Eddings was a struggling, middle-aged author of contemporary adventure when Pawn of Prophecy was published, and by his own admission, he undertook fantasy with a somewhat cynical motive: One day he saw how many printings Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings had gone through, and he figured there must be more commercial potential to the genre than he thought. You couldn't make a hero's journey more Campbellian if you tried.

As it turned out, my re-read revealed many of the reasons why Eddings' books continue to be cherished by fans - and why they also pile up on the secondhand shelves, relics of a less enlightened era. Runaway bestsellers in their day, the staggering 12 novels that comprise these series - five in the Belgariad, five in the Malloreon, plus two whopping standalone novels, a cycle which celebrated the 20th anniversary of its completion in 2017 - are staples of the genre, the kind of dog-eared paperbacks that remain piled up in used bookstores. It's something I kept in mind during a recent re-read of the Belgariad and the Malloreon, two connected series of fantasy novels from the '80s and '90s written by David Eddings and his wife Leigh Eddings (although Leigh only began being credited toward the very end). Even in hindsight, our judgment is colored - by nostalgia, by comfort, by the sense that these books are old friends. As with our first romantic loves, we're often not willing or even able to see their faults. These are, after all, novels we bonded with during a very impressionable time in our lives.

Revisiting our favorite books from adolescence is a tricky thing. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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