i love asoiaf but it’s hard to start rereading atm of course
Unsure about quaint but Discworld is absolutely pleasant and grows a delightful lore around itself. General advice is skip the first two (Pratchett was just figuring it out) and come back to them when you already love Rincewind.
Second vote for Discworld
Guards! Guards!
Mort
Wyrd Sisters
Are all good places to start.
Small Gods is my goto reccomendation for starting points, it’s completely self contained and one of Pratchett’s best works
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Thirded. Discworld is great.
Small Gods and Reaper Man ftw.
Just to add that the BBC has done good audio dramatisations of several of Pratchet’s works.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03mz1wb/episodes/guide
Small Gods and Mort for example, are excellent. Currently not available on bbc iplayer / sounds, although they do regularly rebroadcast them and make them available online, but should be floating around on the torrent or archive sites.
BBC sounds/radio is free to listen outside the UK, unlike the tv content.
I love the first 2 and it’s where I started, I don’t see anything wrong with them and I will die on that hill.
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I agree. The Colour of Magic is what got me into Discworld and I thoroughly enjoyed it as a standalone for a while.
I really don’t think they’re bad or even worse than the rest. I do feel like they’re so different from the other books that whether someone liked them or not doesn’t tell them if they’ll like the rest, which is the only reason I don’t recommend it as a taster before deciding on whether to read the other 30+ tomes.
I tried reading Mort, but it’s very… dense. While I do enjoy the occasional book with flowery, descriptive language, I got a quarter of the way through it and no real plot happened.
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Ah friend, may i interest you in some nice meat pies? Currently two for the price of three. Black crunchy bits included.
The Discworld series might be what you’re looking for.
For pleasantness and YA high fantasy vibe Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle is great.
For wizard school with a much more mature tone R.F. Kuang’s Babel is a great read. Warning though it is much darker and heavier, so prepare yourself emotionally haha.
Just to add a couple of thoughts to this.
Earthsea is often described as being rather mature despite being YA. I agree. There’s a clarity and immediacy to Le Guin’s writing style that cuts straight to the point while also providing clear images and characters which is combined with deep and arguably universal themes and sometimes nice allegory.
Additional to this, the series goes or progresses in surprising directions. As is so often the case, Le Guin didn’t intend to write as many books as she did, but used the opportunity to do interesting or personal things with each book. While there’s a continuity throughout the whole series, it’s not a simple or single story but rather multiple stories with large or important intersections. You could for instance stop any time you like and not really miss out on any satisfying climactic ending.
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For Kuang I agree that they are generally enjoyable reads (or rather, exciting or suspenseful, I suppose) but I would strongly hesitate to put them into a recommendation looking for quaint and pleasant.
Her books go fairly detailed into gore and excesses of violence and sexual abuse, more so for her earlier works. So - good reads but come prepared.
Yes I think Babel is a little lighter on gorey excess than the Poppy Wars (which I haven’t read but my partner has described in detail to me). Which is to be expected for books designed to depict the horrors of colonialism.
But mainly mentioning it with a content warning since it’s often tossed around as an HP replacement. I think the first half of Babel captures a similar “wonders of magic school” vibe, although with a lot more caveats about how inequitable the entire system is. It does get extremely harrowing by the end so maybe should include a clearer warning in my post.
I think that’s completely fair!
light spoilers for Babel
And I also think you hit the nail on the head with both the way it introduces the ‘magical’ world and then pulls the rug out underneath you and protagonist in quite a distressing fashion. Pretty clever actually!
His Dark Materials
Agreed, especially now that the second trilogy is underway. Hoping the next book follows the same more mature progression and can wrap up the story in a satisfying way.
I got the trilogy as a used box set recently and I really wanted to love them but just didn’t click for me. Don’t read a lot of YA now anyway so maybe missed my chance, definitely see the appeal though and think it’s a good fit for OP’s request!
Brandon Sanderson Cosmere fits the bill and is super easy to get into.
The Mistborn series might fit your description the most. But my personal favorite is The Stormlight Archive. The Stormlight Archive is what got me back into reading.
What makes the Cosmere so easy and enjoyable to get into is that different series are only vaguely connected. They take place in the same universe but on different worlds or realms. But since they share the same creation “myth” there are similarities between these worlds. When getting started a lot of the connections feel more like an easter egg. An easter egg that teaches you about the history of the universe.
