If you guys haven't read :-

Frank Herbert - Dune

Raymond E. Feist - Magician

Then you're really missing out on some ace fantasy novels.

As to the guy who had a negative comment about the LotR movies, what were you smoking when you said that??? 2nd to The Godfather they are perhaps the greatest movies made.

Just, NO. there are waaaay to many glaring faults in the movies that it's not even funny.... the greatest heroes in the world almost get wiped out croosing from rivendale to the elfqueen butt some pesky princess just did it faster / safer than them lol -- making the river swell and take out the Naz'gul without the power of the blue ring of power lol -- and uncounteble others makes the movies a joke if you know the world. they are still good movies ( if we are talking directors cut) but they do not even get to top 5 best fantasy movies / television series.

As for what is the best fantasy book, i geuus it depends on why you read them. if you just want to read about battles and magic the dragonlance and forgotten realms are both worlds that have lots of well written novels as well as feist's novell's but if you read them as statements on ideology then the malazan book of the fallen series reign supreme followed by a song of ice and fire and the series that started with wizards first rule( arghh can'r remember the name of the series atm).

and don't cheat yourself of the 2 Thrawn series by Zhan in the starwars universe. by far the coolest chr ever invented... he is pure win.

See, it's lists like this that keep me convinced that Samuel R. Delany is right about the 'root' genre name. SF = speculative fiction. SciFi and Fantasy are subgenres and sometimes they overlap, at least for some readers. I'm sure many, many folks balk to see Dune called an epic fantasy even though the notion of prescience is a core theme of the stories. For others, the mere fact that Bene Gesserit are called "witches" might automatically make the thing a fantasy. But the important part is that Herbert tried to fuse good, character-based storytelling with some Big Ideas that included stuff he knew he was making up from whole cloth. And I won't even get started about how 'prescient' he seems now for having centered an early 1960s novel on both water scarcity and 'global' dependence on a limited resource that was essential for long-distance transportation.

Man, if the 'rethought 4X economy' could help something like melange appear in the occasional Elemental game, or at least the occasional GalCiv 3 game...

I'd like to add my opinion on the debate over Eddings.  For a long time, his books were some of my favorite fantasy books.  Admittedly, they were also the first fantasy novels I independently read (I was something like 7 or 8 at the time), and that probably causes me to feel nostalgia for them.  Now that I've read much more widely, I can still occasionally enjoy them, but they are no longer towards the top of my list.  I will say that the Belgariad were good, even now.  However, in the Mallorean, he tended to repeat the same plot points and characters (and I don't consider his plot based reason a valid excuse for doing that).  After those, I tried to read some of his other books, but I could never get into them.

One author you may want to look into, assuming you can find any of her books, is Andre Norton.  She is one of the more influential Fantasy/Scifi authors this side of Tolkien (And no matter what your personal opinion of his writing is, you can't deny his influence on the genre).  Norton did a huge number of novels, but unfortunately most of them are out of print.  My personal favorite series was her Crystal Gryphon series.

Alright, I went out and purchased Gardens of the Moon this weekend.  Want to see how good it is since so many peeps on here have recommended it.

Another good read are the Order books from L.E. Modesitt.  An intersting twist on the battle of Good v. Evil.

My favorite is The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski, but not sure if you can count that as "epic"

My recommendations:

Robin Hobb - although as another poster pointed out some of characters are quite unlikable.

Russell Kirkpatrick - Fire of Heaven/Husk series.

Guy Gavriel Kay - The Sarantine Mosaic/Fionavar Tapestry series.

J V Jones - The Book of Words/Sword of Shadows series.

Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn series. Elantris is worth reading as well. He also has a lot of interesting material on his website, chapter notes, sample chapters, even a draft of one of his books.

Katherine Kerr - Deverry series.

Raymond Feist - Riftwar Saga. Magician is the first book in the series and well worth a read. Haven't found the later books in the series to be as good though.

David Eddings - Belgariad/Mallorean series. They're both pretty similar, so probably best to read something else between these series.

Kay Kenyon - The Entire and The Rose series. 3rd book isn't coming out until next year, and is more SciFi than Fantasy, but still

George R. R. Martin - A Song of Fire and Ice.

Sean Williams - Books of the Cataclysm. Only just started reading this, but seems interesting so far...

Agreed on all three of these, haven't read the others.

Glen Cook - Chronicles of the Black Company

Joel Rosenberg - The Guardians of the Flame (More of a guilty pleasure actually)

Some Russian Author - Nightwatch

L.E. Modesitt, Jr - The spellsong stuff, or the order/chaos stuff. He also writes good science fiction.

If you're ok with urban fantasy, try the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher.

If you want science fiction, I have recommendations in spades.