I had a cousin and some friends who read a lot of this sort of light fiction, the sword & sorcery, sword & planet, westerns and light sci-fi back when paperbacks were cheap. We'd buy one, read it in a fury and pass it on to the next guy who'd pass one on to us in return. Bought a lot of books I never saw again, but never missed them because we had an endless supply making the rounds. Some were memorable (the Fritz Leiber stuff and when my cousin got me started on Asimov) but most were disposable and forgettable.

I remember my cousin also getting me going on John Norman's Gor series. Just the thing for us hormonal teenage boys who had to tap off out excess energy several times a day back then. "Hey... slave girls!"

But we both sickened of the series fairly quickly around the same time. The S&M was an interesting and titillating aspect of those stories in the beginning books, but they quickly degenerated into out&out pornography with the heroic stories being marinated in the author's twisted theories of sexuality and endless detailed ruminations on S&M and B&D techniques. Comparing notes, my cousin and I had found we were skipping several pages at a time when we came upon the author's rants, scanning ahead to see where he'd gwet back to the supposed plotline of the story. We both abandoned the series just a few books in. Hell, we still had Conan.

Thinking back, what was I doing reading that garbage at 14 or 15?