suffered greatly from the transition.

Game of Thrones

If you haven't heard of this series you probably have not talked to anyone in a few years. Everyone knows this series, primarily from the incredibly popular show, but there are still a strong number that know it best from the books. I, however, don't quite fall into either of those categories.

I actually haven't finished reading the books that are out yet, but they are very good. The intense realism, gory realism, that Game of Thrones contains and puts its characters through is soul-crushing in an incredible way. However my personal grip is that it can be a little too soul-crushing. Life can be painful enough that sometimes the added pain of a character trying to wade through the fires of hell can be a little more than I'm willing to bear.

That being said though, the attention to realistic detail is something that has greatly inspired in my own fantasy writing. I hadn't fully considered how far I could go with the gritty brutality of a world until reading Game of Thrones. Now that I know what it looks like, I'm eager to include elements of it in my own writing.

Kingkiller Chronicle

I get it, if you don't read much fantasy you haven't heard of this. I honestly hadn't heard of it until half a year ago. Yet this series is so incredibly magical I cannot help wishing I had read this series much earlier.

Discounting Lord of the Rings, I think this is the only fantasy series I've read that has had genuinely beautiful scenes in it. Maybe a better word is precious or pure. This series is so fantastically written and covers such an insane net of ideas it boggles my mind.

Honestly the majority of the magic of this series comes out in the main character. He is such a complex figure that always seems to be adapting and changing in such rapid and intricate ways that the character becomes just as magical as the magic he uses.

And also, what a magic system. Absurdly complex yet ridiculously simple, it is such an incredibly weird system that must have sprung from some seriously fantastic inspiration. Patrick Rothfuss has an incredible imagination and he shows it very well.

Stormlight Archive

This series has everything that I adore about fantasy and it is all done to a kind of scientific perfection. The magic really feels magical and the characters come into their magic in some incredibly written scenes. Every character has an incredibly complex web of backstory that they have had to trudge through and still affects their actions. Every character has a story and that story becomes essential not only for the reader to understand the character, but for the characters to understand each other.

Even setting aside the characters, the world itself is ridiculous. The attention to detail in everything has been another incredible inspiration for me to plan out everything in the worlds I make. There seems to be no limit to how far Brandon Sanderson is willing to delve into the ins and outs of the world he created. Also there is so much I can't say without spoiling major points, and that is another sign of a good world in my mind.

Lord of the Rings

Yes of course, what did you expect? If it wasn't in any of the earlier spots, of course it had to be here. The dear grandfather of the fantasy genre. And what a powerful story it is.

Honestly, if all the absurd amount of detail about the world and its history and the characters that have lived in it didn't exist, I would still love this series with all my heart. Some people feel strong connections to poetry. Maybe it triggers some emotions and resonates well. Lord of the Rings is poetry. Maybe it is just poetry for me, but I cannot explain how much this story brings emotions out of me.

I don't have a better way to describe it other than beautiful. How else could you describe so many deep connections between such amazing characters. There is so much emotion in the text that I can't imagine that emotion NOT getting through to the other side. I've read this series around six times, and it isn't enough. It never will be.

If you haven't read this series, do yourself a favor and immerse yourself into this powerful story that will guide you on the most incredibly experience fantasy has to offer.