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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6356321" data-attributes="member: 18">I'd be fascinated to know who wrote the list for Appendix E, because it seems extremely idiosyncratic for a list of D&D-inspirational reading in 2014.I mean, it seems like there are some pretty mainstream/solid fantasy authors missing, as people have illustrated, but others with similar content/writing skill are present. Other choices are pretty bizarre, even actively obscurantist-seeming, with plenty of poorly or questionably-regarded authors present.I mean, obviously missing to me (several people have mentioned most of these):Steven Erikson/MalazanSteven R. Donaldson/Thomas CovenantDavid Eddings/BelgariadAnne McCaffery/PernDavid Gemmel/LegendRaymond Feist/RiftwarTH White/Once and Future KingSteven Brust/Vlad TaltosJK Rowling/PotterKatherine Kurtz/DeryniTad Williams/Memory, Sorrow and ThornI mean, I don't like all those authors or think they're awesome (in fact, I don't like most of them!) but not including them when you're including stuff like Nikolai Tolstoy's Coming of the King (the first of a trilogy which stalled -apparently permanently - in 1988, and which is neither in print nor available as an e-book) or Manly Wade Wellman (a least Golgotha is in print in collections and Kindle), or a number of the other older authors who are neither critically well-regarded nor, well, really even in-print, is pretty strange.Some others I can see skipping - Bakker/Prince of Nothing is kind of "beyond the pale", even by fantasy standards, making stuff like Martin and Cook look censorious and entirely prim and proper by comparison, for example (and he's really derivative of Tolkien in a very odd way, so doesn't really add much to fantasy, imho). Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains series is brave and defiant in certain ways, but it's not actually his best work (nowhere near the Takeshi Kovacs stuff or arguably even Black Man or whatever it was called in the US), so I can see missing it outOthers that I'd personally definitely have included - Robin Hobb - Assassin and Live Ship trilogies for sure. Joe Abercrombie is low fantasy but as on-point as any of the others, and certainly not that scary or weird, and very popular. I know that there are others who are escaping me right now, too. Clive Barker's Imajica for sure, too (that normally makes these list so particularly surprising not to see it here).One thing I will say - almost all the real "must haves", like, serious "DO NOT PASS GO" authors, the best actual writers, both old and new - they are on here - Tolkien, LeGuin, Leiber, Howard, Moorcock, Zelzany, Wolfe etc. for the older school, Pratchett, Mieville, Martin, Lynch, Rothfuss, Jemisin, Kay, and others for the newer.So it's not a bad list, just a kind of odd one.</blockquote>

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