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Jul. 31st, 2012 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreSo, a patron comes up to the desk and asks my help in remembering the name of a particular author. "Do you read sci-fi and fantasy?" she asked. "I know it's not Philip K Dick and I think that it starts with an L."
It did not start with an L, because it was Piers Anthony. I had assumed that she was looking for an author that she'd read before, but apparently not because she asked me if I had read them (which I had, in middle school, like so many of my generation) and then asked me for recommendations.
The thing is, when a patron asks something like that and it seems like they actually want those books, you can't say, "Well, none of them, really, because Xanth is full of puns and all of them are kinda skeezy." After a few seconds, I ended up saying that I remembered liking the Incarnations of Immortality series.
I guess I just sort of assume that people know that Piers Anthony is kind of a creeper who is way too interested in the underwear of adolescent girls. It always surprises me when people don't know these things.
It did not start with an L, because it was Piers Anthony. I had assumed that she was looking for an author that she'd read before, but apparently not because she asked me if I had read them (which I had, in middle school, like so many of my generation) and then asked me for recommendations.
The thing is, when a patron asks something like that and it seems like they actually want those books, you can't say, "Well, none of them, really, because Xanth is full of puns and all of them are kinda skeezy." After a few seconds, I ended up saying that I remembered liking the Incarnations of Immortality series.
I guess I just sort of assume that people know that Piers Anthony is kind of a creeper who is way too interested in the underwear of adolescent girls. It always surprises me when people don't know these things.
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Date: 2012-08-01 02:15 am (UTC)Age then, well, maybe this person wants books written by someone who is entirely too obsessed with the knickers of underage girls. I mean, Twilight and Fifty Shades Of Grey are bestsellers...
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Date: 2012-08-01 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 02:56 am (UTC)He wrote, among other things, a very long fantasy series that involved a lot of ridiculous puns and silliness, in which his creepier tendencies were not immediately evident. So, at least while I was an adolescent, he was pretty popular among burgeoning fantasy geeks. Who then moved on to his other series, which were significantly more unsavory.
There was a time when it seemed like he was one of a lot of people's formative fantasy authors, like Anne McCaffery or Mercedes Lackey. So I tend to assume people know stuff about him.