Xanth

Xanth is a peninsula shaped suspiciously like Florida where every citizen is born with exactly one magic talent — a few world-shaking, most of them useless, all of them literal. The language itself is alive here. A nickelpede is worse than a centipede because it takes bigger bites; a curse fiend is a fiend who curses; the Gap Dragon lives in the Gap, which everyone keeps forgetting on account of the forget-spell. Take a metaphor at its word and Xanth will build a monster out of it. Piers Anthony has been writing it since A Spell for Chameleon in 1977 and has not stopped — The Source of Magic, Castle Roogna, Ogre, Ogre, Night Mare, and onward through titles that are themselves the punchline: The Color of Her Panties, Zombie Lover, Esrever Doom, Apoca Lips. Characters age, marry and hand the quest down to their children. The Good Magician Humfrey still charges a year's service for a single Answer, and nobody has talked him down. What you are here for is play: puns stacked to the ceiling, quests that wander off, a fairy-tale logic that never pretends to be grim. The early books are the sharpest, and the whole thing is built to be jumped into — almost any volume will stop and tell a newcomer what they need. Start at the start, with A Spell for Chameleon, and stop whenever the groaning stops being fun.