We live in a glorious age when books are a click away. It may now seem incomprehensible that one might be forced to read a series of books out of order. Yet, in a dark age not so long ago, when we (and by we, I mean me) were dependent on the vagaries of book store and library orders, it was very easy to find oneself in a place where the choice was (a) read an intermediate book or (b) read nothing new.1
By way of example, here are five F&SF series I began in what most people would say is the wrong place.2
Gray Lensman by E. E. Smith (1951)
Gray Lensman begins in media res, as Kimball Kinnison and his Patrol chums finish the job of pounding what they believe may be Civilization’s enemy Boskone (not the convention) into rubble. Unfortunately for Civilization, this is not the end of Boskone. In fact, as Kinnison discovers, few in Civilization comprehend the true scale of their enemy’s efforts.
This felt like the second half of the story because it is. Any reasonable person would have begun with Galactic Patrol, which introduces Kimball Kinnison. Or they would have, if they had been aware how closely Gray Lensman followed on Galactic Patrol. I was not aware.
I understand that the original serial versions of the stories fed the reader clues about the Big Picture even more parsimoniously than did the paperback editions I read. Just as well that I started with the Pyramid mass market versions and not the relevant magazine issues, or I’d have been even more confused.
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The City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher (1967)
This is the second volume in Christopher’s Tripod series. This installment sees Will and his chums contending to win a coveted position as an abused slave within one of the alien strongholds. The work is demanding, the rulers of Earth are unpleasant, and what Will learns makes the human revolt far more urgent than it was. Pity, then, that those humans who enter the City of Gold and Lead never leave.
The City of Gold and Lead has a number of dramatic reveals whose impact is utterly undermined if one has not read the first book and so are unaware that there was any question of what was in the alien Tripod machines, or who exactly Eloise was or why the reader should care what happened to her. Nevertheless, it was interesting enough to get me to pick up other John Christopher books.
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Spaceship to Saturn by Hugh Walters (1967)
This book is the tenth in the U.N.E.X.A. series. Our small-statured hero Chris Godfrey and his spacefaring chums are dispatched to far Saturn. Being limited to somewhat plausible rockets, the trip is lengthy enough to require suspended animation. The communications challenges would have been intractable save for the fortuitous recruitment of telepathic sisters who can serve as living radios.
Progressing from barely suborbital rockets to true interplanetary vessels in just ten books would have been a lot more impressive had I first read the nine books before this installment. It was only on a recent reread of the first few books that I learned that not only is there considerable progress in rocket technology over the course of the series, the U.N.E.X.A. for which the series is named takes a number of volumes to appear. The early books featured Soviet/Western competition. By volume ten, U.N.E.X.A. was a done deal. Oh well. At least each installment in the series worked well enough on its own.
Let me note that when I first read this book I hadn’t yet read Heinlein’s Time for the Stars. If I had, I would have suspected that Walters had lifted the idea of telepathic spaceship communicators from Heinlein.
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Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert (1969)
For some reason, Disco-era Waterloo Oxford DSS’ library only had the second Dune book, so for me the iconic Dune novel is the one in which our hero, having acquired fearsome powers of foresight in the previous installment, spends the novel desperately trying to find a way to avoid the future he can see bearing down on him. Being a big fan of Greek myth, full of doomed people setting in motion the events they hope to avoid by their efforts to escape fate, teen me thought that was pretty neat.
There were SF fans on staff at WODSS but I don’t think the librarian was among them. Thus the library owned but a single Herbert book and that not his most famous. In the librarian’s defense, despite owning other Herbert books (Under Pressure, Whipping Star, and The Dosadi Experiment), I didn’t think to buy Dune until I came across a copy of it four years after reading Dune Messiah. And then someone stole it before I could read it, and I didn’t replace it for some time….
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Being Alien by Rebecca Ore (1989)
Tom Red-Clay, a human diplomat in (involuntary) service to the alien Federation, is dispatched back to Earth’s Berkeley to keep tabs on human progress and to acquire for Tom a bride—eligible human women being uncommon (although not unknown) on Karst.
Ore drew on terrestrial animals for inspiration for her aliens, who accordingly behave in plausible but non-human ways. She cast her net outside the middle and upper classes for her protagonist Tom, who hails from rural Appalachia. While of more recent vintage than my other examples, Being Alien does hew to older models for series fiction, so is written to stand on its own. In fact, it stands on its own so well that it turned me into an Ore completist. Still, once I tracked down the first volume of the saga, Becoming Alien, some years later, certain plot developments made much more sense in the context of that first book.
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Unless you’ve been very lucky indeed, you likely have your own tales of series begun in the wrong spot or read out of order. Feel free to share!
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Information about books was also harder to come by than it is now, so if a publisher did not care to label their books clearly, the fact that a book was an intermediate book could come as a complete surprise.
