Still, Sunshine and I thought, maybe some of the books were more “real” than others. Perhaps there was a Carolyn who wrote the very first adventure — “The Secret of the Old Clock.” Maybe she also wrote “The Hidden Staircase” (No. 2) and “The Secret of Shadow Ranch” (No. 5) in which a “pretty, slightly plump blonde” named Bess and an “attractive tomboyish girl with short dark hair” named George first appear, ready to help “Titian-haired Nancy” on her “dangerous assignments.”

Carolyn Keene. Her name sounded young and fresh and blond. That “real” Carolyn invented this world full of “delicious” meals and “attractive” boys, a world where three 18-year-old girls drove around town in Nancy’s blue roadster, their trim clothes offset with matching shoes and beige accessories. A world where changing into a fresh dress for dinner and showing one’s blue eyes “to advantage” wasn’t incompatible with wandering around at night shining flashlights into the woods, chasing after shady-looking men and rescuing helpless innocents from terrifying enemies.

After the first few books, Sunshine and I thought, when the series got so popular, Carolyn had to turn some of the writing over to other people: bright young women in smart wool suits who sat in front of typewriters late into the night, banging out these clever, scary mysteries. “Ghostwriters.” We knew the word, and it sounded perfect — though we usually asserted that the early stories were the best. The most authentic.

In reality, Carolyn Keene and Nancy Drew were the brainchildren of Edward Stratemeyer, owner of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and creator of the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys. He hired Benson (nee Wirt) to write about a girl detective, paid her $125 per book, then died the year the first one was published (1930), leaving his daughter Harriet Adams to supervise the series and later write many of the novels herself. But it was Benson who created the Nancy that captured me and my friends. And she really did write for her “whole entire life”: Until her death she penned a column for the Toledo Blade, and she authored more than 130 books — more than Sunshine and I ever would have thought possible.

Fans of Nancy Drew tend to say they love the character because she is a proto-feminist, a good role model for girls. The young sleuth is courageous, agile and smart. Nancy Picard, author of the Jenny Cain mysteries, writes that “the original Nancy Drew is a mythic character in the psyches of the American women who followed her adventures as they were growing up. She may have been Superman, Batman and Green Hornet, all wrapped up in a pretty girl in a blue convertible … [She] is our bright heroine, chasing down the shadows, conquering our worst fears, giving us a glimpse of our brave and better selves, proving to everybody exactly how admirable and wonderful a thing it is to be a girl.”

OK, true enough. Nancy certainly solves mysteries, rescues people, takes fearless action. But rereading the pile of Nancy Drews I found at my local library, I began to think the books’ appeal lies in something other than feminism.

The character is much older than other heroines intended for preteen readers. When I read Nancy Drew, I was also reading about Pippi Longstocking, Ramona the Pest and Harriet the Spy. Nothing with grown-up protagonists. Nothing, even, with protagonists old enough to drive.

There is almost no description in the novels, with the two exceptions of clothing (matching ensembles, fun “Indian costumes”) and food (lobster, hot fudge). There is very little atmosphere and no imagery. When Nancy ventures out at midnight to search for a missing girl in “The Clue of the Broken Locket” (No. 11), “the thick woods shut out the brilliant moonlight” — and that is every word of scene-setting we get.

George has no personality traits aside from athleticism and occasional unkind critiques of Bess’ weight (“Eating is really a very fattening hobby, dear cousin”). Bess has little more: occasional glimmers of giggly timidity and a tendency to eat sundaes when the other girls choose soft drinks. Nancy is the median between their two moderate extremes, and in that sense is even more featureless than they. George is a tiny bit too thin and too masculine; Bess is a shade too plump and too feminine. Nancy Drew is just right, and though she’s always the best at everything — from horseback riding to water ballet, to name the two that impressed me most when I was 9 — she has no interests, speech patterns or personality quirks that carry over from book to book.

The girls also have no troubling feelings besides curiosity and, occasionally, fear. They never get angry at one another. Nancy never misses her boyfriend, Ned, who is often conveniently “in Europe” or at college. She doesn’t mourn her lost mother. She doesn’t have the self-doubt that plagues most contemporary teenage characters. What she does have is a seemingly endless flow of cash. And a nice car. And the chance to take excellent vacations because she is neither in school nor gainfully employed. She has fabulous clothes, and is portrayed — in the yellow hardcover editions that can still be easily found at the public library — in sporty, clean-lined drawings that recall fashion illustrations.

