My Famous Fantasy Five? Here it comes...
1. The Lord of The Rings / The Silmarillion
The problem is, I really can't choose. Sometimes I like one better, sometimes the other. In a way, I like The Silmarillion more, all the great tales and the strong feelings it creates, but LotR, well, it is kind of a second home to me, so I can not choose.
2. The Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin
I reread these a year or two ago and I was astonished. Le Guin is a true master of stroytelling and world-creating and there is a lot of depth to her books. Her world is believable, intriguing and personal, one of the few fantasy universes that has seemed really real to me, like Middle-Earth. Le Guin's storytelling is something many fantasy authors could learn from: she manages to say the important without horribly long decorative phrases and her books (my Finnish copies of the first three books are 200+ pages each) are more complicated and breathtaking adventures than many 1000-page mammoths by various mainstream fantasy authors. There's something rough in Le Guin's style of writing and I like it very much. She also writes subtly and everytime you reread her books you find new things in them. Of her Earthsea books, the first three are certainly better than the latter ones (although they are far better than "average" fantasy as well) and
The Tombs of Atuan remains a particular favourite of mine with it's original atmosphere and mystical world that it's totally its own...
3. The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb
My absolute favourites of "lighter" fantasy. Hobb has said that the Farseer Trilogy was born when she thought of the most common fantasy clichés and decided to try if anything good could be made out of them. I must say she succeeded very well. When reading the books, none of the cliché-elements really bothered me, they were turned into somethign interesting enough and just fit the story perfectly. Hobb tells the story smoothly and her characters are excellent. I will probably remain awed for the rest of my life for how Hobb writes her main character who is also the narrator. In my opinion, it is a very difficult task to create a typical fantasy main character and still be able to make him a personality of his own and make him seem real. I think many fantasy protagonists even by good authors are haunted by a certain hollowness or simplicity that often totally lacks from the same author's side characters. This is not true in Hobb's case. Also, I must say Hobb is the author that had made me cry the most (after Tolkien, of course). Her books make me too sentimental. But when I first read The Farseer Series it was just amazing, for whatever mistake the protagonist did, I knew it was stupid, but I knew that I would have done the same in his situation as well. After a few reareads and growing up a bit I'm not so sure.
Anyway,
The Farseer Series are worth reading, like the trilogies that followed it (
The Liveship Traders and
The Tawny Man).
4. Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
I actually like Kay's alternative history novels (especially
The Lions of Al-Rassan and
A Song for Arbonne) more than his fantasy ones. Tigana, however, is almost the same level as those two I mentioned. It's the perfect book for anyone who looks for epic fantasy mixed with tragedy, political plotting, adventure and relationship drama.
5. ?
Now this is a place the holder of which depends on what I've been reading lately. Currently, I feel like nominating George R.R. Martin's to-be-megalomaniac epic fantasy series
The Song of Ice and Fire. Now that I think of it, it seems I have a soft spot for well-written epic fantasy with intriguing characters and lots of political plotting...