They have George RR Martin but not Erikson, curses.
I consider George RR Martin to be a bit of a hack, no matter how popular he becomes. It drives me crazy when he has a character act in a certain way for 800 pages and then suddenly jump the shark.
They have George RR Martin but not Erikson, curses.
On the other hand, there are plenty of actually good fantasy novels in there, and I hope no-one begrudges me wishing there were a few more instead of the fantasy-factory type novels. (I admit to the possibility of good fantasy tie-in novels while remaining ignorant of an actual example.) Where is Jack Vance's Lyonesse? And they really, really should have included Joe Abercrombie.
For example I just realized that Steven Brust isn't on the list which actually surprises me quite a bit - I would have figured his Vlad novels were inspirational to someone working on the game.
Well it's gone from a list of books that inspired Gygax to a list of books that inspired Gygax and various other unnamed developers of the game. It's not really a list of fantasy fiction you should read because it's good, more of a list of fantasy fiction you might want to read if you want to get into the headspace of the people who made the game. Abercrombie hasn't been writing that long - I'm not really surprised that he wouldn't rank as a major influence on the game developers. Your influences are more likely to be things from your formative years than awesome books you just picked up recently, and the older you get the farther back "recently" stretches.
I'm more surprised by certain older omissions that I would be sure would have been there. For example I just realized that Steven Brust isn't on the list which actually surprises me quite a bit - I would have figured his Vlad novels were inspirational to someone working on the game.