In short, the Nancy Drew stories are both pure mysteries and glamour fantasies. The lack of emotion and character, combined with trademark cliffhangers at the close of every chapter — “Within seconds, the canoe sank!” “Just then the agonized scream of a woman came from the house!” — make the books read like exercises in pure plot-making. At the same time, the old illustrations are still reprinted because the neat little outfits and carefully constructed hairstyles are part of the books’ appeal. Food, clothes and vacations to dude ranches, summer cottages and historic castles — it’s all closer to reading old copies of Mademoiselle magazine than it is to Agatha Christie.

Unlike the hardcovers, the contemporary paperbacks have no pictures except cover art that makes Nancy look more like Alicia Silverstone than Joan Fontaine — but the prose style is remarkably similar to that of the Benson stories. Same digs at Bess’ weight; same cool clothes for Nancy; still no job, no school; great car, great travel; no atmosphere or description other than meals and outfits. In short, the same fantasy.

Ironically, since her heroine had such a sense of entitlement and always proudly identified herself as a detective, Mildred Benson never collected royalties and was contractually bound from admitting she was a series writer until a court case in the 1980s revealed it. Also ironically, the yellow hardcovers, which I have always thought of as the “real” Nancy Drew books (as opposed to the contempo-romance-looking paperbacks) — are actually revised, condensed editions of the stories as written by Benson and the other early Carolyn Keenes. In 1959, Harriet Adams had them edited to uniform length, excising racial slurs and other unpleasant bits. Nancy’s age was also raised from 16 to 18 and her hair color changed: blond in the originals, she is “titian-haired” in the yellow books.

To find the original stories as Benson wrote them would take probably only a few minutes on eBay, but a 1930 blue-covered first edition of “The Secret of the Old Clock” is worth $1,500, whereas the revised, yellow-covered 1959 edition is worth $10 to $25. Libraries have the yellow. Bookstores have the yellow. Therefore this article, my memories and most of Mildred Benson’s legacy are built primarily on a Nancy rather different from the original. Benson told Salon that the Adams edits “made Nancy into a traditional sort of a heroine. More of a house type. And in her day, that is what I had specifically gotten away from.”

And yet, it is the yellow books that matter most, because they are the texts that have infiltrated the collective imagination of anyone born after, say, 1952. (That is, unless you are a true fan, or a collector, or a book historian — in which case they are corrupt and second-rate.) In any case, Benson’s passing is just a symbol. She wrote some of the books, but not all. She wrote some of the prose we see on the page, but not all. She was the “real” Carolyn Keene, and she was not. Her Nancy is the “real” Nancy, and it is not. The essence of the girl sleuth — if the essence of a fictional character is somehow located in authorship or in textual sanctity — remains an unsolvable mystery.

In Maggie’s parents’ house, the basement rec room was totally separate from the rest of the building. Private. By the time high school was over, we had all puked, smooched boys and smoked pot down there at one point or another. On the night of her birthday, we convened in that basement — snickering and whispering — to hear the advice of our most experienced member, Renee.

Renee had already seen a porno, one whole film from beginning to end, and this is what she had to tell us: A funny-looking man with a huge wiener picked up a woman in a deserted laundromat. As they started to fuck, sudsy water spewed out of an overloaded washing machine, covering the linoleum. The couple, unfazed by this turn of events, skidded across the soapy floor, getting cleaner and cleaner the more they copulated. Renee had apparently replayed the scene several times on fast-forward.

Thus informed, we set off for the local video store. But as soon as we arrived — crisis. Scottie, a tall, supercute blond boy we knew vaguely from parties, was working the cash register! Suddenly our private escapade had the potential to turn massively public.

What to do, what to do? He’d think we were sluts! He’d tell everyone we knew! Outspoken Renee asked him coolly for a recommendation. “Talk Dirty to Me,” Scottie said, with an authoritative calm. It was the best.

Well, what did that mean, the best? It made him the horniest? It was the most hilarious? It was the one he thought would embarrass us the most? Or it was the one he thought would make him seem cool to a bunch of girls? Maybe it was the only one he’d ever watched. Whatever. We rented it.

