I have others, but guess I have to wait for future days to post them. (What's the point of that, exactly? Seems more irritating than anything else. Also, more likely to dissuade participation -shortening your lists- as people just don't return, forget, and/or have other things to do [irl] besides returning just to type out one item, than it would lengthen your threads/responses.)
I was being pessimistic and thinking some folks would just come in and dump 50 without comment. Was hoping for just the top few, wanted everyone (well, lots of people) to have the chance to add something new to the list, and was hoping it would encourage some commentary.
What makes these better than Sword of Shannara? In the circles I run in the Shannara books are not.. well received. So, I'm curious what the difference is.
A lot of people consider The Sword of Shannara to be derivative of Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring. (I'm not sure why Sword gets singled out while other, even more derivative works get a pass, but anyway.) I feel like once that reputation was established, readers began to apply it to all of Terry Brooks' works.
Whether you believe the critics or not, you'll find that The Heritage of Shannara series is less derivative than the first trilogy. The setting is the same, but the plot, the tone, and the character arcs are more modern and Brooks manages to avoid many (but not all, alas) of the bad fantasy tropes that are prevalent in the genre.
Another big difference is that Heritage is much more representative. In The Sword of Shannara, there is only one female character (Shirl), and she has a very minor presence in the story...essentially she exists solely for another major character to rescue (by accident, I might add) and fall in love with. That old "woman as a quest reward" trope is everywhere in the whole fantasy fiction genre, and The Sword of Shannara is hardly the worst offender, but it's a solid criticism.
In contrast, Heritage has numerous female characters that are essential for driving the plot (Wren Ohmsford, Quickening, Damson Rae...), and they are much better written. There's at least one black main character (Walker Boh, the titular "Druid of Shannara" of book 2) as well. It's not a perfect book series; there's a heavy-handed "doomed romance" arc that today's readers might roll their eyes at, but it's still much better than the terrible "broken bird" trope in Elfstones of Shannara (the second book of the previous Sword of Shannara trilogy.)
If you don't want to wade through the archaic language, I recommend The Night Land, A Story Retold (2011) by James Stoddard. A more intelligible, and frankly better, telling of the story.
Can't remember the exact title, but we had a book of "weapons and armours through the centuries" (or something like that) when I was a kid. So not exactly a novel or even fiction, but it was one of my earliest important inspiration and foundation of my love for things medieval. Later there were bandes-dessinées (Belgian-school of "comics") such as Thorgal that cemented that interest, or even Johan and Pirloui (and the smurfs). And then the classic novels proper (LotR series et al)
For my kids and their friends however, the question is more like : "what one book/series were you inspired to read because of D&D?"
