I have not read all the annoying epic fantasy series.

[snarp]

I'm trying to educate myself culturally. What are the classic annoying fantasy series that I need to have read, as a nerd?

Notice that I'm talking about annoying fantasy series - like, stuff where every single book has the same plot, or the cast of characters grows by six or seven people every book and every book gets longer because they all need to have stuff to do, or the last eight books have pretty much just been about the author's hat bondage fetish, or whatever.

I have read Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books and Raymond Feist's Magician books.

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Seconding Terry Brooks for the most egregious "this is blurry Xerox of Tolkien, just like all my previous dozen blurry Xeroxes of Tolkien!" I've ever seen. Blatantly unoriginal and his prose causes me ACTUAL PHYSICAL PAIN.

And has nobody mentioned Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books yet? Must be a lot of repression of traumatic memories going on...

[distractionary]

Yeah, I didn't make it more than a third of the way through the first Thomas Covenant book before the pain burned out all involved synapses.

[juliet]

I liked the Mordant's Need books (there were only two of them, which probably helps, & also probably makes it *not* Annoying Epic Fantasy of the sort requested), but similarly only made it 1/3 of the way through Thomas Covenant before throwing the book across the room.