The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. Snarky Fantasy.
The Colour of Magic is the first Discworld novel. It is a send up of fantasy, a genre ripe for mocking. The heroes are a wizard who failed out of magic school and a tourist from the other side of the world, which is a disc that rests on the back of four elephants who are riding on a celestial turtle.
Rincewind, the wizard, is tasked with showing Twoflower, the tourist, around the continent. Twoflower is the first tourist from his side of the world to visit the main continent. He is extremely naive as to the culture on the continent he is visiting. Most of the hijinks that ensue do so because of his ignorance and polly annaish nature.
Absurdism abounds and is quite diverting. Eventually it became distracting. The satire is forced and relies heavily on puns. The tourist, Twoflower, brings modern day concepts into the story but they are sometimes hidden behind impenetrable veils of punnery. It just broke the frame. In the end the point was the absurdism rather than the plot, which in the end meant absolutely nothing. Definitely not escapist fantasy. This book was so self aware that it is hard to get into.
-fh