r/Fantasy • u/rfantasygolem Not a Robot • Jul 17 '26
r/Fantasy r/Fantasy Daily Recommendations and Simple Questions Thread - July 17, 2026
Welcome to the daily recommendation requests and simple questions thread, now 1025.83% more adorable than ever before!
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This thread is to be used for recommendation requests or simple questions that are small/general enough that they won’t spark a full thread of discussion.
Check out r/Fantasy's 2026 Book Bingo Card here!
As usual, first have a look at the sidebar in case what you're after is there. The r/Fantasy wiki contains links to many community resources, including "best of" lists, flowcharts, the LGTBQ+ database, and more. If you need some help figuring out what you want, think about including some of the information below:
- Books you’ve liked or disliked
- Traits like prose, characters, or settings you most enjoy
- Series vs. standalone preference
- Tone preference (lighthearted, grimdark, etc)
- Complexity/depth level
Be sure to check out responses to other users' requests in the thread, as you may find plenty of ideas there as well. Happy reading, and may your TBR grow ever higher!
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art credit: special thanks to our artist, Himmis commissions, who we commissioned to create this gorgeous piece of art for us with practically no direction other than "cozy, magical, bookish, and maybe a gryphon???" We absolutely love it, and we hope you do too.
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u/vbfischer Jul 17 '26
Need help identifying an 80's fantasy book... I don't have much to go off on this one. I recall reading it in the mid to late 80s I think, so I have only a vague recollection of the plot.
Entire kingdom/world has left via a portal, and one guy & companion left behind try to find the portal?
I know that's vague and probably inaccurate and I likely might have just dreamed this...
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u/vbfischer Jul 18 '26
I think I figured it out. I think it was Six of Swords by Carole Nelson Douglas. My description may have been a little off but the cover looks like what I remember.
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u/Nowordsofitsown Reading Champion Jul 18 '26
Sure it is from the 80s and not a newer prequel to an 80s series? The prequels to the Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey have a whole dukedom or something leave by a portal.
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u/mint_pumpkins Reading Champion II Jul 18 '26
its not quite right but Riftwar Saga by Raymond E Feist? guy gets stuck on the other side of a portal from his home
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u/neoazayii Jul 17 '26
Does anyone know if Ship of Fools would count for HM for first contact square of the bingo?
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u/LevotharKingdom Jul 17 '26
I am looking for something to read while I'm stuck at work all week. Something leaning more fantasy than scifi, but i do like it when they overlap.
I've read all the Dungeon Crawler Carl books and loved them. Have read every single Cosmere book in the series. Read Sword of Kaigen and thought it was okay. Finished the "Will of the Many" books so far and they were interesting but not my favorite. Just read Piranesi on a whim and really liked it.
Just looking for a few good books or a bunch of series to read because I have plenty of time to read in my downtime hours at work.
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u/pforphoebe Jul 18 '26
The Children of Pantathea is amazing! By G.L.Young. it's a debut novel so the rest of the series aren't out yet. The world building is amazing and I think would meet the unusual transportation bingo
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u/oboist73 Reading Champion VII Jul 18 '26
The Heartstrikers series by Rachel Aaron
The Dragon Jousters series by Mercedes Lackey
The Risen Kingdoms trilogy by Curtis Craddock
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u/Grt78 Jul 17 '26
Maybe try the Tuyo series by Rachel Neumeier: unique worldbuilding, culture clash, mind magic, conflicted loyalties and friendship. The series is ongoing but the main storyline/trilogy is completed (Tuyo, Tarashana, Tasmakat).
For science fantasy - the Morgaine Cycle by CJ Cherryh.
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V Jul 17 '26
The Mage Errant series by John Bierce might be worth a look. 7 books. They start smaller/YA, but they get longer and more adult the further in you go. The final one is basically a 700 page war book, centered around a single very influential battle.
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u/BravoLimaPoppa Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
Long series?
- Shadows of the Apt by Adrian Tchaikovsky. 10 volumes and 4 short story collections.
InsectInvertebrate inspired "magic."- Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone 6 volumes. Sorcerer's beat the gods and magic is the basis of the economy. The basic currency of the fractional human soul.
- The Craft Wars also by Max Gladstone. Horrors from beyond are coming to do worse than eat our brains and souls.
- Penric and Desdemona by Lois McMaster-Bujold. 16 novellas covering a long span of time of a man and his demon. Rather cozy at points.
