I love how their second recommendation for people new to fantasy is The Simarillion. I mean, this is a pretty terrible flowchart in general, but jeezus
The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis. Basically, what if Napoleon's engineers had access to helium? Author does a fantastic job of 'building' the airship and giving her a crew.
So are cats! Or horses, or (theoretical as to this list and discussion) unicorns. Horses and unicorns you can ride, as you could a dragon! Riding > walking 95% p value.
You'd have problems taking a very sick dragon to the vet. I mean, if it can at least walk under its own power that's one thing, but you'd need a Very Large Truck for one that's out cold. And a crane to put it on the trailer. Then you have to find a vet who's willing to look at it. Not all of them will treat reptiles, or large animals of any sort. Also, they have to have a parking lot that will take your truckload of dragon (ours doesn't).
Also, the food bill would be prohibitively large. Can you imagine how much meat you'd need to feed a dragon for a year? Now think about current grocery prices. The dragon won't pay out of its hoard (by definition—you hoard a hoard), so it's all on you.
Don't even try to think about cleaning up what comes out of the other end.
A few interesting picks and one just bleeehhhhh pick in the Drizzt series. There are ever so many better PnP based books, right off the top of my head the OG dragon lance series by Weiss and Hickman.
Also, I’m stoked that Furies of Caulderon was listed. That might be in my top three, and sadly it looks to have been abandoned by Jim Butcher.
Not impressed. I've read a good half of what's on there if not more, and I saw several books that I would emphatically disrecommend to anyone who asked about them. The science fiction seems to emphasise "classic" over "entertaining"—the only thing on that side that I would feel happy recommending is the Bujold—and the fantasy isn't much better.
My strongest disrecommendation would be A Spell for Chameleon, because Anthony is a real creeper and while Chameleon itself is just mildly sexist, I'd be afraid of whoever I was talking to picking up Firefly on the assumption it would be more of the same. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant is also a strong absolute nope for me because the protagonist is an unrepentant rapist (also a self-absorbed whiner, IIRC—just not a fun person to spend hundreds of pages with). Several other books on the chart I would class as "popular but lousy" and two as outright boring. Some others I would only recommend to certain people, or with caveats.
One thing that there isn't a lot of here is racial or cultural diversity—all of the authors whose backgrounds I know are white people from the US, the UK, or Canada. Even if we assume this was issued 10+ years ago, I'd expect to see Samuel R. Delaney and possibly Octavia Butler over on the SF side. For an up-to-date chart, I'd expect to see Cixin Liu (I didn't likeThe Three-Body Problem, but it's substantial enough that I'd have no issues recommending it), Yoon Ha Lee, and possibly Nnedi Okrafor on the SF side, and N.K. Jemisen and maybe Zen Cho on the fantasy side. Are only white people expected to ask for recommendations?
The other thing I noticed about the SF side of the chart is that there's very little there that I'd consider fun to read—too much old hard SF and dystopian fiction. It looks like a reading list for a university course on history of SF. Where's the Liaden Universe? Kirstein's The Steerswoman? Melissa Scott's Five-Twelvths of Heaven? James White's Sector General stories? All the other interesting and quirky books that are loved within the genre but were never bestsellers outside it? For that matter, if we're doing older hard SF, where are Hal Clement, Harry Harrison, and C.J. Cherryh? Anne Leckie's Ancillary trilogy should also be on any current version of this thing.
Now we get to the fantasy side. Notable missing stuff that I haven't already mentioned: anything by Naomi Naovik, Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor, Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy (Moon is conspicuously missing from both sides of the chart), Brust's Jhereg, P.C. Hodgell's God Stalk. (Twenty years ago, I would also have included Hughart's The Bridge of Birds, but that might get accusations of cultural appropriation leveled at it now.) I'd also double down on Bujold with Curse of Chalion rather than recommend Brian Sanderson twice—he's good, but not that good.
Instead of these authors and series, we get extruded fantasy product like Sword of Shannara, one of the most derivative fantasy novels I've ever read. Bleh. (I find it interesting that Lackey's Valdemar and Modesitt's Recluce novels are missing, although that's because they were popular at the same time as Brooks, Eddings, Feist, and Goodkind rather than because I would recommend them.)