I'd say The Lord of the Rings, buit it's not really a serie... It's a trilogy but the author (mighty Tolkien!) wanted to publish it in one book, eventhough the post-war context of the period compelled them to print it in three differents volumes.
Anyway, The Discworld serie (Terry Pratchett) is great, there's also The Black Company (Glen Cook) which is dark and very strange but absolutely fabulous!
Redwall by Brain Jacques. It's the only series you can pick up any of it's 20+ books and you don't need to have read 15 books before. All the stories are unique and independent from one another, although some do set a prequel of sorts.
And in case you don't know, your local library has a 99.99999% chance of having at least one of them.
It'll keep you reading for months. Each story runs an average of 350 pages.
LOTR, since after awhile, I felt Harry Potter had a weak plot with repetitive events, and that Artemis Fowl wasn't really interesting after awhile. LOTR almost seems like an actual war story, minus the fantasy. Plus, the books explaining Middelearth's history and culture is just fascinating.
Plus, the books explaining Middelearth's history and culture is just fascinating.
i totally agree! Furthemore, if you read The Silmarillon, it's amazing how deep he's gone in the background of middleearth... I mean there's appendices with languages (he created 8), and he explains (in fact his son writted it, after Tolkien's manuscripts) the relation, for exemple, between Rohan language and Numenorean (and Gondorian by extension...), and you see how the second one influenced the first one, with words in Rohan derivated from Numenorean.. It's just blowing! Everything get sense, every place finds its history! Tolkien is indeed one of the greatest author of our century!