...by Richard Flanagan was an amazing WW2 book based in part, on his father's stories of being a POW. You won't forget some of the passages. Best book I've read in a long time and it won the Mann Booker Prize two years ago.

https://www.amazon.com/Narrow-Road-Deep-North/dp/0804171475

I've read two others of Flanagan's: Gould's Book of Fish which was quite surreal and The Sound of One Hand Clapping which is a bit more feminine in appeal but still excellent.

I'm a fan of Hemingway, McCarthy and Flanagan is similar in many ways to those two. He plays with structure a lot so things are not linear at all in his books but bounce back and forth over many years. 

No wheel of time pls 

The Black Company? (by Glen Cook)
I really liked that series because it set aside a lot of fantasy conventions, and it's easy to get into because the books are actually of a sane length (200-250 pages) with quick-moving plots.

Lord Dunsany's stuff is not really high fantasy and I'm sure you've read it, but damn, Dunsany is awesome, especially the early stuff like The Gods of Pegana and Time and the Gods. I would recommend to anyone to get the Penguin Classics version of Dunsany, it's got a good selection of works including the entire Gods of Pegana. 

No problems here when it comes to insane page counts.

have read minimal Dunsany, will look for penguin.

thanks for suggestions! 

First time really reading Tolkien. Just phenomenal. I don't often re-read, but this is one I can see reading annually. Up next is the Silmarillion probably followed by the Children of Hurin. 

Easily in my bottom 5% of "most likely to ever read again", if not lower. If I started fantasy reading now I doubt I would bother. Still, he sorta did okay for the genre I guess. 

He kind of founded the genre! 

Yeah, people either really like or dislike his work, it seems. *shrugs*

He kind of founded the genre!

that's the joke (I think).