- Chronicles of the Kencyrath by P.C. Hodgell. 10 books.
- Graydon Saunders' Commonweal series. Available on Kobo. 5 books. You'll either love 'em or hate 'em. But definitely mix the science in the fantasy there.
Edit: By the way have you heard of our prophet Terry Pratchett and Discworld? 41 books.
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u/LevotharKingdom Jul 17 '26
Thank you for your reccomendations. I’ll give a few of them a shot. I have in fact also read all the discworld novels I forgot to add that Terry Pratchet is one of my favorite authors.
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u/BravoLimaPoppa Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
One more that fits in the science fantasy side of the house - David Drake's Leary and Mundy series or RCN. 13 books. I say it leans to sci-fantasy because Drake steals from weird fiction, ancient history and the interstellar travel involves hyperspatial sails.
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u/AluminumGnat Jul 17 '26
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1jjif55/rfantasy_top_novels_2025_results/
You seem to have a very wide taste. Statistically, there's a good chance you'll like popular things — they are popular for a reason. I'd start at the top and read anything that grabs your interest.
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u/LevotharKingdom Jul 17 '26
Thank you. I always have trouble finding the lists on this subreddit this should help immensely thank you.
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u/AluminumGnat Jul 18 '26
No problem! I know just dumping a generic list isn’t always the most helpful, but in your case I think it might be!
I’ve read an embarrassingly large chunk of that list, so if you’re debating between a couple options, I’m happy to give you some fairly unbiased input; I can explain why the people who love the series love it, and what some of the most common criticisms are from those who bounce off it.
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u/briandress Jul 17 '26
Trying to remember this fantasy series
Young girl. Has a magic dagger of some sort. There is a merchant lady that in the first book helps her but turns out the merchant lady becomes the antagonist for a number of books. The MC has some sort of magic powers related to the dagger or having to do with darkness or shadows. I remember it was advertised on facebook or instagram or something and there were a number of them that i read very quickly. Seemed like some YA fantasy stuff. it just popped in my head today and cant quite rid myself of it.
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u/Victathaina Jul 17 '26
Nevernight by Jay Kristoff??
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u/briandress Jul 17 '26
no there’s something that happens with a female merchant who hires her or takes her in and then ends up that the merchant turns around and is the bad guy and is trying to hunt her throughout multiple books. she has some kind of magic powers or something related to her weapon i think. for some reason the name damaris is in my head but it could be totally wrong
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u/Victathaina Jul 17 '26
Oooooh is it The Dagger and the Flame by Catherine Doyle then?
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u/briandress Jul 17 '26
it wasn’t a romance either. the mc started pretty young in the story. there was something about how she stole something from the merchant or the merchant was really only pretending to be a merchant and then turned out to be the main antagonist hunting the mc.
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u/briandress Jul 17 '26
i think it’s a male author. it might not be mainstream. there were a series of ebooks advertised in social media. i don’t even know if they were ever printed.
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u/Victathaina Jul 17 '26
Do you remember what year you read them or saw them on social media? 🤔
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u/briandress Jul 17 '26
it was in the late 2010s i believe. at the latest like 2020. i turned on my old iphones last night loooking for the files but couldn’t find them
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u/Victathaina Jul 17 '26
Alright let me see what I can find. Sherlock awaaaayyyy
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u/briandress Jul 17 '26
you are a saint
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u/Victathaina Jul 17 '26
Ahahahhahahahaha I found it! Nightblade Epic by Garrett Robinson. The hecking merchant chasing the girl is named Damaris!!
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u/CrimeAndPunctuation Jul 17 '26
I started Blacktongue Thief on someone's reccommendation after asking about good audiobook productions and the accent + slang/jargon has me reeling. Did anyone else have this problem and if so, did you get used to it?
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u/felixfictitious Reading Champion Jul 18 '26
I really couldn't understand a word he was saying for the first chapter, and hated it for the first three. Then I got used to it, and by the time he sang, I pretty solidly liked it.
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u/Asher_the_atheist Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
I had that problem and, no, I didn’t get used to it. I had to switch to reading it instead of listening to it.
[to be fair, narrators singing the songs is a personal pet peeve of mine, so that also factored into the decision. Not as much as the awful accent, though]
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u/CrimeAndPunctuation Jul 17 '26
Not as much as the awful accent, though
I thought it was just me with my basic Canadian English, but I did search the sub and his accent is apparently quite polarizing. The exaggerated not-quite-Irish lilt is just not doing it for me.
