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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krypter" data-source="post: 4612754" data-attributes="member: 15016">Since my original reply was eaten long ago by the great Database Crash Dragon, I'd like to once again bump this thread and thank mmadsen (and Mr. Ratecliffe, of course) for bringing these books to our attention. This list rekindled my love of fantasy at a time when I had grown bored of it, and inspired me to read a lot of other great literature as well. That said, here's my quick 1-second review of them:Hobberdy Dick: 5/5, warm, wonderful and filled with fairy glamour and good English values.The Hobbit: 5/5, exciting, thoughtful and quintessentially adventurous.The Books of Wonder: 3/5, kind of hit-or-miss, with some Dunsany greats along with a few tepid storiesTales of Averoigne: 4/5, I think the words "purple prose" where invented for CAS, but his worlds do stand out and his sentences are adventures in themselves. The Book of Three Dragons: 5/5, glorious and epic, full of celtic wit and the best use of a bard as a hero that I've ever read. Watership Down: 2/5, quite disappointing. I never empathized with the characters and the plot was downright banal. A long read for not much reward. The Night Land: 4/5, brilliant imagery but marred by the saccharine love-words of a teenage poet. Recommended with reservations.  The Face in the Frost: 2/5, completely went over head, I think, because I just didn't get into Sir Bacon running around after an amorphous threat and cowering at every knock on the door. A Wizard of Earthsea: 5/5, an fantastic, organic world with a magic system that puts most others to shame, though the "deep plot" isn't as deep as it seemed when I first read it as a teenager. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: 5/5, long, but worth the extended opium hallucinations and Lovecraft's trademark florid prose. The Worm Ouroboros: 5/5, brilliantly written in an affected style, but the unsympathetic characters almost drove me mad. Yes, I was rooting for the villains most of the time. Also, bring an unabridged OED along, you'll need it. Bridge of Birds: 5/5, wonderful, uplifting, funny as hell and amazingly fun adventure in a China that never was. Recommended. A Voyage to Arcturus: 4/5, trippy: oh yeah. Surreal, experimental and very thoughtful, it yanked fantasy into places later explored by Burroughs and Herbert. Silverlock: 5/5, a truly inspiring read, though the adventurer himself is not exactly a hero. Maybe this should be first on the list, to bring people into the Commonwealth of Letters? Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: 5/5, the best of primeval sword-and-sorcery combined with a wit and flair that hasn't been matched since. Later books get a little less interesting, but the first 4 are gold. Collected Ghost Stories: 3/5, meh, well written but not my style and will generally not have the expected effect on modern readers as it would have had on the delicate sensibilities of Victorian ladies. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld: 5/5, beautiful, poetic and heart-wrenching, the best example of a fantasy story that reveals the hundred-fold emotions of its protagonists. Definitely recommended. The Well at the World's End: 4/5, good medieval romance but a little long-winded. Tragedy, stout hearts, betrayals and many turns of the road make this a fantasy that's quite unpredictable. I've now got my own list of fantasy favorites, starting with Grendel, and I hope Mr. Ratecliffe will one day continue his series of articles. So what are you waiting for? Get reading! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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