The best fantasy for getting lost in a world of magic and monsters

The Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews combines an epic magical apocalypse with one of the snarkiest and most badass heroines in urban fantasy. While the first book is not the best in the series, it is necessary to appreciate the rest of the series. And oh boy, what a series it is!

Kate Daniels is one of those formative urban fantasies for me, as it didn’t balk from having magic out in the open. It explores the interaction of the supernatural with the world we know without escaping into hidden worlds and the masquerade so prevalent in most urban fantasy—and for that it stands as one of the best urban fantasies out there.

While Henry Cavill’s depiction of Geralt is stellar, the Netflix series is no substitute for the dark, engrossing, and morally grey tale that is The Witcher. For me, The Witcher games and novels were the exact combination of monster hunting, moral quandaries, and somber contemplation that I needed.

It’s no wonder that people describe my books as a modern Witcher! While the main novels are excellent, the short story anthology that started it all is legendary and is a must-read!

While I grew up on Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and His Dark Materials, I still credit Feist’s Riftwar Saga for sparking my true love of fantasy. This epic spans a total of 31 books, crafting a multigenerational tale of a world of magic, cataclysm, monsters, and continuously rising stakes that never feel trite.

Through all my years reading, nothing has topped it. It’s high time I start a re-read.

Any fantasy book list would be incomplete without this classic. While some may complain about pacing, dryness, or that they should have just taken the eagles to Mordor, The Lord of the Rings has still stood the test of time as not just an enjoyable classic, but a foundational text in fantasy in general.

While the magic is subtler than what we’re used to in modern fantasy, it seeps into every pore of the text, crafting a world of wonderment filled with horrific monsters, glorious heroes, and time-tested importance and morals. It is truly an epic work.

The Wheel of Time gets a bad wrap as a slog, and it may be so further in the series. But I never found it boring. Rather, what I found while reading Jordan’s epic was a magical world that I could become fully engrossed in. What starts as a thin Lord of the Rings clone soon becomes its own unique tale of prophecy and adventure incomparable to any other fantasy.

The monsters and the magic are also both in top form! Trollocs are like orcs on steroids, with the magic of the Aes Sedai being one of the first hard magic systems that really made me start thinking about, well, magic systems.