For it was a Hobbit hole, and that means Comfort

britgeekgrrl was posting the other day that she didn't really care for Fantasy, which surprised me, since she seems to channel a bunch of classic Fantasy archetypes without too much effort. So I asked her what she'd read, and was very surprised when we had almost exactly no overlap (or maybe not so surprised, since I rather like a lot of Fantasy, but care almost not at all for a lot of the formula fantasy published in the last decade and a half or so). So I went to my bookshelf and took down a list of all the fantasy, to find out what I expect people to have read, or at least encourage them to read. Some of this you'll probably like, some of it is barely readable canon.

( More Fantasy than you can shake a stick at. If you read this list of books, then you will have been exposed to an awful lot of the genre's classics. And you can write fantasy games and formula fantasy until your hands cramp irreparably. Note: there are no spoilers contained below. )

I'll do Science Fiction in another post.