I read…some number of them. It’s been at least ten years, though, so I can’t remember what number I got up to. The puns began to make me physically ill.
Hi. My name is jmizzou. And I’m a recovering Xanth reader.
When I was younger, I read up to Demons Don’t Dream. At that point, I realized that I was slowly being punned to death, and needed help. I cleaned up my act, turned to less mind-numbing forms of entertainment like TV and heavy metal music, and was on the straight and narrow for a number of years.
Sadly, I fell off the wagon one day when I saw Harpy Thyme and Geis of the Gargoyle at the local library. I thought to myself, “Self, maybe you were too young to appreciate Anthony’s own special form of genius. Maybe you should give these books a try! What could be the harm in that?” Little could I anticipate the horror that awaited within those hardback covers.
I could have left my opinion of Anthony at “dried up hack,” but then I made the mistake of reading his Isle of Man series. Or, at least, starting to read the series, because after he injected 50 pages of watersports into one of the books, I revised my opinion of him to “dirty, dirty old man” and vowed never to read anything by Anthony ever again.
I read them all until Color of Her Panties. After that, I just couldn’t see Anthony as anything but a dirty old man…and the almost-simultaneous publication of And Eternity certainly didn’t help that.
Which is a shame, because the volumes immediately preceding those in their respective series (Question Quest and For Love of Evil) were quite good.
My favorite Xanth book was Night Mare.
I’ve read them all up to Swell Foop. I haven’t seen Up in a Heaval or Cube Route anywhere, but I haven’t really been looking, either.
My mother bought me Dragon on a Pedestal when I was something like 10 or so, and I enjoyed it, so I went back and got my hands on all the ones before it. I’ve also read almost all the ones after it, though most of those only once…the series has become kind of boring. Anthony has a writing style that’s extremely simple and juvenile on the surface but winks at you with adult themes underneath, which wouldn’t be so bad if it were a sly wink but instead tends to be two huge metaphorical eyes glowing at several million watts and blinking at the speed of hummingbird’s wings, waving around giant signs in black Magic Marker that read “LOOK! LOOK! DOUBLE ENTENDRE HERE! DON’T MISS IT! AREN’T I NAUGHTY?”
Yet I continue to read them…
I’ve read Harpy Thyme, Zombie Lover, and The Dastard. I own The Dastard and borrowed the others from the library. They’re fine in small doses. I want to read a few more, but I worry that they may really annoy me. I’ve also read On a Pale Horse, which wasn’t that bad, although I hear that the rest of that series was terrible. The Author’s Note was very entertaining.
Do yourself a favor and don’t ever touch Firefly unless it’s with the flaming end of a tiki torch.
Agreed with the Castle Roogna fans with Nightmare coming in second. And, like so many others, I stopped at Vale of the Vole. I used to get them from the library but they stopped right before Vale and I couldn’t justify actually paying for them just for the sake of inertia.
I read many of them when I was younger. Everything up through Question Quest, I think. I think the next one was the Panties one, and I never ended up opening that one. The first ones were quite good, and I remember liking Centaur Aisle a lot. Specifically, I think I enjoyed Dor most as a character.
Piers Anthony’s problem seems to be that he doesn’t know when to end a good series. Probably the cries and pleas from young fans encouraged him to extend certain series longer than they should have gone. Xanth seems to be his one remaining trademark – other ideas have apparently fizzled out?
First books of his I ever read was the Apprentice Adept trilogy. He should have stopped with those three.
On a Pale Horse was probably the best of that series, and I liked some of the others. Including #6, the one on Satan. It was an interesting new perspective on earlier events. The whole thing ended with a fizzle, though – And Eternity was crap.
Too late… already read it in college.
To clarify – I’m not saying those were bad. I liked them very much. And it wrapped up nicely in Juxtaposition. No need for that second trilogy, which was just dull.
/end hijack
I own the first few, up to Night Mare maybe. A buddy and I in high school were going through them. Believe it or not, it was the love interest that got me in a couple of them. “Why can’t I get a girlfriend! Why can’t I have magical powers!” I was such a sap as a teenager. But, like others I grew bored of them and just quit. I’m not sure where they are actually…
I too stopped… at some point along the way. But WHY did we stop? What was it that changed? It surely wasn’t JUST that it was more of the same: wasn’t it that something wasn’t as good?
