Last few years? There always has been good kid’s fantasy books out there: Madeline L’engle, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Roald Dahl, Norton Juster, L Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, etc.
Those are all authors I cut my teeth on as a kid, and I think are all age-appropriate pre-teen books.
The more recent “bumper crop” books are crap like Eragon and an endless supply of Harry Potter knockoffs, although the Inkheart and Ember series are supposed to be good (and of course Pullman’s stuff.)
What rape is there in Lovecraft? There are plenty of allusions to miscegeny, something that apparently freaked him out, and he was certainly bigoted in various ways, but I don’t remember any characters in any sexual situations at all offhand. Of course, I haven’t read his complete works.
There’ve been plenty of allusions to rape in the mythos, but not by Lovecraft himself. If anything, his works give the distinct impression that sex in general, and specifically vaginas, scared the living shit out of him.
That was my impression too.
There was a really funny one man skit put on a couple of years ago at the H.P. Lovecraft festival where in a school age H.P. is confronted with a drawing of a vagina on a chalkboard in a sex education class.
Absolutely hilarious, I believe there is a dvd or sumsuch, but the name escapes me*.
*Late Bloomer which seems to be a more fleshed out version of the skit I saw, can’t say how good it is.
Because nobody demanded it - a trailer for Late Bloomer
If it did happen, it was “off-screen,” so to speak. Consensual sex occurred somewhat more often, IIRC.
nods Yep, I think the first thing I read of his was Split Infinty. Loved his stuff as a kid and read everything he wrote for years.
Not to defend Anthony (because he’s terrible), but just to play Devil’s Advocate – Lewis Carroll?
Or Lovecraft. I’d argue his paranoid and rabid racism maybe made him a more effective horror writer.
It’s possible for a writer to be a horrible human being and produce things that are still worth reading. Piers Anthony, of course, is a horrible human being AND a horrible writer, so no help to him.
Interesting you should bring this up. There’s a Smithsonian article about this subject that I read this month.
I think some of it is a matter of us looking at a 19th century man from the 21st century. A quote from the article:
His image as a man of suspect sexuality “says more about our society and its hang-ups than it does about Dodgson himself,” Will Brooker says. We see him through the prism of contemporary culture—one that sexualizes youth, especially female youth, even as it is repulsed by pedophilia.
Heck yeah. L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” series got me through grade school.
Insert mandatory reference to the Sonia Greene (a.k.a. Mrs. Lovecraft) quote about how he was “an adequately excellent lover”.
I love Pratchett to bits, but I’ve never been able to discern a difference between the style of his ‘kids’ books and everything else. I mean ‘Equal Rites’
has a young protagonist, but it’s not in the ‘kids books’ section… eh, you can’t really go wrong with him.
…
My two year old daughter is having lunch right next to me and I just had a little happy thinking of all the cool books I can give her to read :)
We’ll probably have eye implant readers available by then. Or maybe the iBall.
The kids’ books have chapter breaks.
I read On A Pale Horse as a teenager and really enjoyed it. The series rapidly went downhill, and I never made it past the third or fourth book and I lost interest in Anthony.
From the rest of this topic, looks like a good thing.
The sixth book was by far the worst, as the entire plot of the book hung on stupid wordplay, wherein it was revealed that (spoilers, but honestly if you care about spoilers at this point, you’re not reading this thread) the character named “Natasha” was actually an anagram for “Ah, Satan”.
You can imagine how book-throwingly awesome it was to see J.K. Rowling use this exact plot point in the Harry Potter books.
Louis Cypher approves.
“In the year 1999, the world will be run by a computer known as ‘S.A.-TAN’, a clever concealment of the name ‘Satan’”
The A.V. Club revisits Piers Anthony (via)
It’s almost criminal to call Anthony’s misogyny casual, seeing as how it’s so completely thought out and fundamentally integrated as a primary theme.
Chameleon has no control over her metamorphosis. It occurs naturally and gradually according to a monthly—or rather, “lunar”—cycle that’s obviously meant as a metaphor for the menstrual cycle. Because, of course, that’s what a woman’s period does: turns them into either mindless fuck-bunnies or devious, penis-wilting shrews.
Speaking of basilisks: Bestiality is a central plot point of Spell. Bink discovers that the underpopulation of Xanth is a result of all the human-on-monster sex that goes down across the land thanks to a bit of magical, naturally occurring aphrodisiac. But Bink doesn’t judge. He can’t. Earlier in the book, under the thrall of that aphrodisiac, he gets a hard-on for a harpy. But hey, he doesn’t judge.
TL; DR.
His Topics in Multicultural and Gender Issues In American Literature professor must be very proud, though.