|
I read a lot of Fantasy growing up (due to wanting "more like Tolkien"), especially (gasp) David Eddings and Terry Pratchett (although I'm not sure if he counts) but these days I read very little in the genre. I've invested so much time and effort into The Wheel of Time that I intend to read the recently-published final instalment at some point but really the only currently ongoing/modern Fantasy which interests me is Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicle, which is interesting enough. I found Brandon Sanderson's much-lauded The Way of Kings to be very boring and after reading A Game of Thrones I had no interest in continuing the series any further. I found myself unable to complete Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora.
That being said I grew up as part of the original Harry Potter generation and those books will always be extremely dear to my heart. I also quite enjoyed Titus Groan if that counts. I'm also quite keen on classic science-fiction such as Asimov, Clarke and Philip K. Dick. Otherwise I'm pretty dispirited by modern Fantasy, and mostly read "literature" for desperate want of a better word (what is Fantasy but "literature" set in imaginary worlds?) - I'm currently awash in Moby-Dick. I'm particularly fond of Modernism, Hemingway especially. I'm afraid personally for me in terms of Fantasy that Professor Tolkien's work sets the bar much too high - his timeless and elegant prose style, his level of detail and invention and his enormous thematic applicability give something to me that other Fantasy authors never have. There's something I find intensely satisfying about old-fashioned prose in particular, which I think is one of the reasons I enjoy, along with Professor Tolkien, authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
|