For the record, lots of people said they stopped with Vale of the Vole, but I think that’s one liked if I can remember: wasn’t that the one with the dude who was half ogre or something?
I’m another one who read all of them up to Vale of the Vole. I got hooked on Xanth in the late 80s when I did a few months in jail (for stupid teenage stuff that didn’t catch up with me untill my 20s). My wife would send me a few books every week, and one of the books would always be the next in the series. I dug 'em because I’m a big fan of bad puns and I kept buying them over the next few years. I don’t really know why I stopped reading them.
I actually have everything up to The Dastard on a disc somewhere as .txt files, but I’ve never actually read a book on the computer and probably never will. Maybe I’ll start catching up with the series next time I go to the library, which, now that I think of it, should be today since the Star Trek (The Return) book I have is due in a few days.
[QUOTE=Apos]
I too stopped… at some point along the way. But WHY did we stop? What was it that changed? It surely wasn’t JUST that it was more of the same: wasn’t it that something wasn’t as good?/QUOTE]
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Having discovered I was now old enough to get actual sex or rent porn, I need not get my thrills through Anthony’s scintillating descriptions of the physical assets of wood-nymphs, naiads, centaur breasts, gorgon boobies, maiden sex appeal or brain-dead women in general.
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Some of the ways that Piers Anthony ignored previous plot developments and characters in lieu of newer ones. Also some things about Xanth never did make any sense: you ever recall a funeral in Xanth? I was also increasingly annoyed by Xanth’s homogenous racial make-up… to be the inverse of Florida, Xanth sure seemed to lack any Latino, cuban, African-American, Native American and Asian influence.
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Some of the details in his Author’s Notes were seriously off-putting. I got a strong whiff of prima donna-ness off Golem In The Gears that almost put me off the series. At times Piers Anthony reminds me of a lesser John Byrne or Harlan Ellison, without the former’s career heights or the latter’s talent.
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Centaurs and Night Mares. Horses, schmorses. The last thing I needed to read about was sexually aroused horses – how ''bout you?
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There’s a creeping misogyny and apparent obsession over various female body parts that gets real apparent after reading Xanth awhile. If you get it and drop the series, youre probably somewhat normal. If you get it and keep coming back for more, you’re an accessory.
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Despite the requirements of the Good magician Humphery, damned few of the protagonists in Xanth novels ever had to do a years’ service for their Answers. And EVERY novel starts off with a quest. It gets somewhat irritating after awhile.
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The Love Spring was just an exercise in beastilality and softcore written porn.
I’ve read… 26 of them, I own the visual guide to Xanth, and the Xanth computer game. A friend of mine had the Xanth board game.
I gave up after #26 mainly because of Askia’s first setence in reason #2 above. It seemed he was more concerned with setting up the next novel than resolving the one he was writing.
I really, really love puns though. And gratuitous bits of female flesh.
I’ve read…a lot of them. I’m not sure, anymore, because I’ve successfully blocked most of them from my memory. I stopped, I think, because after a while the books seemed to be interchangeably similar. Whatever new elements (new mundane characters, huge ret-cons, etc.) were introduced failed to grab my attention in any way.
I was a voracious reader when I was younger, and having enjoyed the first two or three Xanth books, I set out to read as many Anthony books as I could find. So, I read through the Xanth series, the Apprentice Adept series, the Incarnations of Immortality series, even Bio of a Space Tyrant. (gah.) (I hope I have better taste now…)
I remember being increasingly creeped out by the odd fetishes that Anthony seemed to have. This reached its peak with the naked serfs of the Apprentice Adept series. This series also had the biggest continuity changes between books. I remember a werewolf explaining that a person’s talent with magic is directly related to his ranking in the game Ladders. This got thrown out the window right away, as we saw Adepts (purple, black) who were aged members of the upper class…
I think the only series that Piers Anthony actually planned out was the Bio of a Space Tyrant…which was crap for another reason: “Let’s HIT the ALLeGOry HOME with a SLEDGEhammer, shall we?”
