> My, I'm whiney today... y'see, it bugs me that the Xanth books nowadays are so obsessed with being unrelentingly punny that the stories and characters really lose out. A lot. Have you read the first six books? They are, in order, "A Spell for Chameleon," "The Source of Magic," "Castle Roogna," "Centaur Isle," "Night Mare," and "Ogre, Ogre." They do have the essential punnish quality that pervades the entire series, but it isn't taken quite to the level of redicularity that it is in the later books, and they become good reading for the stories and characters that they contain rather than simply for a lot of terrible puns.
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> Dar "Hoo-ah" ien

I read "Ogre, Ogre" and "Night Mare" (I think). They were pretty good. And I agree, they had much more plot than some of the others, which seemed to just be a lot of puns strung together with some other words thrown in for padding.
Part of my problem is that I've only read a handfull of Xanth books, and I read them all out of order (that is, in whatever order my friend found them as she was cleaning her room last summer), so I have little concept of what order they're supposed to go in.

Lu "Whose fault is it? Oh, it's San Andres' fault. . . " isa