“Talk Dirty to Me,” if I remember it right, is about a spectacularly unappealing drifter with a humongous cock. His even uglier (and less well-endowed) sidekick is a virgin. They’re hanging out on the beach, doing nothing much of anything, and the drifter tells the sidekick he’ll show him how it’s done. They enter a doctor’s office, the drifter exposes his limp pecker to the nurse, she thinks that’s really great and he gets lucky. The next day, after he tries the same move on a toothy blond real estate lady (she, too, responds favorably), the two men get permission to cohabitate in an enormous mansion, rent-free. And whaddya know? Babes come over and they all talk dirty.

While all this was going on, my girlfriends and I were squirming around in our seats on the basement couch. We weren’t exactly heated up; the drifter was too crass and homely to make any sort of dent in our preppy prom date fantasies (though I’m sure we all thought about Scottie, at least a little). It was more like we were getting an education in sexual possibilities.

We were preppy girls. Protected girls. We still burst into hysterical laughter at the word “penis.” Yes, some of us had touched one, some of us had even touched two, but that was about as far as our experience went. So “Talk Dirty to Me” provided some entirely fresh information: People might watch each other have sex. People might like looking in mirrors while they do it. Some people might screw doggy style while uttering — over and over in all seriousness — “I’m gonna come all over your big ass.” (We didn’t know anyone liked big asses. We didn’t know anyone talked like that during sex! We didn’t know anyone might like to watch himself come.)

Here’s some other stuff I learned that night: Some women comb their pubic hair. Some women trim it with scissors. You can use your hand while giving a blow job for added effect. Some men are turned on by giving head. Some people scream a lot during sex, and nobody thinks it’s weird.

I was still a virgin, of course. But as the VCR rewound, I was no longer an innocent — and to me, that felt good. Two hours with a not very good porn movie had hugely expanded my understanding of sex. No longer could I see it only through the misty lens of romance novels and the earnest, educational view of my sophomore sex-ed class; “Talk Dirty to Me” showed me what I most needed to know at that point in my life: Desire is raw, and silly, and awkward, and incomprehensible.

What did we do when Maggie turned 19? I’ll leave that to your imagination.

“The Fourth Hand,” Irving’s first novel since winning the Academy Award for the screenplay of “The Cider House Rules,” is comparatively small. It is shorter than the others, certainly, but it also matters less. The instigating tragedy is comparatively minor: Beefcake newscaster Patrick Wallingford’s left hand is eaten by an Indian circus lion. Patrick wants a new hand very badly, but his life goes on as before, anyhow: reporting on disasters for a third-rate news channel, sleeping with countless women thanks to his movie-star looks — and never quite landing in the world. He is not a person of depth, and losing his hand does not make him one: “It had previously been Patrick’s experience that women were easily smitten with him, at least initially; it had also been his experience that women got over him easily, too.”

Patrick’s studliness and essential shallowness differentiate “The Fourth Hand” from Irving’s recent books — and frankly, they make it worse. Irving protagonists are usually painfully sensitive, acutely aware of every nuance of interaction. They feel things more strongly than other people around them. Life tears them up, they take action, they are consumed by worry. They also tend to be sexually inhibited or dysfunctional: The narrator of “A Prayer for Owen Meany” is celibate, as is Dr. Larch of “Cider House”; the hero of “Hotel New Hampshire” is erotically obsessed with his sister; Dr. Daruwalla of “Son of the Circus” is just a prude. “The Fourth Hand,” by contrast, traces the emotional maturation of a discontented lothario — and in this sense, it’s more similar to the early novel “The Water Method Man” than to Irving’s later work.

Patrick matures mainly because he falls in love with a good woman and fathers her child — and also because he has a number of memorable erotic encounters. A make-up artist almost dies choking on her gum during orgasm while her brother yells threats into the answering machine (“I’m gonna grind up your prick in a blenda. Then I’m gonna make ya drink it!”); an aging, dying feminist treats him like a friend; a ball-busting future anchorwoman demands his top-of-the-gene-pool seed; and a 51-year-old widow, unhappily pregnant, reads E.B. White in bed and then disappears, possibly having made up her entire life story. These single nights transform Patrick into the monogamist he becomes because they’re complicated: He can’t forget them like he could an easy night of near-anonymous sex.

