Don't know how I missed that David Eddings died at the beginning of June.
I had been re-reading his Elenium and Tamuli series... they hold up better than I expected, certainly better than a lot of fantasy books I read as a teenager. He had a style that must've really appealed to young kids--his most engaging characters were the witty, acerbic ones. Eddings' books showed he knew how societies really functioned as a conglomeration of people pursuing their own desires, even if he was almost clinically unwilling to dig very deeply into any of that. His cut-throat thieves are impossibly polished. This is the contradiction that gets frustrating in his work: he readily acknowledges the disturbed, violent underbelly of society but constantly holds it at arms length and paves over the traumas it creates with pages of witty banter.
I'm sad he's gone--the Belgariad was a landmark fantasy series--and now I feel compelled to read his later books.
