So, I saw a link today to a website that had asked this question of its readers. They ran a sort of vote, accepting nominations over a long period and compiling the most-mentioned books into a list, and then opened it to the floor for voting.
Unfortunately, their list was quite lacking, but the question left me curious -- so I thought, could we at hubski do exactly the same thing? Do we care enough to? Not sure how many avid readers of the fantasy genre there are here, but I volunteer to run the nomination process if anyone wants to do this.
Thoughts on how this could work? Also feel free to just answer the question.
LOTR has to be up there, Susan Cooper's "the Grey King" is a good one, Charles De Lint's "Moonheart" is a little dated, but pretty awesome. It is now a day later and I'm kicking myself for not mentioning "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman, and "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman. In fact, if I had to choose it would probably be "The Golden Compass
I should add that my vote probably goes to The Hobbit; at least that's what I would nominate if we got far enough into this process to have a site-wide vote. It's not as good as any of the trilogy, but it embodies "fantasy" much more and has the advantage of being a complete story.
I have to vote for the Wheel of Time series. Can't pick anything else, I grew up with that series and it will forever have a mark on me. If you really want just a single book, I guess I'll pick the first four books from the Wheel of Time series.
Agreed, it is a fantastic book, but it isn't as great by itself.
I'm an avid fantasy reader. I read a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, classic lit, and some non-fiction sciency/space stuff. I'd give my vote to Dragon Lance, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. From 1,000 feet it looks like your standard "band of unlikely heroes assembles", evil rises in the lands once more, and they embark on a quest to save the world. All of the standard fantasy cliches are there, and from the sound of it and even having read it I feel like I should not love it as much as I do... but I do! The visuals spelled out are beautiful, the character development is wonderful (It's the first book in what's technically a 4 book series), and it's actually a very well told story, and written in a very drawing way, to the point where it's even a little jaw-dropping at times. It's just a really fun adventure. Read it first when I was 14, read it just a year ago at 31, and many different times in between. It's a really solid read, but normally doesn't make too many "fantasy lists". But it definitely is "The Great Fantasy" novel because it hits all those right cliches and fantasy canon, but it's just extremely well finished.