@Tsundoku I wouldn't count that as a great work of literature though ;-) More a patchwork of plagiarised themes and tropes held together by a thin paste of simply being enjoyable and having good characters.
On a different note... thanks for the reminder, @heather. Now I just have to hope it doesn't fall apart in my hands, having been printed in 1982 and not in the best condition...
Tolkien of course has got to be the main founding father of fantasy, but Le Guin was also original, pioneering many ideas and tropes, and very influential in fantasy literature.
But starting in 2020, I wanted to move through literature in chronological order, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh. But judging by the time I've spent on Gilgamesh alone, I will need to live for aeons just to get to twentieth-century literature.
If you want to read a novel that constantly addresses you as a reader (you know, for a change), you can try If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino.
One time, we had an English assignment where we had to do some poetry/visual art thingy on a book page, and I swear a part of me died when I heard the paper being ripped from the book
She has like just a stack of Lord of the Flies for this very project
> The young pilot was still grinning broadly. "That's why they always put two blank pages at the back of the atlas. They're for new countries. You're meant to fill them in yourself." (The BFG, chapter 21: "The Plan", by Roald Dahl)