I enjoyed the first three, but after that, they were just bad.
I own the first ten, plus a couple scattered from later in the series, and have read (I think) through Zombie Lover, which would be about number 25 or so (I’m certain I’ve read Zombie Lover, but I don’t recall if I’ve read Harpy Time, and whether that was before or after). I also have the computer game (picked it up in a bargain bin somewhere, together with the book that came with it), and it’s really, really bad, even for being based on a Xanth book. Of the later books (past, say, Night Mare, the only one I’d really recommend is Question Quest, which is basically Humphry’s life story. You don’t need to read it in sequence with the rest; as long as you know who Humphry is, you’ll be fine.
What weaned me, I think, was a combination of factors: First, I went off to college, and didn’t have access to nearly as good a library any more. Second, around that same time, I caught up with Anthony’s writing frenzy, so I couldn’t start a new one as soon as I finished the previous. Third, at some point in high school, a friend had introduced me to Heinlein (well, not to the man himself, but to his books), which meant I actually had something good to devour voraciously. And fourth, once I got a chance to come up for air from my voracious reading (due to the other three factors), I had a chance to stop and think, and realized that Piers Anthony’s books aren’t actually all that good. Some of his books are entertaining, to be sure, but they’re still formulaic hackwork schlock.
Askia, he did make some token attempts at introducing diversity, but even as a non-minority, it seemed weak and condescending to me, like he was standing up and saying “I’m not racist, I support those poor black people even though they’re not as good as us”. Like, in one of the books, there was a community of colored people. As in, literally colored, blue and green and orange and purple. Whoever was King at that point magnanimously agreed to let them populate some abandoned marshland or whatnot, so long as they didn’t mingle with the “regular” folks. Come to think of it, the extreme lack of enlightenment on racial issues, combined with the hypocritical insistance that he was enlightened, might have been another of the things that drove me away.
Since some others have mentioned the Incarnations of Immortality series, I’ll add my agreement that they went monotonically downhill in quality, and I only acknowledge the first five at all. On a Pale Horse, the first one, is probably the best thing I’ve read by Anthony (and unfortunately, I’ve read a lot), and although it isn’t really as good, I’m personally partial to Bearing an Hourglass (yes, that was the direct inspiration for my username). After that, if you want resolution to the series, go ahead and read the other three (I’m a completist, and hate to leave a series in the middle). But you can safely consider the series over after Being a Green Mother.
And finally, whatever you do, avoid all of his early stuff. Remember I said that some Anthony stuff is entertaining? Well, Macroscope, Mercycle, Race Against Time, and But What of Earth are neither good nor entertaining. And as for Battle Circle, well, there are some things that you really only need to tell to your psychotherapist.
And seriously, seriously avoid Anthonology, a collection of short stories. If you think Xanth is bad for the wink, wink, nudge, nudge juvenile smut level, Anthony is about ten times worse when he’s freed of the “young adult” format and doesn’t have a series’ worth of relatively-beloved characters he needs to avoid besmirching.
I’ve read more than enough of them, although I’m pleased to see several titles mentioned in this thread that I appear to have dodged. I can’t recall when I actually put them down, but I have to confess to having read the Bio of a Space Tyrant books, as well as three Apprentice Adept titles.
One thing has me curious, though (although not curoius enough to actually pick him up again): did he ever introduce a bee-keeper doing business down at the marina?
I read through Heaven Cent.
They just got boring after a while.
As for the Incarnation series, I loved the first one, though the next two were ok and hated the next two.
It took me several years before I bothered to pick up the 6th and surprising liked it. It was interesting to see the events from the first 5 books from a different angle.
It made me hope for good things out of the seventh, but nope.
I started reading them in high school and got up to Golem in Gear. A few years later, my son discovered them and I got up to The Color of her Panties. Zoltarb made it all the way up to The Dastard.
Slight hijack-- I also loved his Adept Series that I read in high school too. Imagine my surprise when my son tells me he goes to the next generation and then kills them all.