Shockingly, I agree. I read only one volume - The Source of Magic - and found it to be not good.

Then again, I happily read the first seventeen Gor novels so...there you go.

Is 'sparce' the same as 'sparse' but set in 'outer spase'?

I liked the Thomas Covenant books when they first came out as well, but I haven't been able to get through the audiobooks despite a couple tries recently.

I enjoyed the Xanth series for the silliness it was, but I haven't been tempted to re-read any of them.

I wondered at that line, too.

I got the first three audio books of Thomas Covenant last year to "read" them again after many decades.
Listening to them instead of having to read them myself is what was needed. On a normal read, I think I
would have put down the first book and stopped otherwise. As it is, I had no inclination to go any further
in visiting the trilogy of trilogies (or however many books it ended up being). Pity. Those books were
amazing to me as a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I guess I read The Source of Magic by Piers Anthony, but I can't remember anything about it, really.

I enjoyed the last The Viking Trilogy by Poul Anderson: Golden Horn, The Road of the Sea Horse, The Sign of the Raven.
A nice mix of fiction and fact that follows the adventures of Harald Hardrada, but it takes a bit to get into it. It helps that I
like the norse stuff. The first book came out in 1980.

Poul Anderson was a real favourite of mine whatever genre he wrote in. Haven't read anything of his for a good long while. I also liked very much the Gate of Ivrel etc from CJ Cherryh. Again, S&S rather than High Fantasy whatever that really means...

I finally got around to reading one of the Dying Earth novels by Jack Vance. I figured that since Dungeons & Dragons'
magic system was heavily based upon Vanthian magic that I should give it a shot.

It was okay, but it was an anthology of short stories in the sane setting and not a novel. I guess the later books follow
more of a single character.

That's an interesting question--how do you differentiate "Sword and Sorcery" from "High Fantasy?" They both take place in alternate worlds where there's lots of magic and lots of people running around with swords, and a generally pre-industrial level of technology.

I just did a quick consultation of their respective Wikipedia entries. The one on "High Fantasy" suggested that it has more of a concern with moral issues--implying that Sword-and-Sorcery characters tend to be rather amoral in outlook. Matches what I've seen.

The Wiki entry on "Sword and Sorcery" indicated that S&S stories tend to be concerned with more personal stakes, whereas High Fantasy protagonists are usually fighting for the fate of the world. It also pointed out that S&S settings, stories, and heroes tend to have a picaresque quality. Again, seems fair enough.

So if it has picaresque elements, with heroes who are running around on the margins of society, and perhaps acting rather like low-lifes, then it's S&S. If it involves the clash of armies of Good and Evil, then it's High Fantasy.

The easiest way I've always used is Conan's approach - in Sword and Sorcery, magic is something evil, terrifying, and absolutely not to be trusted. In epic fantasy, magic is grand, a tool of our heroes, and something they rely on.

The other major way to tell the difference is the scale - S&S is focused on the life of the hero, their friends, and their enemies; in epic fantasy, normally, the entire world, if not reality itself is at stake.

The amorality of the hero used to be another good way to tell the difference, but grimdark (the application of amorality to protagonist characters in Epic settings) has made this a less clear indicator.

my 0.02

Interesting. It could also perhaps, not co-incidentally, be categorised as "Lord of the Rings Rip Off" or "Conan Rip Off"

Yep, making the Portal Fantasy sub-genre the "Narnia rip off".

That's essentially how I process the difference.

This should be a blurb.

I read some, but not all, Jack Vance - and really enjoyed it. Wracking my brains for what it was - not his most famous things, like Dying Earth or Lyonesse, which I haven't read. But when I do a search it comes up with nothing. It was an omnibus with a red cover, and I owned it for many years before moving house.
I did also read The Anome books, which surely have the best title in all literature with volume 3 (I think) - The Servants of the Wankh

Edit: The omnibus WAS these Wankh books - under the title Planet of Adventure.

I read THE SWORD OF SHANNARA when I was about 13. I enjoyed it very much and since I had never read Tolkien, I was completely ignorant of it being a ripoff. The first two sequels came out while I was in high school and seemed to bring the series to an end. When Brooks followed it up several years later with the LEGACY quadrilogy, I was excited and again greatly enjoyed the books. I also read his contemporary "Word vs. Void" trilogy. Years of single parenthood meant I never read most of his later Shannara books, but I remember the earlier stuff fondly.

Oh man, I know I'm not incredibly well-read or anything, but I thought Dying Earth was just mind-blowing. I am still just bowled over by how imaginative Vance was.

+1.

I've got some of these in that big DAW yellow-spine haul I got a while back.

They are well worth reading - brisk, unpretentious and imaginative.