The woman who really makes this passive playboy into a constant lover and devoted father is the widow of the man whose appendage he receives in one of the first-ever hand transplant surgeries. Doris Clausen wants visitation rights with the hand, maybe because she’s obsessed with Patrick from TV and actually arranged to have her husband’s hand donated to him before the man died in a handgun accident — or maybe because she truly loved her husband. Patrick is smitten, possibly because part of Otto Clausen is attached to his left arm, and possibly because he’s had prescient dreams about Doris and her country house.

In the end, she loves him back, even though his body rejects her husband’s hand and he has to have it removed. When she squeezes his stump between her thighs, Patrick feels the phantom fingers of a “fourth hand” that symbolizes some kind of destiny fulfillment: “There were the two you were born with,” Doris tells him. “You lost one. Otto’s was your third. As for this one … this is the one that will never forget me. This one is mine.”

Unlike book critic Richard Eder, who starts his New York Times evisceration of “The Fourth Hand” with the premise that “it’s hard to say what [an Irving novel] might be other than a good-sized detonation that leaves a relatively shallow crater,” I tend to love Irving — for his dedication to complex, old-fashioned plotting; for his unironic, urgent characters; and for his passion for peculiar, telling details and rhythms of prose. So although there’s not much plot in “The Fourth Hand,” and characters tend to appear briefly and then never return (as I’ve hinted, Patrick himself isn’t much to write home about) — I found kernels of familiar delight here, anyhow.

The book has something of Owen Meany’s mysticism: Patrick’s premonitions (the result of an intense Indian painkiller) suggest that his fate is linked with that of his future hand donor; in some way, he already is Otto, and Otto is him. Irving also demonstrates the same urgent engagement with other people’s books we saw in “Son of the Circus” and “Cider House.” Here, it’s “Stuart Little,” “Charlotte’s Web” and “The English Patient.” Though the thematic ties to White and Ondaatje are hard to grasp (Stuart is on a journey, Patrick is on a journey?), Irving’s passion for literature is infectious. And, thank goodness, there is the expected and pitifully lovable smelly dog (“she ate sticks, shoes, rocks, paper, metal, plastic, tennis balls, children’s toys, and her own feces”); the less-delightful but still-familiar parody of feminism; and most important, the occasionally thrilling sentence of utter clarity, humor and truth. On Patrick’s anorexic surgeon: “[Dr. Zajac's] thinness was compulsive; he couldn’t be thin enough. A marathoner, a bird watcher, a seed-eater — a habit he had acquired from his observation of finches — the doctor was preternaturally drawn to birds and to people who were famous. He became a hand surgeon to the stars.”

Perhaps “The Fourth Hand” is just a quick shot at another bestseller before the glow of the Oscar wears off. Like nearly every other new comic novel on the bookstore shelves, this one is about dating and fear of commitment. Maybe the man thinks this stuff is all people want to read about nowadays; he’s just trying to deliver.

But perhaps “The Fourth Hand” is best seen as a transitional novel, moving Irving away from the Dickensian storytelling he’s been entrenched in since “The World According to Garp.” Could be he’s heading toward a looser, more modern form. I truly hope he is. Because when Irving is good, he is very, very good, and when he is bad, he gives me glimpses of something better.

“Forbidden Erotica: The Rotenberg Collection” is the ideal gift for both the porn fiend and the bibliophile. The black-and-white pictures — gelatin silver prints, albumen prints, postcards, lithographs and sepia-tone photographs — date from the 1870s to the 1940s, and are as lewd as anything being done today. Though homosexual images are relatively infrequent, the pictures are without exception produced by men, for men: French maid outfits, an abundance of fellatio, water sports, lots of boots and knee-high stockings — with everyone in the most acrobatic of positions. In one series of pictures, a man places his cock on a dinner plate full of potatoes and other vegetables, while his female companion, wielding a large steak knife, threatens to eat his member like a sausage. In another, a woman putts a golf ball that is resting on a man’s penis. The pictures come from the archives of Mark Rotenberg, who started his collection when he found a dumpster full of a dead neighbor’s girlie magazines. The book is thrilling, weird and full of homely and beautiful bodies alike.

