The 5 best fantasy books

Fantasy is the literary genre in which childhood and maturity meet again despite everything. The reward is always the enjoyment of that paradise inhabited during childhood and recovered thanks to the fantastic when the years are climbing on our backs.

Therefore the best fantastic books they are a hybrid where those pristine fables coexist, with which we are entrenched principles such as good, evil, beauty, love ..., but also death, resentment, revenge and any other essence to either corner of morality, in combination with more sophisticated plots that reconstruct the old totems of the fantastic. As always, balance is difficult because the well-known virtue of equidistance is not so fashionable.

Perhaps that is why the fantasy genre has lately been polarized between epic narrators, with inspirations including gore, explicitly sexual, and writers who fit better into the naive side of fantasy, where color faces lighter threats, capable even of finally redirect towards good.

In other words, today we hardly find a novel like «Never-ending story» that encompasses a little of everything. Better or worse, but these are the times. As you can guess, I prefer fantasy capable of wandering from recognizable environments, but looking for that eclectic spirit that every selection requires, I will try to rescue from here and there...

Top 5 Recommended Fantasy Novels

The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende

I have mentioned it before and it is evident that the generational issue has a lot to do with my choice. I don't remember exactly what age I read it for the first time, I guess she was around 12 years old. The impression of new worlds that open up before you in a way that literature could not achieve in any other way.

A reading catharsis that led to the later reader that I was and the writer that I tried to be. All because of an accident that left me in a cast on my foot and hand after a leak from a pool in a chalet on the outskirts (in my defense I will argue that we were only going to hunt frogs in that rather godforsaken pool). This is how I discovered myself next to Atreyu and ta. My convalescence mattered little because I ended up escaping from that balcony at the end of summer and found my way to the country of Fantasy.

Summary: What is Fantasia? Fantasy is the Neverending Story. Where it is written that story? In a book with copper-colored covers. Where is that book? Then I was in the attic of a school... These are the three questions that Deep Thinkers ask, and the three simple answers they receive from Bastian.

But to really know what Fantasy is, you have to read that, that is, this book. The one in your hands. The Childish Empress is mortally ill and her kingdom is in grave danger. Salvation depends on Atreyu, a brave warrior from the greenskin tribe, and Bastián, a shy boy who passionately reads a magical book. A thousand adventures will lead them to meet and meet a fabulous gallery of characters, and together they will shape one of the great creations of literature of all time.

The Neverending Story, by Ende

The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien

It was my turn to discover the great work of Tolkien in an adolescent phase in which every approach to the fantastic had an almost psychedelic intensity. That was a half-read with a good friend. Our subsequent meetings, to lecture on the evolution of the adventure turned into a universe (mediating white smokes), made us fly over the middle lands and everything that passed us by. And it is that a pharaonic novel, to which an ingenious author dedicated more than a decade, deserves at least some good sittings with which to accompany travelers and immortals of the world imagination for a while ...

In the sleepy and idyllic Shire, a young hobbit is given a commission: to guard the One Ring and set out on the journey to its destruction in the Rift of Destiny. Accompanied by wizards, men, elves and dwarves, he will cross Middle-earth and enter the shadows of Mordor, always pursued by the hosts of Sauron, the Dark Lord, ready to recover his creation to establish the ultimate domain of Evil.

Things are getting ugly, but Frodo and Sam always continue their journey along the Anduin River, pursued by the mysterious shadow of a strange being who also covets possession of the Ring. Meanwhile, men, elves and dwarves prepare for the final battle against the forces of the Lord of Evil.

The armies of the Dark Lord are spreading their evil shadow more and more across Middle-earth. Men, elves, and dwarves join forces to do battle with Sauron and his hosts. Unaware of these preparations, Frodo and Sam continue to enter the land of Mordor on their heroic journey to destroy the Ring of Power in the Cracks of Destiny.

The dead zone, of Stephen King

Yes, Stephen King it is also fantasy and good. Many are his novels that connect directly with the fantasy genre. Except that the horror author labels (increasingly worn down by the overwhelming capacity of the genius from Maine), sometimes prevent us from valuing the ingenuity spread by all genres.

In this story, the paranormal takes us into a fantasy where the confines of reality acquire that fuzzy feel, like scenes that could move at a different pace before us, like superimposed dimensions in fascinating stage settings. And no, it is not science fiction, it is just overflowing and overflowing fantasy that fascinates and, in the case of this novel, thrills ...

From an accident suffered by the protagonist, John Smith, which kept him in a coma for years, we discover that in his transition between life and death he returns from the coma with some kind of active connection to the future. His brain, damaged in the blow, houses a mind that in its proximity to the afterlife has returned with extraordinary powers of prediction.

The character in question, John, is an ordinary guy, someone who, after being embraced by death, just wants to take advantage of the moments of his life. Among the most personal plot of an anonymous guy who Stephen King It makes you feel very close, as if it could be you, we are getting closer to that ability to predict.

John deciphers the destiny of the wills that shake his hand, or that touch him, his mind connects with the future and presents what is going to happen. Thanks to this ability, he knows of a sinister fate that awaits them all if a politician he greets reaches power. You must act immediately.

Meanwhile his life goes on and we hooked up with the lost love, with the aftermath of the accident. John is a very human guy who arouses great emotion. The conjunction of that personal aspect with the fantasy of his capacity and the necessary action to avoid a sinister future turn the novel into something special. Fantasy, yes, but with large doses of fascinating realism.

The dead zone, of Stephen King

The Little Prince

In the supposed antipodes of Stephen King, and yet almost back to the same place, because fantasy covers everything. Thus we find an initiatory work in fantasy, in literature and even in philosophy. One of those works that is on par today, at least in terms of narrative significance, with great books like Don Quixote or the Bible. The Little Prince is all of us, imagined in a delirium at 45º in the desert after a landing that could have been fatal. It is not that the plot is constructed like a virguería typical of a genius. It is more the gift of opportunity, simplicity as a revelation.

I don't know if when we die we will see the light as Saint Exupery could do while he saw this little story being born. The point is that our entire life is covered by its lucidity loaded with fantasy. The little prince's doubts resonate among the evidence of the misunderstanding that is the human being. A being capable of confusing a hat with an elephant devoured by a snake. A being stuck in the armchair on an abandoned planet as if it were an empire of incalculable value...

The Little Prince

The name of the wind

The most "fanciful" of my selection. At least in terms of what the current genre is trending. And yet, a great work outlined with that characterization of very close characters, inhabitants of remote places but endowed with the deepest empathy to achieve a plot that is very much our own.

In an inn in no man's land, a man is about to tell, for the first time, the true story of his life. A story that only he knows and that has been diluted after the rumors, conjectures and tavern tales that have turned him into a legendary character whom everyone had already left for dead: Kvothe ... musician, beggar, thief, student, magician, hero and killer.

Now he is going to reveal the truth about himself. And for this he must start at the beginning: his childhood in a troupe of itinerant artists, his years living as a petty thief on the streets of a big city and his arrival at a university where he hoped to find all the answers he had been looking for.

The name of the wind
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