But each series is basically self contained. Most characters and people aren’t even aware of the existance of these different worlds. The focus is mostly on the specific world. Meaning you don’t have to worry about reading order or missing out. Heck, if you don’t enjoy a specific series you can even skip it without losing too much.
There are a few unpublished or planned books that will focus on the connection of these worlds, on characters that travel between them. They will probably be the most enjoyable if you read everything in the Cosmere.
Sanderson has some amazing books, but I wouldn’t describe any of them as quant or pleasant. They’re pretty dark.
His Dark Materials aka the Golden Compass books
An obvious choice for me is The Hobbit. It hits a completely different and more adventurous feeling to LoTR, while still hinting at the lore that would follow. Sometimes I think I might prefer to LoTR in general tbh.
The Amber Chronicles by Zelazny
Branden Sanderson has a bunch of good series that fit the description.
The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty was very enjoyable. Still YA, but engaging throughout.
Raymond E. Feist’s Magician series was quite engaging, I thought… though I read it many many years ago.
Percy Jackson… kind of? Still a tad childish.
If you’re looking for something less childish (or not YA) and less bigoted, I would suggest not thinking just in terms of series, but in terms of prolific authors.
People have mentioned the Discworld series, which is a series in the loosest sense of the word. They occur in the same universe and the books share characters. There’s individual storylines with min the series as well (eg the Witches books). You can start pretty much anywhere because each of the books is self-contained, and when you do stumble across, for example, the origin story of a character you liked from a novel where they were appearing as a costar, it’s always a bit more fun than if you had worried about getting all the backstories down in the first place.
I’d also recommend Neil Gaiman. His works are even less collected than Discworld, but there are commonalities and shared mythologies that make them feel coherent. Good Omens is where I’d start - it’s a feel good rom com about the antichrist and the end of the world. American Gods. Graveyard Book. The Sandman series is pretty brilliant both as a graphic novel and as a full-production audiobook. He has a ton of other work, too.
Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy is a compelling piece of pretty accurate historical fiction incorporating the great figures and events in science and politics of the 18th century (Newton, Leibniz, Hanover, the English civil war, Hooke, cryptography, natural philosophy, puritanism, capitalism, and so on). In total it runs a bit over 2000 pages. It’s not high fantasy though. It’s more like historical (science?) fiction.
The David Eddings books are excellent.
I’m re-reading them again and quite like them, but OP might not - depending on what they consider bigotry and how sensitive they are. It was written in the 80s (Belgariad, anyway) and sensibilities have moved on a bit.
Especially ethnicity is very simplistic in the Belgariad - these races are mostly good, these races are mostly bad, each one has a pithy stereotype and people seem to behave more or less like theirs dictates. That seems unfortunate, but in-universe this is justified - the races really are significantly different through selection (7 gods each picked their people), breeding and religious pressure. One of the gods is the Big Bad, making for an “evil race”. The story is not quite that black and white, but it’s also only as complicated as needed.
I think taking it as commentary is a big mistake - at worst it’s still just kinda lazy, IMO - but some people will likely get offended by it anyway. (“This will probably offend Polgara, but that’s too bad. If it wasn’t this, she’d just find something else.”)
I would still recommend it to anyone who likes irreverent (for the 80s) High Fantasy - the story is bog standard YA Fantasy/coming-of-age etc., but then the story isn’t really the point. While not Tolkien or Sanderson level worldbuilding, it certainly fits the lore part.
Because I’m on a similar search and have never heard of Eddings, I immediately googled him and found that he and his wive spend a year in prison because the abused their adopted son. It sounds to me this is something OP would take into consideration…
Wow, I totally missed that…
“these details did not resurface in media coverage of the couple during their successful joint career as authors, only returning to public attention several years after both had died.”
She died in 2007, he died in 2009.
The Riftwar Saga! Such a fun series that is criminally under-appreciated.
Martha Wells. ‘Death of the Necromancer’ is a stand alone. Thief and his actress mistress are on a course of vengeance, get side tracked by evil. ‘The Wizard Hunters’ is the first book of a follow up trilogy featuring their daughter. First book is 1890’s tech plus magic, and the trilogy is WW1 level tech. Airships and ocean liners.
