All good points! Thank you for expanding.
Other disreccomnds: Terry Goodkind and David Weddings. Also Patrick Rothfuss and GRRM, because their respective series are likely to remain unfinished. Joe Abercrombie’s First Law might be a reasonable low fantasy substitute for ASOIAF.
There was also a lot of Neil Stephenson. I would recommend most of his work with caveats.
In addition to your missing list: where are the alternate histories? The Yiddish Policeman’s Union seems like a good fit.
I haven’t read Goodkind (a highschool friend warned me off, and the commentary on Usenet did so again a few years later) so I can’t speak to how bad his work is. Eddings I wouldn’t recommend to anyone over 16, I agree. He’s the kind of author you age out of pretty fast.
In GRRM’s case, I might recommend Fevre Dream—his older standalone novel about vampires on the 19th-century Mississippi—rather than aSoIaF.
