62 Books Like Elder Race

I’ve read The Name of the Wind twice, and each time it feels like sitting down to hear a bard weave his life into song.

Kvothe isn’t perfect—he’s brilliant, arrogant, reckless—but that’s why I believe him. Rothfuss’s prose has a rhythm that lingers in my head like music. What struck me most wasn’t the magic or mystery, but the small human moments: playing the lute for coins, hungering for knowledge, fumbling through mistakes.

For me, it was less about answers and more about the act of telling one’s story, flaws and all.

This particular book/series by Sanderson is a quickly-paced fantasy heist with a very cool magic system involving different metals. The main character, Vin, is a lowly commoner who ends up navigating the complex social web of nobility. It’s a fascinating progression with a fascinating and satisfying result.

This book has loosely inspired some aspects of action, nobility, and the gem-based magic system found in my Heroes of Time series. One review of my book Murdoch’s Choice called it “Mistborn on a Boat.”

I can’t remember if I read WOT or GOT first… but this book was one of my entries into epic fantasy.

It begins with normal people trying to figure out something they can’t fully understand, and fearing being powerless in the face of what’s coming. Jordon really takes his time to slowly build the world, but even then, it feels like it is already established, and it is the reader who is new here.

What made it memorable was the way it balanced massive stakes with human fragility. It explores the theme that power isn’t always just a gift or a curse; it can be a burden that costs the wielders and those who are in orbit of it.

Master of the Five Magics delivers exactly what the title suggests. Hardy creates not only one, but five distinct and well-thought-out systems of magic. Each discipline is different from the next in practice, application, and style. The mechanics of how each of the systems functions is logical, precise, and adheres to a well-planned set of rules. The reader explores the world of magics through immersive storytelling and the reader can enjoy the journey without the perception of having attended a university course on the subject material.

The trilogy is seen as ahead of its time and is often credited as having influenced later authors as they explored the subject of magic in fantasy in their own writings.

My copies of this series are so worn by reading and re-reading that they are falling apart. There’s no higher praise from me as a reader. 

This is my comfort read, which is odd because it’s about the fall of a civilization—and The Dark, in particular, is terrifying. We never really see them. That’s partly because they aren’t entirely corporeal and can change size and shape at will. It’s also because anyone we know in the story who encounters them is almost certainly fighting for their life.

Are The Dark one character or many? Certainly, what one of them knows, they all know. The key to this conundrum is what motivates them to do as they do, and alien as they are; their motivations are as unexpected as they are profound. 

This is beautifully written classic fantasy in all its glory. If you only read one book of these five,… show more.

This book is just fun, but it’s also a weird kind of fun. Short and to the point, it follows two monstrous men as they wreak deadly havoc on a dark little town. It leans heavily on the media’s history of queer-coding villains in stories and allows the characters to be unapologetically evil. Readers who enjoy this book will find themselves thinking the pair are strangely cute together, all the while trying to remember that they’re very dangerous. It’s great as an audiobook and makes the perfect palate cleaners between longer books. 

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld hooked me from the very first pages—cliché as that may sound, it’s true. Virtually the entire book (as well as others from the Discworld) I read with a smile on my face.

Pratchett’s unique humor, his satirical take on human nature, the imaginative world of Discworld, and his reflections on reality come together in a brilliant mix that made me read… and read… and read.

Sometimes, you just want to retire and have a nice, quiet cup of tea. And world-ending magical plots keep getting in the way. Adoulla Mahmoud, once the best Ghul hunter alive, is just trying to retire. Unfortunately, the world has other plans for him. Alongside the pious warrior Raseed bas Raseed, and the shapeshifting Zamia Badawi, Adoulla faces the greatest threat yet. One that could destroy not just his favorite teahouse, but the world. 

While there is some good-natured humor within this book, Saladin Ahmed establishes right away with a torture-scene prologue that Throne of the Crescent Moon will be dark and gory. I love the magic system and the Arabia-inspired world. The only downside to this book is that Ahmed doesn’t seem to be working on the sequel. 

This book was a turning point for me in Harry Potter. There’s darkness in the books before it, but I still feel like Rowling was pulling her punches. Instead of sunshine and rainbows, this is where things got real. 

I steamrolled through it in days and don’t normally read that fast. My wife and I had to buy our own copy, and I had to outrace her so her poorly concealed reactions couldn’t spoil anything for me. 

We finally see how the wizarding world works in good and bad aspects, down to corruption and the fallibility of otherwise-squeaky-clean characters. If wizards and magic were real, this book was the first one balanced enough to make me believe it.

You want epic—you got epic! Belgarath becomes the disciple of the god, Aldur, and struggles to learn not only magic, but humility. Belgarath the Sorcerer is a late book in Eddings’ epic series, and if I recall correctly, it should be read after The Belgariad and The Mallorean (both of which are 5-book sequences). I’m pretty sure that reading about these hugely powerful gods and their disciples seeped into the developing inspiration for Kiranis, with its gods and prophets and grand schemes. There’s something deeply welcoming about this book, which is in 1st person as Belgarath tells his tale, especially following everything that happened in the preceding 10-book cycle. This is my favourite Eddings character, and he is more alive than those you might think were the central ones. From this book, I learned that true character development is an evolutionary process, and you just have to be patient… show more.