nostalgebraist:

Me and the fantasy genre have a problem. I just can’t enjoy it most of the time and I don’t know why!

I liked Narnia when I was very very young. From then on, no luck, neither with “classics” nor with anything else. LotR? Listened to an abridged book-on-tape as a childhood insomniac and spent…

Here’s a selection of things that might appeal. They almost deliberately have nothing in common except for being about as far away from Tolkien derivatives as I can find and covering a relatively wide selection of types of books. Also this list is in order of how readily they came to mind rather than how strongly I recommend them to you because I don’t know you well enough to know which items are likely to actually appeal. I recommend looking at descriptions of them and seeing which jump out at you.

• The Chalion series by Lois McMaster Bujold. though if you haven’t already read Bujold’s sci-fi and you like sci-fi I would probably recommend starting with the Vorkosigan books. Note: Bujold has various other fantasy series. I also like her wide green world books but think if you haven’t read much fantasy I think they’re a bad place to start.
• The Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Note: Give it more than 5 pages. I was initially turned off by the opening scene because it comes off as a bit up itself, but it gets better rapidly.
• The PC Peter Grant series by Ben Aarononovitch (Rivers of London, etc). This one’s very different and is in the “urban fantasy” subgenre (A friend describes books like this as wizardcop. This is amongst the most literal instances of wizardcop.)
• The Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews. Solidly pulpy but very enjoyable. Post-apocalyptic urban fantasy. Note: Contains werewolves and vampires (the latter somewhat non-traditionally so, the former fairly standard) if those are as off-putting as elves.
• The Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Galliger. Utterly adorable steampunk. Also contains vampires and werewolves. Note: Everyone I have ever recommended this series to goes from “What? Are you serious?” to “OMG THESE BOOKS ARE AMAZING”. This may be a function of small sample size / sampling bias, but it’s at least suggestive.
• Chronicles of an Age of Darkness by Hugh Cook: Note: These books are out of print so may be difficult to find. They are however amazing. They contain a lot of sci-fi as well as fantasy, but you have to make it about halfway through the series before this becomes apparent and it’s a very long series. I recommend not starting here but they’re worth a try.
• The Farsala trilogy by Hilari Bell. Enjoyable both in its own right and as a sort of deconstruction of how myths get made.
• The Farseer series by Robin Hobb.
• The Legends of Ethshar series by Lawrence Watt Evans. This is a bit of an obscure recommendation. I mostly include it because it’s a bunch of pleasantly light stories in a well constructed and interesting world.
• The Steerswoman Series by Rosemary Kirstein. This one is actually blatantly science-fiction and not fantasy, but it’s sufficiently in the guise of fantasy that this might work for you.

…ok, I’ve probably overwhelmed you with enough recommendations now.