The hunky boys of the big and little screens — both timeless legends and pinups destined for obscurity — are the subject of the most unabashed and campy photo book of the season: “Shirtless: The Hollywood Male Physique.” Rock Hudson in the bathtub, Ryan O’Neal eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in a bathing suit, Rudolph Valentino on the beach (he has an enormous package). What’s especially great about “Shirtless” in comparison with photo books largely populated by models is that we already have relationships with these men; we’ve seen them in countless movie and TV roles, and now we get to see them nearly naked. There’s the thrill of watching the iconic get undressed, plus a nostalgic and comical element: Marlon Brando, John Travolta and Matt Dillon look amazing, but we all know they’ve gone to seed. Some of these guys are hairy, normal-looking or soft around the middle (Ronald Reagan, Chuck Norris and Erik Estrada, especially), while others are surprisingly built (like Michael Landon, Christian Bale and Steve Guttenberg). “Today, in a time when perfect male bodies are almost commonplace,” writes the author, “I felt it was important to focus on the men who paved the way for this bounty.” The boy-crazy teenagers and the gay cinemagoers on your list will love this book. And before you wrap it, you can get a glimpse up Jude Law’s shorts.

In “Body Knots” Howard Schatz, who claims on the jacket copy to be the “world’s preeminent photographer of the human body,” does for the human form what “Play With Your Food” did for the potato. Photographs of nude dancers twisted into complicated corporeal tangles, then colored and otherwise altered with computer technology, make the human body seem more like a bulbous fruit than a sexual object. Yet the book is oddly sexy, partly because of the anonymity of the models (their faces don’t show), and partly because their naked bodies are bonded in orgiastic poses. Bottoms swell like luscious pears, hands look like spiny leaves, spines arc like the curve of a banana. This is erotica for graphic designers, Silicon Valley millionaires and fruit lovers of all persuasions. “Nude Body Nude,” another collection by Schatz, isn’t worth its $75 price tag. Glamorous, perfectly formed and well-oiled bodies in provocative (but not sexually explicit) poses make the nude seem like a dead art form: The book is a collection of sleek studio shots, nothing more.

“Picturing the Modern Amazon” is designed to accompany a museum exhibition of the same title that was at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art last year. It is the most scholarly title on this list, but it provides naked, hypermuscular photographs and drawings that (although clearly intended to edify young girls and feminist theorists) will arouse people who like being engulfed and overpowered by enormous women — and titillate nearly everyone else. The pictures range from historical photographs of circus strongwomen to portraits of scantily clad bodybuilders by artists like Andres Serrano (Yolanda Hughes in black-leather bondage wear); Walter Gutman (Claudia Wilbourn, one of the few builders without obvious breast implants, flexing in the nude) and Renée Cox (Heather Foster, toting a gun and wearing thigh-high boots). Even better is the comic-book art: Wonder Woman with her golden lasso and various superheroines from more outré publications, such as an image from “Atomic Age Amazon” that features a gigantic woman named Jodi shooting bullets out of her phenomenally large breasts.

The Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender and Reproduction spent years collecting photographs that document the sexual practices of ordinary people. “Peek: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute” displays amateur snapshots and professional images dating from the 1880s to the 1990s. Some of the lusty porn shots that dominate the Rotenberg Collection can be found here, but the real pleasure is in the comical and exhibitionistic sensuality of ordinary people. A couple shoots arrows on a snow-covered hill, naked except for heavy black boots. A dominatrix in a black mask and lace-up thigh-high boots whips a small toy dog into obedience. A bespectacled woman turns hamburgers on a barbecue in the nude. This is the erotica of everyday life, arousing and odd.

The photographs in “Nude Sculpture: 5,000 Years” are discreetly erotic. The book is simultaneously a homage to the beauty of the human body and a testimony to the nearly miraculous ability of sculptors to render softness out of stone. It’s a collaboration between photographer David Finn and artists like Rodin, Bernini, Canova, Dupré and Michelangelo, and the pleasure is in the curves of the highly muscled male bodies and the smoothly arching female ones. Christ hangs on the cross, and there are closeups of several penises — those of Hercules, Perseus, Bacchus, Adam and someone who raped the Sabine women. The genitalia of myth, history and legend, suitable for your grandma’s coffee table.

“Emerging Bodies: Nudes From the Polaroid Collections” will excite the art lovers and amateur photographers on your list, though it’s not much of a turn-on. Pictures made on instant film by artists like Gabriele Basilico, Chuck Close and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as a number of lesser-known photographers, prove genuinely thought-provoking and very often lovely.

