This sums it up politely. There's much, much worse to be said about his oeuvre, but this is a start.
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New digs for ponderings about Levantine Christianity.
The interior of Saint Paul Melkite Greek Catholic Church, Harissa, Lebanon. I have decided to set up a Substack exploring Eastern Christi...
I enjoyed the Xanth novels when I was a teenager but, like most of the books I read at that time, have no interest in either revisiting or sharing with my own children.
ReplyDeleteWas on the verge of starting the Xanth series a couple of times but never did. Lucky me, it would seem. 😁
ReplyDeleteYou are.
DeleteI read the first three (?) Xanth books way back when. Some bad stuff there in retrospect, but I stopped reading Anthony with "Bio of a Space Tyrant." Some really, really creepy stuff in there. And when Anthony's depictions of women and young girls are brought up, he invariably deflects to "why doesn't the violence bother you?"
ReplyDelete"When someone tells you who he is--listen to him."
I remember Crewel Lye and Ogre, Ogre...sort of. I know I read a few others, too. Bio of a Space Tyrant was, I think, the last thing of his that I read. I thought Dune a far superior, and enjoyable, read, although Space Tyrant was very popular with several of my friends in our last couple of years of high school.
DeleteI found Xanth more enjoyable and less idiotic than Asimov and a lot of the other scifi/fantasy that was recommended to me. I've since accepted that all authors are seriously weird.
The only thing I read in that era that I've passed along to my kids and will still reread, besides Tolkien, Lewis, & REH, is Eddings' Belgariad & Mallorean quintets.
I tried a few years back to reread Terry Brooks and a lot of the D&D branded novels (Bob Salvatore, Weiss & Hickman, etc.) and found them all unreadably bad.