Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings

[Gainsdalf the Whey]

Kingkiller Chronicles is next on my list, I'm reading The Mistborn series now. It's absolutely fantastic. I don't know if I've really been so connected to so many characters in a single book/series before. If it's true that WoT inspired Sanderson to play with magic having strict rules, and those rules and way magic is used really being the driving factor that society is structured around, it's definitely a point for WoT as far as inspiring something new.

[Girl-Meet-World]

I need to read WoT next, actually. The series just seemed very long, and there were other things that I wanted to read. However, knowing that Sanderson actually finished the WoT series, well, its practically a necessity.

But Sanderson's exploration of magic really hooked me, and he wrote a stand-alone (?) of magic coming from colour, which was fascinating, and fabulously written.

[Xenophon]

 

Seriously though, GoT is just the flavor of the month,

 

Nah, it's been widely popular for very nearly two decades now. I was there for the first books and I was there when the long wait began; the series has been pretty unusual in terms of its impact on the genre.

 

But yes, I would support the choice of going with LOTR first. For one thing, it's foundational to the genre in a way that basically no other works are; for another, it's complete. Also the whole thing is about the same length as a single volume in some of the newer fantasy series. The style may be a bit unusual for modern-day readers; Tolkien did not really (nor did he really try to) write a "novel" as such, he was looking more back at sagas and legends, which was his stock in trade; his main thing was playing with his made-up languages, and making up a world for them to belong to. In fact I'd optimally recommend reading LOTR while one is still fairly young and without too many preconceived notions of what a "fantasy novel" is supposed to be like; but if one has passed that stage without having read it, the second-best thing is to play catch-up. 

 

On a final note, I do find it sort of amusing that someone would criticize George RR Martin for being slow to write and spending time on rewrites while recommending Tolkien instead, given that he was basically the High King of endless rewrites... took him 12 years to write LOTR, and what he himself considered to be his life's work was never finished in his lifetime, and only completed from some of his left-behind notes and first/second/third/nth drafts after his death; he left behind enough such notes for his son to make a whole career out of.