Michael Spano’s black-and-whites of women whose bodies are patterned with light and Basilico’s pictures of naked bottoms scored by marks from chair seats explore the relationship of the body to its environment. And of course, Polaroid film is ideal for anyone inclined to snap his own dirty pictures. Rather than face prying clerks at the local 24-hour photo stop, the Polaroid photographer gets instant results and complete privacy. Consider “Emerging Bodies” as inspiration for a little homemade erotica.

On the other hand, Petter Hegre’s “My Wife” is a valentine. Over the past few years, he took innumerable snapshots of his petite, blond (and always fully shaved) wife, Svanborg. She is vivacious and silly, not always beautiful, perpetually erotic. In the kitchen, she struggles into a lycra bodysuit. On the porch, she sunbathes nude next to a kiddie pool. Sometimes she sleeps with other women, sometimes with a man who appears to be Hegre himself.

The pictures are scarily intimate: Svanborg is photographed with a tampon string hanging between her legs, sitting on the toilet while doubled over with stomach cramps, stretched across the bed with a vibrator. “My Wife” feels like a genuine document of a hot-blooded romance in which the woman is neither idealized nor degraded: she simply is.

I then consumed “The Source of Magic” (Xanth 2), “Castle Roogna” (X3), “Centaur Aisle” (X4), “Ogre, Ogre” (X5), “Night Mare” (X6), “Golem in the Gears” (X7) and “Crewel Lye” (X8) in swift succession, only stopping when I got a boyfriend who read philosophy and made me feel embarrassed about my reading habits. Now Anthony’s latest, “The Dastard” (X24), is out in hardcover, and it’s been years since I immersed myself in the pleasure of reading series fantasy. (Well, that’s not exactly accurate. Like everyone else, I read the Harry Potter books, and their popularity has led me both to return to Xanth and to contemplate just what makes this genre so satisfying. Also, Anthony is devilish fun, and nobody is paying him any critical attention, even though a large number of Xanth books have hit the New York Times bestseller list.)

“A Spell for Chameleon” is the story of Bink, a young man who is about to be exiled from the magical land of Xanth because he has no talent — all humans must demonstrate magic ability by the age of 25. In hope of avoiding deportment, he travels through the perilous wilderness (populated by harpies, dragons and a wide variety of dangerous magical plants) to ask Humphrey, the Magician of Information, whether or not he has any undiscovered ability. Humphrey discerns that Bink does indeed, but the magic remains somehow unidentifiable, so Bink is wrongly exiled to dreary Mundania (where the rest of us live). There, he encounters Evil Magician Trent, banished from Xanth for trying to overthrow the Storm King.

Trent is a transformer. He can change any living thing into any other living thing. And though his talent has been worthless all his many years in Mundania, and though there is an enormous deadly shield preventing his return, he is nonetheless plotting the conquest of his native country. He imprisons Bink and a fellow exile — a fiendishly smart and painfully ugly woman named Fanchon — and forces them to help him eliminate the shield; all three return to Xanth (it’s a long story), huge and complex adventures ensue, Bink prevails through what appears to be a series of miraculous coincidences, and eventually Trent discovers our hero’s talent: Bink cannot be hurt by magic in any way. Fanchon reveals that she is a chameleon — stupid and gorgeous at the start of the month, ugly and smart at the end of it (she left Xanth to escape the constant transformation) — and she and Bink fall in love and get married (he likes variety). Trent turns out not to be so evil after all; he takes over from the aging, incompetent Storm King, and everyone lives happily ever after.

What my friend Bell said about “A Spell for Chameleon” — “Good — I mean, pretty cheesy, but fun anyhow” — is, I imagine, absolutely typical of how Anthony’s fans describe his work to others. I describe it that way, because there’s something deeply uncool about liking series fantasy, especially in the New York literary circles I find myself in. But the fun Anthony offers is pretty huge, and if I can admit I like Adam Sandler and “South Park,” I’m certainly mature enough to admit I get a huge kick out of Xanth. The books are full of silly humor and zippy adventure. For example, in “Centaur Aisle” (X4), Bink’s son Dor (whose magician-level talent is speaking to inanimate objects) has to face three challenges in order to gain entry to Humphrey’s castle. He out-maneuvers a zombie sea serpent in the castle moat; climbs a glass mountain by feeding the bizarre, uneven-legged animal that keeps interrupting his progress (“Give me strength to survive the monumental idiocy of the animate,” the mountain prays obnoxiously, before Dor figures out what to do; and opens the top of the glass peak by banging his cranium against it. (“That’s using your head,” the mountain quips.)