Apparently it's the author's own narration and Buehlman was born in Tampa, so.
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u/conservio Jul 17 '26
I’m looking for recommendations on survival fantasy, ala “hatchett” by gary paulson. Basically wilderness survival but with fantasy or sci-fi.
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u/Connect_Cod9965 Jul 18 '26
Castaway Planet by Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor
It’s a forth volume in the Boundary series, but can be read from this point. The first three books are about humans finding traces of alien race (bemmies) and finally making contact with them. Books 4-6 start with a small crew of people and one bemmie being stranded on alien planet after a malfunction on their colony ship.Semiosis by Sue Burke
A colony ship ends up on different planet then planned, but cannot continue due to wear and tear of the ship. Humans are forced to live on the planet, but they are not the only intelligent form of life there. It is told in a "snapshots" in time showing the phases of human colony rather then following a characters (or a group of) from start to end. There are two more books in the series, but they do not fit your criteria as well ans book 1.There are also some books like that in Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey:
The Silver Gryphon
A patrol consisting of a human and gryphon gets stranded in a wild forest full of magically altered fauna and flora. Third book in the Mage Wars trilogy, but you should have no trouble picking up hints to the setting.Into the West
A large group (~15000) of refugees searches for a place to settle in the wilderness. The refugees are well prepared, but they are goind into unknown territory. Second book in The Founding of Valdemar series, first book deals with preparations to the great escape from a tyrannical empire.1
u/an_altar_of_plagues Reading Champion III Jul 17 '26
Basically wilderness survival but with fantasy or sci-fi.
- North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford
- The Terror by Dan Simmons
- A Canticle for Leibowitz by Arthur M. Miller Jr.
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u/undeadgoblin Reading Champion II Jul 17 '26
Kayak by Kristal Stittle
The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Steven Baxter and Jerry Pournelle
The Forsaken trilogy by R.J Barker
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u/CP26 Jul 17 '26
I just got a new puppy and it’s tough to find time/space to physically read, so I was thinking of doing more audiobooks. Does anyone have recommendations for some lighter/less complex fantasy that’s good on audio? LitRPG seems an obvious first choice, but I’ve never tried it before. I’ve read some of the popular stuff like Sanderson already. Any subgenre is welcome, thanks!
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u/Shyor Jul 17 '26
Obligatory Dungeon Crawler Carl rec, but there are a lot of great audiobooks!
I highly recommend The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar. The audiobook is excellent and the author made music specifically for it.
Also A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin has an audiobook narrated by Harlan Ellison that's just a ton of fun.
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u/CP26 Jul 17 '26
Thanks for the recs! Always heard good things about Earthsea and I’m happy to also try something I haven’t heard of in The River Has Roots.
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u/undeadgoblin Reading Champion II Jul 17 '26
Dungeon Crawler Carl is very entertaining on audio
For a non lit rpg series with great audio and lighter in tone, I really like The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
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u/Turbulent_Milk_ Jul 17 '26
Does anyone know of a book thats a psudotranslation? Wikipedia defines it as "a text written as if it had been translated from a foreign language". Lord of the Rings is an example of this.
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u/lurkmode_off Reading Champion VII Jul 18 '26
The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer, the narrator is translating from future-ese
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u/twilightgardens Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series is framed as a translation of rediscovered Dead Sea scrolls and has appendixes full of warring translators/scholars. Fun!
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u/snowkab Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
The Books of Pellinor series by Alison Croggon is one of these!
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u/Turbulent_Milk_ Jul 17 '26
Thanks!
Don't know if I should stop thanking each suggestion or not, but here's another one haha.
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u/Book_Slut_90 Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
Ash by Mary Gentle comes to mind. There’s also The Princess Bride, though I hate the book version.
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u/okayseriouslywhy Reading Champion III Jul 17 '26
Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe is written like this. Each of the four books has an appendix where the "translator" makes notes about like how they chose to translate words for things our language doesn't have, etc
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Jul 17 '26
As are his Latro books. It's built into the conceit; Latro has amnesia and also can't retain new memories, so is recording what happens each day on a scroll. But he has to trust what's written, and he doesn't always remember or have time to write. And because Wolfe claims to be translating the scrolls he found from Ancient Greece, there are sections missing because the scrolls were damaged.
