Why Read Fantasy Fiction?
What makes the fantasy genre so appealing?
Fantasy literature offers the reader much of what general fiction offers — escape and adventure — but it goes far beyond the familiar realm of belief. It allows us to enter a world of "contrasts and opposites", to break away from the entrapment of realism.
Runjhun Noopur explains in this article the four main reasons why people love fantasy stories and why those stories stay with them long after them have put the book down.
Books
Some Popular Fantasy Books
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
The Lord of the Rings is an epic high-fantasy novel by the English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in Middle-earth, the story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 children's book The Hobbit, but eventually developed into a much larger work. Written in stages between 1937 and 1949, The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling books ever written, with over 150 million copies sold.
A Game of Thrones
A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of epic fantasy novels by the American novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin. He began writing the first volume, A Game of Thrones, in 1991, publishing it in 1996. The novels are set on the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos. The story unfolds through a rotating set of subjective points of view, the success or survival of any one of which is never assured. Each chapter is told from a limited third-person perspective, drawn from a group of characters that grows from nine in the first novel to 31 by the fifth.
His Dark Materials
His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights (1995; published as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The fantasy elements include witches and armoured polar bears; the trilogy also alludes to concepts from physics, philosophy, and theology.