The jokes are fast and furious. The action is fantastical. In many ways, Xanth offers the same kind of entertainment as a good Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. But one of the real reasons it’s compelling and the reason it has the power to hit bestseller lists over and over despite critical savagery or (more likely) critical neglect is that it offers the opportunity to return to a familiar world. Xanth develops, but in its essence, it is always the same.

True, non-fantasy series by P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming offer the opportunity to return to beloved imaginary worlds, but the Xanth books’ explicit agenda is the creation of an alternate universe. Anthony’s novels (and probably series fantasy as an entire genre) offer a comfortingly repetitive escapism you can’t get from a single story, or from a series ostensibly set in reality — not even in anything so close to reality as to lack dragons, nymphs and unicorns.

Whereas in science fiction novels the fun is in the author’s invention — in novelty — the Xanth books are populated with magical creatures we already know from Western myth and legend. Anthony takes these familiar beasties and gives them his own twist, and has thus generated his own body of lore. There are maps at the front of almost every novel, as well as a handbook for ardent fans: “Piers Anthony’s Visual Guide to Xanth” lists all the animals, plants, magical elements of the world, from angelfish (“Very nice fish with gauzy wings which allow it to hover … Devilfish like to pursue angelfish and do something censored to them”) to the Zomonster (“the zombie Monster under Lacuna’s bed”). The guide also summarizes Xanth history and provides sleek, comic-book style illustrations of all the major characters, with special attention devoted to bare-chested creatures like centaurs, merfolk, naga and fairies.

There are lots of naked bodies because all the Xanth books carry a frisson of naughtiness, which was no doubt an even larger part of their appeal to my teenage self than it is to my adult one. In many cases the sexual references are so ludicrous they make me laugh out loud. For example, in Xanth all children are kept ignorant of the facts of life by “The Adult Conspiracy” until they come of age. Once initiated, they know dirty words (usually rendered in *%!** symbols) and learn how to “summon the stork,” an intimate activity that replicates ours in Mundania exactly — except that the resulting progeny are, in fact, delivered by an actual stork.

Creatures in Xanth tend to mate with their own species — goblins with goblins, centaurs with centaurs — but there are also a lot of “love springs” around, some of which produce lasting affection and some of which produce only momentary lust. Thus, a dragon may mate with human to produce a half-breed dragon/girl, or a winged monster may mate with a centaur to produce a centaur with wings. In the magical tapestry that depicts all Xanth history in tiny moving images, such liaisons are misted out to prevent the breaching of the Conspiracy by inquiring children.

The Adult Conspiracy is the object of much titillating speculation on the part of the (usually) juvenile heroes and heroines; nearly every leading character shows a decided interest in sex. In the earlier books, that interest takes the form of lusty references to the various naked female creatures who populate Xanth; centaurs, nymphs and harpies, among others, see no need for the human affectation of clothing. In “A Spell for Chameleon,” for example, Bink has just had a ride on a female centaur, and stops off at a remote cabin in the woods for a night’s rest. “A filly!” chuckles his host. “Where’d you hang on when she jumped?” Bink smiles ruefully. “Well, she said she’d drop me in a trench if I did it again,” he replies.

In the later books, sexuality takes shape as an intense preoccupation with underwear: one of the Xanth novels is even titled “The Color of Her Panties” (X15). Nudity, because it is natural for nymphs, centaurs and the like, is nowhere near as exciting as underclothing, and no man gets to see a (humanoid) woman’s panties unless the two are going to be sexually involved.

