I just wanted to chime in on a few of these titles.
Eddings since in the past two months I've read almost all of his work.
Belgariad was pretty amazing. The follow-up the Mallorean really dragged on. The Elenium was amazing. The follow-up work, the Tamuli, which I haven't finished yet, has high highs and low lows.
Actually, all of Eddings can be described as high highs and low lows, but the Tamuli is his worst in this regard so far. When the heroes visited the Styric Council and when Mirtai had her angst speech about her past, I almost stopped reading without being able to return to the series. It read like bad fanfiction.
The Sapphire Rose, the third book of the Elenium, is a cover to cover orgasm. A fairly light-hearted, yet extremely intense orgy of battle after battle, each executed extremely well. If there's one thing Eddings does right, it's action scenes.
The Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews (Magic Bites, Magic Burns, Magic Strikes) is a really fun short read, much better than most of the other urban fantasy out there, which almost all feature friendly neighborhood vampires who are troubled but cute and hated for reasons beyond their control and end up rescuing (physically) and getting rescued by (spiritually) our protagonist, who is almost certainly a spit-fire of a woman who talks tough and then turns to mush in the arms of her man (TVTropes much?). Here, our protagonist may be a spit-fire of a woman, but she's actively avoiding the men who pursue her romantically. And if anything, she's more "troubled but cute" than they are, but rather than getting rescued in a spiritual sense by them, she actually develops as a character on her own -- gasp.
The world building in the Kate Daniels series is amazing.
The draw back is the writing. Andrews has improved noticeably as an author over the course of these three books, but she still has issues with pacing and providing detail.
Kim Harrison's Dead Witch Walking (aka The Hollows) series also has good world building and is penned a bit better than the Kate Daniels series, but the author has some bad writing habbits. I got a pissed off at Harrison when she had her protagonist locked in a cage, stuck in animal form, and spending her time rating the body of the male villain who captured her. The "erotic moments" tend not to be erotic at all either, often feeling forced.
Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson series is probably the best urban fantasy series I've read to date. There's a heavy emphasis on character relationships rather than action, but while there are several male characters chasing after the female lead (when is there not?), the relationships are entirely believable (unlike so many other stories), and the female lead does not just go jumping into bed with them.
As for the Dresden Files, I find myself sometimes very annoyed with Butcher (the author). He seems to enjoy giving Harry lots to angst about and making the odds absolutely insurmountable, but it's as if that's all he knows how to do to keep the flow of action going. Additionally, I tend to feel that Dresden falls into Mary Sue territory more than almost any other protagonist I have read, even in the urban fantasy genre. I don't feel like he's a born-and-raised wizard; I feel like he's a role-player acting out the part of a wizard. Consequently, Dresden will go from a complete coward to an uber badass in the span of a few pages, will say weird shit in his narration, a lot of which is contradictory (though I've heard that Butcher admits to Dresden being an unreliable narrator), and repeat himself many times over.
What I do like about the Dresden Files, more than ANY other urban fantasy I have read, is that he, unlike all the friendly neighborhood vampire authors, brings in some Lovecraftian themes about our inability to deal with the supernatural. Kind of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer before we realized that she wiped the floor with every big bad in every episode of every season (with the apocalypse being an annual event).
Ugh. Do not get me started on Simon R. Green's John Taylor series. I literally threw my book, something I cannot ever remember doing before. I liked the world he created, even if it was unoriginal, but the narrative and the wooden dialogue ruin it. At one point, a man walks up to Taylor and his client and Taylor gives a THREE PAGE MONOLOGUE describing exactly what kind of person that fellow is. That was the point at which I threw the book. Half the time I'm not sure if Green is trying to be scary or funny. He relentless has Taylor repeat the phrase "in the Nightside," and it gives the impression that Green thinks he is terribly innovative and dramatic when he's not.
Worst waste of money I have had since I lost a 10 dollar bill when I put it in my sock on a run (I had something I wanted to buy...).
A good book to read, that I haven't seen mentioned, is The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines, though apparently Disney wants to turn it into a movie, and it will likely be entirely ruined, so it should be read sooner rather than later. It's a new take on old fairy tales, starting AFTER the "happily ever after" in Cinderella's story, when her stepsisters team up with a witch and abduct the prince. She travels with Snow White and Talia (Sleeping Beauty). Hines uses the original fairy tales as a guide, rather than the Disney versions we all know today, so it's not as light hearted as it may at first sound. Let's just say it took more than a kiss to wake-up Talia and that in Hines' story, unlike the fairy tale, Rape Is Not Love.
I'm also a little disappointed that my favorite epic fantasy author hasn't been listed. Glen Cook's Tales of the Black Company has been my favorite epic fantasy thus far. It's a gray and gray morality story told from the point of view of a soldier in a mercenary band. Cook's writing style is a bit stilted, but it works perfectly for the Black Company because of it being a soldier's perspective, so the flowery sort of descriptive language of someone like Jordan would be totally off.
I've also read Cook's A Cruel Wind and liked it a lot, but it was clearly less refined than the Black Company, which came later. I have to give an extreme YMMV warning and I'd recommend that you read the first four or five chapters before considering purchase. The stitled narrative did not work very well in the third person and Cook's lack of detail made it at times really hard to follow. Still, the story itself, the world, the characters... IMO Cook is amazing.