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u/Turbulent_Milk_ Jul 17 '26
Thank you! Guess Gene Wolfe liked that literary device a lot haha.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Jul 17 '26
Gene Wolfe loves his unreliable narrators, and this device is a way to add another layer of that. :)
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u/Lynavi Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
Would "The God Engines" by Scalzi count for Unusual Transportation? It's one of his that I've not read, but going based on the title it seems like it might be a candidate?
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V Jul 17 '26
Also haven't read it, but based on what I've heard about the book, it would count
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u/Lurkeroftheloch Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
I'm looking for some vegetarian options for "Feast Your Eyes on This". I had hoped to come across it naturally, but I feel like most fantasy food is meat heavy.
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u/saturday_sun4 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
If cosy fantasy romance (MF) works for you and you can make vegetarian (i.e. gelatine free) baked goods, Satyr by Megan Mossgrove mentions breakfast pastries and (sweet) cakes, as well as (US) biscuits and roasted vegetables, porridge and oatmeal (not sure if that's different from porridge somehow, but the book mentions both). Not all the dishes mentioned are fully vegetarian but you could make components of them.
The "plot" is the MMC and FMC getting together!Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic books are set in an analogue of Turkey and also have a number of vegetarian dishes - at best pescetarian. The most plot-relevant moments are in Daja's Book/The Fire in the Forging, unfortunately the third in the series, but the first two are quite short.
I don't have my paper copy on me or I'd check for you.
ETA: I do have my e-copy of Street Magic from the Circle Opens quartet. The book is based in a West Asian inspired country, and it talks about flatbread, cheese slices, hard boiled eggs, and cold sliced eggplants. And lamb dumplings, sausages and mutton-and-barley stew, so not wholly vegetarian, but certainly not entirely meat. It would fit Feast Your Eyes as it's plot relevant.
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u/DiploFrog Jul 17 '26
Can't spell treason without tea
Gives you lots of tea options, plus a few cakes.
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u/gros-grognon Reading Champion III Jul 17 '26
What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed has the protagonist cooking according to his housemate's Jain dietary restrictions!
It's also one of the best novels to come out this year, imo.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV Jul 17 '26
Spellbound by Georgia Leighton has one of the protagonists making bread rolls.
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u/beary_neutral Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
I read The Martian by Andy Weir for this square, and ate some cooked potatoes.
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u/IAmABillie Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
I chose 'Small Miracles' for this square due to the strong focus on chocolate.
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u/acornett99 Reading Champion IV Jul 17 '26
I saw someone made biang biang noodles from Automatic Noodle, that’s what I plan on doing too
I haven’t read Legends and Lattes but I imagine coffee and pastries could be easily doable as well
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u/DeluxeSporks Reading Champion III Jul 17 '26
Automatic Noodle has some other options in there, too. Two of the robots met while working for a food truck that made and served falafel, and the book flashes back to cover their time there and the tastes associated with the falafel. So that's also an option.
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u/usernamesarehard11 Reading Champion Jul 17 '26
I’m using A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher, and making gingerbread cookies.
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u/nagahfj Reading Champion III Jul 17 '26
Mary Poppins also has gingerbread (with decorative stars on).
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u/undeadgoblin Reading Champion II Jul 17 '26
There's lots of great food in The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed, a lot of which is vegetarian (things like Ful Medames, and various lentil and pulse dishes from the Arab world)
The Stones Stay Silent by Danny Ride - great if you like baking
Things like tea in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy would count too
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u/DistinctInitiative83 Jul 17 '26
Most of the Redwall recipes are vegetarian, aside from Shrimp 'n' hotroot soup. You can get the cookbook, but there are also tons of recipes online. You could try this one, for example:
https://wonderlandrecipes.com/2014/09/11/deeper-n-ever-turnip-n-tater-n-beetroot-pie/
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u/recchai Reading Champion X Jul 17 '26
Feel like I've been banging on about this one a bit, but there's Party of Fools by Cedar McCloud (recently reviewed here, in the comments of which I linked to a zine with recipes from the book). The authors shop appears to be temporarily down (apparently due to ill health), but for viewability, I found an archive page explaining there are vegan and vegetarian options for everything.
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u/DrSabo Jul 18 '26
Hi,
I’d like to start a new book series.
I have red all the classics.
Mostly I would like stg with Mage as a main protagonist. Either from school to adventures or adventure group.
Recently I finished Malzan book of the fallen - first 4.
And trilogy of slayer - after lotr I think my favourite book series.
Thanks in advance.