The Dastard (anti-hero of the 24th book), who traded his soul and conscience for the talent of “unhappening” events, is particularly aggressive in his desire to see feminine underwear; he asks nearly every woman he meets if she’ll show him some, and his 14-year-old traveling companion only saves herself by turning into a dragon when he tries to look up her skirt. “You’re trying to see underage panties –” she cries, “and you don’t care at all!” “Certainly I care,” he replies. “I’m frustrated because my effort was wasted. All I can see is your stupid feet.” The Dastard’s eyes repeatedly glaze over at the sight of cleavage, and in the climactic scene Princess Melody nearly stuns him into a state of total idiocy by showing him a pair of green, “princessly” panties. Indeed, panties and artfully packaged dicolletage are often a useful weapon in Xanth; the well-endowed Nada Naga (in human form) stuns an attacking ogre into a stupor merely by inhaling suggestively in the novel “Isle of View” (X13).

One of the unsung delights of series fantasy is the way it can make you nostalgic for itself. Talking about C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series recently, a friend of mine pointed out that in the later books, the central characters (Lucy, Edmund, etc.) had become the stuff of Narnia legend. They were historic figures: still present, but grown into their kingly and queenly roles, no longer the center of the action. The same is true for Xanth, and it’s one reason the “Visual Guide” is such a kick. By the third and fourth books, the protagonists of “A Spell for Chameleon” (X1) — Bink, Chameleon, Magician Trent — have become part of a back story that lets readers of the earlier books savor the thrill of special knowledge. Anthony always checks in with these characters. Indeed, by the 24th book there are so many that parts of the novel feel like an obligatory roundup, but the books create a wonderful sense of history that lets readers muse fondly back on, say, the high jinks of Grundy the Golem in his early days, before he settled down and married Rapunzel.

Essentially, Anthony is massively accessible, both as a narrative voice and as an author: He gives his fans what feels like a real opportunity to influence both his fictional and actual worlds. Before the Web, he had a 1-800 number readers could call for information, and he has always answered his many letters (more than 100 a month) with unfailing good humor. In fact, at the end of all the later Xanth novels is an author’s note, which credits Anthony’s readers with the various egregious puns that have found their way into print (in “Yon Ill Wind” (X20), “ant-acid,” a “thyme bomb” and a “junk male,” among others). Anthony even created a character named Jenny Elf, who first appears in “Isle of View,” because a girl named Jenny — a major Xanth fan — had been hit by a drunk driver and paralyzed for life. Each author note updates the public on the real Jenny’s health and doings.

Now, he reaches people through his Web site, where Anthony writes a newsletter detailing the adventures of his grandchildren, the length of his daily jogs and his opinions on matters ranging from gun control (he’s in favor) to e-tickets (they make him nervous). He even gives the gory details on his difficulties acquiring a stool sample for his doctor: “I defecated into a plastic bag. As fate would have it, I had a huge cumbersome movement the consistency of hot fudge.”

Piers Anthony hears his readers. He responds to them, gives them what they want. Yes, I love Charles Dickens and Jane Austen more than I will ever love Anthony, but they will never write any new novels that will immerse me, say, in the social world of Bath, circa 1800. Even if they were still alive, they wouldn’t answer my fan mail or let me influence their writings — authors of literary fiction rarely do. Series fantasy, and Anthony’s Xanth novels in particular, appeal to a different part of me than do “serious” novels. Xanth gives me a history, nostalgia, a regular dose of the familiar, an opportunity to be an active fan.

That he is so incredibly prolific (he’s written over 113 novels), and that he delivers his brand of pleasure so consistently, probably accounts for Anthony’s poor critical reputation (though the sex jokes and puns shouldn’t be discounted, either). Essentially, it is uncool to like him, and uncool to take any series author very seriously, so critics ignore him when in fact there’s ample fodder in the novels for speculation and analysis: Anthony has a complicated relationship to feminism, sometimes ardent, sometimes dismissive (women exist to make men happy; rape is a constant threat; the patriarchy is a problem); he tackles issues like biased intelligence testing and racism with a complexity belied by his lightness of tone; and he consistently parodies cultural sexual attitudes and censorship, via the Adult Conspiracy. This is not to say he’s Dickens, but that the moral universe of Xanth is fairly complex, and his books warrant rereading because I discover new stuff to ponder each time.

So yes, the Xanth books are pretty cheesy, but fun anyhow. Of course, fun is something comic writers like Dickens and Austen offered their readers, too, but a lot of critically acclaimed contemporary novelists don’t seem to concern themselves with it. I believe reading can, and should, be fun. Who cares if it’s cheesy? I can return to Xanth as often as I like, and going there feels like coming home.