Fantasy

The fantasy genre is what got me interested in reading when I was a youngling. Like a lot of other genres it has it's good stories and it's bad stories, with the later being more common. One has to wade through the bad ones to find the good ones. Thankfully, my parents knew what a lot of the good ones were. I was exposed to Tolkien's writing at a young age, starting with The Hobbit. It read like a children's book compared to The Lord of the Rings, which I read when I was older. It was a prologue, establishing some of Tolkien's deeply developed world. Everything had a history, things that don't even come up in the books.
The depth of the world was the most fascinating thing. I began drawing world maps in school on large pieces of paper, inventing land masses, and names for all the little cities. It was very amusing. I got very good at drawing little squiggly lines at the edges of continents to represent water.
I've read a lot of David Edding's works as well - the entire Belgariad, and The Redemption of Althalus. The Belgariad was a pretty classic heroes journey type of story, with an insecure boy becoming a scorscerer king of Riva. Eddings built the story around a prophecy and a magical item. I read in some of Eddings development work that a lot of fantasy stories revolve around some small magical object with high value. It's an easy story centerpiece - everything falls in around it.

Fantasy code;
Magical object
Wizards/scorcerers/mages
knights
kingdoms
dragons