It's no secret that I'm a huge sucker for epic fantasy. Part of that is my reading speed- I read really, really fast, so most books are over just way too fast for my taste. A good epic fantasy series, however, is just about long enough for me. I'm going to do a short series of posts exploring a few of my favorites this week.
The Codex Alera is a six book epic fantasy series set in a heavily Roman Empire themed universe. (In fact, the empire of Alera was founded by one of the lost Roman legions transported to a fantasy world.) It's somewhat unusual in that literally everyone in Alera has access to magic, called furycrafting. Furycrafting is elemental magic granted to people by spirits known as furies that comes in six flavors- earth, wind, water, fire, metal, and wood. More powerful furies can actually be summoned in physical form. The protagonist of the series, Tavi, is unique in that he is the only member of Aleran society to lack furycraft at all, and so is forced to survive on his wits alone. The Codex Alera features tons of high stakes espionage, epic battles, and world-ending threats. Also, there are ten foot tall wolfmen.
The Codex Alera avoids one of the biggest issues with epic fantasy series, bloat, in a very interesting manner. It's quite normal for epic fantasy to just keep adding and adding characters and plotlines until each book slows to a crawl. Codex Alera avoids that handily, both due to Jim Butcher's tight plotting and the time interval between each book- Jim Butcher keeps significant gaps of time between the events in the book, which themselves tend to take place over relatively short periods of time- weeks at most, generally. (This also avoids problems like a character becoming a swordsmaster in a few months.)
Codex Alera's world is well fleshed out and fascinating, Jim Butcher's action scenes are clearly written and thrilling (as always), and the whole series is done, so you don't have to wait for more books! If you're into epic fantasy, definitely check this one out. If you haven't tried epic fantasy before, this might be a good starting point- at only six volumes, it's one of the more approachable entry points.