Your #1 pick in the Fantasy genre

[sarcasm_made_Easy]

sword of shanara is still offensive to me.  and i read it over 10 years ago.

[msmpls]

Seeing as how I'm a "Room-Of-One's-Own-Thumping-Uber-Feminist" (not my words, but semi-appropriate none the less) I have to put in my vote for Octavia Butler's Kindred for a couple of reasons:
1) Butler was one of the few pioneering women in a literary genre dominated by men.
2) It illustrates the many themes of "traditional sci-fi" without all the rayguns and spaceships (don't get me wrong, I dig rayguns and spaceships too!)
3) It is a history lesson in the dynamics and expectations of men and women blacks and whites, and the grey areas that reside between these polarities in the antebellum south.
Even though Kindred is usually shelved under "African-American Literature" I definitely consider it my #1 sci-fi read...

RIP Octavia Butler
6/22/1947 - 2/24/2006

[sarcasm_made_Easy]

as a feminist what do you think of anne mcaffreys work?

[msmpls]

I haven't read too many of her books, although I did enjoy The Rowan and Stich in Snow (even though the latter is usually classified "romance"). My 10-year-old niece just started the Pegasus series so I was thinking about reading the trilogy along with her.

(And I'm not really a feminist, just a female that studied way too much feminist literary criticism )

[sarcasm_made_Easy]

ah well thats much less annoying

I liked macfreys stuff, although my favorite series of hers is the dragon song trilogy which is pretty light stuff. Granted it seems to think you already know a bit about the whole dragon world she has already made.

[Jinto]

Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga.  Its what got me into fantasy novels!

Wow. You should read Tolkien, from whom Feist stole most of his ideas (not to mention cribbing wholesale from Tolkien's invented languages).  Surprised the estate never went after this guy.

95% of all fantasy writers have stolen from Tolkien, it doesn't mean it isn't a good read.  I enjoyed Feist's early work as well.

Feist's Riftwar Saga trilogy + Janny Wurts' Kelewan Trilogy that tells the other side of the story for the Riftwar Saga, are both excellent reading. Good story pacing, not too long, not overly descriptive and generally easy reading. They're debatably a better pair of series to introduce a new reader to the Fantasy genre than Tolkien's stuff. That doesn't mean they're better as literature necessarily, just that they're really good as introductory series', at least in my opinion.