Best Fantasy Books for Beginners

I may not have mentioned it lately, but I'm thrilled to be in one of the best professions in the world. Storytelling affects people in so many ways, and when I get an email saying, "Your books turned me onto fantasy, and now I'm devouring everything I can find," I can't help but smile.

Petrik Leo of Novel Notions does a great job introducing readers to new fantasy books and just did his second Best Fantasy Books for Beginners post. This is great for many reasons, but also because Petrik highlights so many self-published authors — many of whom I consider my friends (and hopefully, they feel the same way about me).

Petrik broke his recommendations into a number of groups, including:

Classic Epic FantasyModern Epic FantasyMagic School SettingCozy and Urban FantasyMorally Gray Main Characters or Grimdark FantasyHere are all 20 books, and I'm proud to have one of mine included in the group.

Go watch Petrik's, video. He has a lot of insights. But to help you narrow down which books to try out first, I've included a handy-dandy chart below which will take you straight to Goodreads so you can check out the titles (just click the book covers), authors, who published them (pay particular attention to the "Self" ones as these are really the creme of their crop and really are worth checking out, and how many ratings and review each book has.
I hope you find this helpful, and I also have my fingers crossed that you'll find more authors to love. Oh, and thanks to Robin, who did all the hard work of putting the about montage of covers and this chart together.
  Title  Author    Publisher   Ratings   Reviews    M. L. Spencer Self3,873607 Ryan CahillSelf5,089724  Raymond E. Fiest 
Janny Wurts Harper Voyager36,6771,106   Michael J. Sullivan  Orbit36,1522,078 Anthony ReynoldsOrbit2,101418 Richard SwanOrbit5,4171,243 John GwynneOrbit27,6694,255 Domagoj Kurmaić
(Nobody103) Wraithmarked 
Creative5,750350 J. T. GreathouseGollancz1,897485 James IslingtonSaga Press1,179472 Dyrk AshtonSelf2,403499 Rachel AaronSelf12,8461,333 Travis BaldreeTor88,93218,598   Christopher Buehlman  Tor15,8442,437 Michael R. Fletcher Harper Voyager 2,798534 Daniel T. JacksonSelf1,459409 Peter McLeanAce4,793879 Mike ShackleGollancz1,436285 Krystle MatarSelf322142 Nicolas LietzauSelf1,163329