Where we post our fantasy recommendations

[Eilathen]

I hope this is not perceived as a snarky/passive agressive thread, but i really do think it is a shame that we did not see all those recs that got sent in for the guild-lists.

So here is the chance to collect fantasy recommendations for us guilders. If you have a book or a series that you think is a "must read" in fantasy, go ahead and post it here. It is especially helpful if you can do a short "why do i like it" thing...i mean i will inform myself via the internet anyway (and probably you'll do that as well ), but it still is a big help if you tell us why it is good.

About the elephant in the room - yes, it is hard to define what is fantasy and what is not. So i will not try to define it here. I think some things are clearly Sci Fi instead of Fantasy, but if you think your book(s) need to be mentioned here, go ahead.

I'm very curious to see what you gals and guys read ... let us see if we can help each other find good things to read.

So here is my starting it off entry:

Steven Erikson

Malazan Book of the Fallen (Book 1 is named Gardens of the Moon)

Why i like it: I have never read anything that big and complex, ever. The worldbuilding is spectacular and his prose is also pretty sophisticated (i am not a native English speaker). Steven is an anthropologist and archaeologist and it clearly shows...his races and cultures are very well thought out and have a lot of depth which gives his world an authenticity that i haven't seen in many a fantasy novel so far.

Fair warning: Steven is a "show, don't tell" kind of author. He just throws you in at the deep end and he does not like to explain things via his characters. You have to read on and find out. I know lots of folks who didn't get through the first 200 pages of Gardens of the Moon. But if you do, i don't think you'll regret it. It's a hell of a ride.

[Redrobes]

I am sure that ChickPea put all the recs received into the final posts.

https://www.cartographersguild.com/c...tions-(Part-I)

https://www.cartographersguild.com/c...ions-(Part-II)

I dont understand the logic of running a parallel version of ChickPeas book recommendations. We have been running the guild > 10 years and as soon as ChickPea starts one then we have to have a 2nd ? If you have a recommendation for a fantasy book or series then post it to ChickPea using the instructions set out in the thread.

https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=39357

[Eilathen]

Here's what chickpea said (several times) in that thread:

Please PM me with your answers. Please do not post them here. This thread is for asking any questions you may have. It's not for posting your recommendations.

I wanted a thread to post the Recs to.

She also said that there will be no new Parts for the fantasy side of things (and i am not sure she used all the Recs she got in the 2 parts we have so far...she said something along the lines of "and we will collect the best recs into a list...").
So i thought we could use a usual (as in, i find those kind of threads on almost all forums i frequent) fantasy recommendation thread. Some users expressed their regret that the recs are not posted in the other thread as well, so i opened this one.

If the Mods/Admin decide that they do not want it, you can close it. Although i do think it would be nice to have an official Recs thread for fantasy.

[Falconius]

Pretty sure I've seen a few recommendation threads around here before, though those may have been digressions from another topic. I don't remember.

I'm also pretty sure that Chickpea's goal was to put together some organized articles/survey's for the site, not make an inexhaustible list of book recommendations. In other words there is still a place for such a thread if it does not already exist.

[ChickPea]

Hey Eilathen,

There were only a small number of submissions I didn't use. There were a couple of suggestions for books by the same author. If you enjoy one book by an author, you're naturally going to seek out more of their work on your own. I wanted to cover a broad spectrum of book suggestions, so it seemed redundant to include multiple books/series from the same author. There was one other submission that didn't quite meet the criteria I asked, but apart from that, I pretty much included everything that was submitted. That's why there won't be another fantasy post. I don't have any more suggestions to use!

The whole point of the blog posts was to get some fresh content on the front page. Robbie tells us that keeping the front page updated helps to boost the Guild's profile in search engines, but it's hard to come up with ideas/time for new content. I already spend a ridiculous amount of time preparing daily tweets, as well as the twice-a-month challenge winners posts, so we thought some articles with content generated by the community might be a good idea. It's not too much to ask you guys to write a little review of your favourite book. This gives us some decent material to put in an article, and in return you might get a suggestion or two for some reading material. Seemed like a win-win scenario. The reason I was being strict about not posting in that other thread is because.. well... what's the post in creating an article if everyone's already read what's posted in the thread?

However, if people would prefer to post their books here, then I think we'll have to shelve the idea of future blog posts. There isn't much point.

[Greason Wolfe]

So here is an idea.... What if we continue to submit recommendations through the link and maybe once a week there can be a new blog post of some sort listing one recommendation? Not being a blogger myself, I don't know how time consuming that might be for you, but it would produce new content on a regular basis which would be a good thing, yes? Or would it be simpler/easier if we just did our own blog postings to keep the new content coming in?

[ChickPea]

You can certainly create your own blog posts, but they won't show on the front page.

I have to be blunt and say that I'm not sure there'll be enough submissions to create weekly posts. These things tend to fizzle out unless people are constantly being reminded. Even with me pushing the fantasy books blog post, and with the thread running for 2 - 3 weeks, I got about 25(ish) submissions and those faded away towards the end. This was ample for two blog posts, but I assumed I'd received all I was going to get for fantasy, and that's why I was considering another genre.

[Straf]

I think it's a cracking idea myself because there are some books in there that I'd be interested in reading but had not heard of before. I also think a sci-fi one would be good. Perhaps it could be repeated in a few months where new submissions could be blogged, if there were enough sent in. Another thing that might work is RPG reviews or just some information. A summary of different types of RPG.

[ChickPea]

Hey Straf, yeah, I thought a couple of gaming-themed posts might go down well too. I think your idea to give it a few months and then ask for more fantasy recs might be worth trying. If the format is well-established by that point, we might get sufficient responses for another fantasy post or two. We'll see how it goes.

[Wired]

Why don't we simply keep posting recs here and make this post a sticky?