Try reading Anthony Piers, if you have a fetish for older men banging teenage girls, it will be right up your alley! It also has other stuff in it besides that...
Sounds to me like you should mean Piers Anthony.
He's got some stuff I like (Incarnations Of Immortality series, though I only originally found the first five books, of eight) but while I rather liked the Xanth stuff at the time (35 books in that series, at this moment, more coming, though I can't think of any beyond Isle Of View that I read), I did rather compare him to "Terry Pratchett with only the puns" (witness "Isle Of View") at the time I was falling out of love with Xanth and going full-on-Pratchett.
Pratchett aint really what you're looking for, at first sight. The first two books, these days often sold as one, were said to be intended as a silly
antidote to the high fantasy stuff that got inspired by JRRT, Robert E. Howard and the like, but went overboard (in PTerry's opinion, at least) [
edit: the prior high fantasy stuff, that is, although he is also self-critical of his younger self's writing]. And even long-term fans rarely rate these early books as much as some of the later ones, which are more expertly written (by an older and wiser author), but
certainly not what you're asking for, but enjoyable nonetheless.
If you
do want to consider Pratchett's books, however, without actually knowing much about you I think the standard "start here" is often "Guards! Guards!". The first of the (informally known-as) "Watch" series (or, aptly enough, the "Guards" one), it starts the process of following the development of the kind of guard whose sort of job is to rush in to attack the 'hero' and get killed, but in a(n increasingly) fully-fledged working city. There's dragons, and stuff, but in a logical manner. Surprisingly logical for the way the setting becomes.
If you're looking for high magic equivalent stuff, the Wizards series (which starts off with the aforementioned first two books, The Colour Of Magic and Light Fantastic) features increasingly complicated ways in which
not to use magic, in and out of a magical academy (pre-dating and already better fleshed-out than Hogwarts, don't worry!), or the Witch series which does much the same with the female version (the magic of country lore, etc).
One visual reading order guide (slightly out of date) is at
http://www.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/the-discworld-reading-order-guide-20.jpg. The missing books (where "Rincewind books" is what I'd term the "Wizards series" with the Rincewind starters). If despite my protestations that this is not exactly "What comes after J R R Tolkien" doesn't put you off, and you aren't already acquainted with it all
anyway, you might still want to check it out.
Be warned that the early books start off very light (until fine-tuning to just right, by somewhere around the third to fifth book in, depending on personal preference) and the very latest ones go very dark[1], but then if you know anything about PTerry you'll both know what he's currently going through and that
if this has any bearing on the recent darkening it won't have made him gratuitous about it.
For the record I (also... to add to that ninjaing nenjin) found Silmarillion hard to read (almost as hard as it is to remember how to spell (again, thanks to Nenjin for confirming I got that vaguely right). But if you are into the Tolkien mythos it's probably one to read to make sure you're immersed.
(And, as an additional response to nenjin's intermediate message, Weis & Hickman novels are probably a touchstone in the genre, IMHO, but there's an awful lot of them and I can't comment on actual consistency across the whole range.)
[1] "I Shall Wear Midnight", which you should imagine is added after Wintersmith in the "Young adults"/"Witches" set on the linked-to reading order, has pretty much a very horrific situation right near the start that surprised me, but I still think it's worth reading if/when you get to it.
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Topic: What comes after J R Tolkien. (Read 8909 times)