Well, it's from 20 years ago now, so maybe not. Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell is just what you always hope recent(ish) fantasy will be, and almost never is. (The magic does not feel like you're being asked to memorize the rules to a video game you'll never play, and the big moments do not read like the stage directions in an action movie.)
I loved the way Clarke balanced the tone – stuffy old British gentlemen meeting chaotic, anti-rational fairy people/places must have been very hard to get right.
I'm also a sucker for mixing real and fake historical references and dabbling in a little forgerty-as-a-genre.
A reviewer for Titus Groan said somewhere that the best spirit of Fantasy is to complicate rational modernism and expose that there is a lot of magical thinking at its core (not to just create something less real in contrast to reality). Without knowing that much about the industrial revolution in Northern England I feel like Clarke did that exceptionally well.
Best of all, it's based and footnote-pilled.
I’ve eschewed this one as book club fodder, wrongly it seems? Like it’s actually good?! Might have to get some.