Robert Jordan - Wheel of Time series
Raymond E. Feist - Riftwar Saga

Both series are excellent reads and will fit your demands quite nicely.

Aye its a genius series. Absolutely love it =)




Great series, still waiting on the 14?th and last book so i can finally close them off.

Comes on on Jan 8th 2013. They pushed it back almost a year. That being said, check out Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. Only 1 book so far and the next one is waiting till the WoT is finished so the wait is going to be a long one but he is an amazing author. Shot to my top 5 after reading The Way of Kings.

Some books I think were good:

Sci fi: Dune Series [14]
Fantasy: Game of Thrones Series [5+], Wayfarer's Redemption Series [6], Corean Chronicles Series [8]

Dune is definitely my favorite.

I have read a good trilogy of sci fi called Dread Empire's Fall book one is called The Praxus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Empire's_Fall I found the books very interesting

The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.

Sigh. People keep telling me the Wheel of Time series is great, but i've tried to get into it like three times, and I just can't seem to do so.

The first time I read it I could not put it down till about book 8 when it slows down, took a small break then. Reread it 3 times and on my 4th run through right now in preparation for book 15 coming out in January. I would suggest trying to power through at least book one. So many plot lines and hooks by that time that only death will keep you from it, and even death will not keep you from Shai'tan!

Same here.

I keep hearing people recommend it, but when I read the Wikipedia article I was put off, I've long since learnt you shouldn't judge by a summary, but... well, I guess I'll have to give it try.

What's the most amount of pages you guys have read in a day? My record is 1.2k pages reading one of Peter F. Hamilton's books, Judas Unchained iirc but it's not one I'm going to recommend.

I'm just going to back up the Honor Harrington series here, the first few books were a great read, not much romance iirc though but that's just up to personal preference, not sure why I dropped it.

An author I'd recommend would be Alastair Reynolds but his characters are often times weak, and again the romance is scarce, plots are great though, particularly the Revelation Space series and House of a Thousand Suns.

And let's not forget Bill Bryson! He writes travel books and even wrote a very entertaining book about scientific stuff, I definitely think he's worth ignoring your genres to mention :p

I read the Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan in one sitting. That's the most I've ever read at one time. (my 6th re-read of the series is just finishing now i started in january taking it slow to catch things better)

I've read Battlefield Earth in one day, several times. It's about 1000 pages...and then I've read a few other books as well...I'd estimate maybe 1600-1800 pages? That's a long day though.

I read two honor harrington books yesterday, and while they're pretty good, their trouble is that they are both too realistic and not realistic enough. One the one hand it's towards the darker side of the sliding scale of cynicism by killing off characters like hotcakes. On the other hand it has small ships with crews in the 1500 range, and missiles that weigh dozens of tons. These two things don't gel well with me, especially after reading other (Supposedly realistic) sci-fi with cruisers with crews of 25 and missiles that can be loaded by hand. Plus, Harrington doesn't even describe with any accuracy why lasers can't be used for point defence, which doesn't really make any sense to me, since they've got lasers just about everywhere else.

And the amount of damage they take and the speed with which they repair it brings it up to practically Star Trek levels. One second they "lose" entire missile tubes and lasers, and 15 minutes later they've got them back online and functional, supposedly at lower power, but it never actually serves as more than a dramatic device...but not enough of a dramatic device to make it really matter.

And then at the end you've got Honor herself; she has dozens, probably hundreds, maybe THOUSANDS of friends that die because of, or as a result of actions on her part. And yet she doesn't ever even have an indication of doing the right thing. At her worst she degenerates into something of an anti-hero, but that is only for seconds and it has no chance of lasting. It approaches Mary Sue levels, really. It's almost like she's a Mary Sue that the author is trying really hard to cover up her being a Mary Sue by putting her into situations which she should have no realistic control, and hoping the fact she takes a few lasers to the broadsides covers up the rest of her being very nearly perfect. Oh sure, she claims she's bad at math and politics and stuff, but that's only when she's actively thinking about it(IE, bringing it to the audience's attention). In the course of normal life she does almost everything essentially perfectly, which only makes it more jarring when she loses entire ships in combat, something that happens solely because of the series' location on the sliding scale of idealism and cynicism.

Huh. Looking back I just realized I ranted a little. That tends to happen when I find a book series that I almost like. Sigh.

Find some books by Peter F. Hamilton, a British writer. Very good at what he does. maybe (as has been said already), Judas Unchained" was a little disappointing, but was probably cause I waited so long for it to arrive on my bookcase.

Iain M. Banks does "The Culture" themed books. Alot of strong female characters in the various books. Well written and varied.

I grew up reading Robert Heinlein, Isacc Assimov, Piers Antony and with a bit of Douglas Adams thrown in. It was a good start to appreciating Sci Fi now 20 years later.

Lois McMasters Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series fits just about everything you've requested.

Piers Anthony's Mode series and Incarnations of Immortality series.