[2]On the plus side, I acquired what turned out to be a commodifiable skill. One of my niches at the SFBC was the Read Out of Sequence Guy, which meant, for example, I got sent intermediate installments of the Wheel of Time, Song of Ice and Fire, and Malazan series without ever seeing the earlier ones. Modern series tend to assume the reader will have access to all the books in order. I do not recommend reading any of the Wheel of Time, Song of Ice and Fire, or Malazan books out of order. On one occasion, a manuscript innocent of page numbers came apart in shipping and was delivered to me as a randomly ordered assortment of pages. I did volunteer to read it—after all, if page numbers mattered, surely they would have numbered the pages?—but for reasons that were never clear to me, this offer was declined.
Weird. The comment counter says there is a comment above this one but I cannot see it.
(Edit)
It’s gone now. Must have been a glitch.
I read “Endymion” (and then “The Rise of Endymion”) by Dan Simmons before “Hyperion” & “The Fall of Hyperion”. Starting with the aftermath of the events in the first two books and a couple of hundred years later had its own charm, even when I did not get many aspects and connections until much later in the story or after I read the first two books. But I like being thrown into the deep end of a story and try to find my way through it.
I read “City of Lead and Gold” first, too, and recommended it to a friend, who was most displeased with me when he and I figured out that there was an earlier book.
I first began reading The Wheel of Time by buying, at 11, Into the Blight, which is actually the second half of the first book The Eye of the World. It was split into two for a younger audience, but I had no idea it was the second part of a whole story because my local Books a Million didn’t have From the Two Rivers (part 1).
It DID have the bonus of starting with Perrin, Egwene, and the whole wolf-brother arc, which immediately caught my attention, but the result was I was way less invested in Rand’s story through the rest of the series. The back of Into the Blight listed the next three or four books in order, though, so I knew what to look for when I had more spending money!
When your reading audiobooks at a time before the digital age, and the specialist library for the blind not only doesn’t care to send you books in the right order anyway, but even record! books in the right order, this happened to me so often it wasn’t funny.
oddly enough one of the most notable for me was also with John Christopher, as I got sent beyond the burning lands, the second of his post apocalyptic sword of the spirits trilogy, before reading the first book.
Though the journey as a weird trip through a world of nuclear mutants was good enough fun, all of the politics and the fact that the main character was heir apparent despite his elder brother being prince and having a son, including the final desperate duel where the main character is accused of a murder he didn’t commit and nearly burned alive, really didn’t make as much impression on me as it should have done.
Also, when I did read the first book, finding out that the spiritualist seers were actually scientists who used forbidden technology probably wasn’t the shock Christopher intended ;D.
another really extreme case for me was Susan Cooper’s dark is rising series, where I not only started with Greenwhich, where the magical object which the child protagonists had retrieved in the series first book was stolen and they had to get it back, but also, I never actually read that first book, over sea under stone until literally thirty years later, by which point I’d read the other four books of the series several times.
Oddly enough, I actually found Over sea under stone a severe disappointment, though whether this was because Cooper herself wrote that a long time before the rest of the series and there is a pretty huge tonal change, or whether it just didn’t[ hold as much nostalgia value for me I don’t know.
Same goes for David Eddings, where the RNIB library did the mallorean and not the belgariad, and Isaac Asimov’s foundation series, where they quite happily did the first, second and fourth books, and not the third! (I always wondered what happened to the Mule).
On the other hand, sometimes reading books out of order can be an advantage.
I read the first of Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant novels in 2007, and to be honest really didn’t like it much, mostly because covenant himself is a gigantic douchenozle.
When however I was sent the fourth book, the wounded land three years later, I read it because I didn’t have anything else, and suddenly wow! where did this comparatively decent guy come from? And yee gods, this world is really interesting, I want to see much more of it.
I’m afraid all of these instances have now given me something of a mania for reading series in order, even for indexing like a demon and working out time lines so that I can precisely judge what to read when, which is particularly interesting when I’m doing things like trying to actually fill in the gaps in Anne McCaffery’s Dragon rider’s series, which I only ever read portions of before.
When I was a kid I picked up a random Redwall book because I liked the cover and I was very very lost. Thankfully a helpful librarian printed out a chart of the Redwall series and helped me find the correct place to start. It might have been my entry into enjoying sprawling not always linear series.
Most recently I read The Big Over Easy before I read any of the Thursday Next books. I was very lost and it almost put off of Jasper Fforde because it made almost no sense out of context. Thankfully I kept finding myself drawn to the premise of his books- picked up Thursday Next and then read The Big Over Easy when it fit in with the rest and I totally changed my perspective on it- so dang meta and clever.
I read Neptune 1 is Missing as my first UNEXA book and then went on a many years long quest to find the other books
I also read Grey Lensman first then found Tri-Planetary which further added to my confusion
Lastly my introduction to Larry Niven was Ringworld as a child which made understanding Known Space an interesting thing
The first Daniel Keys Moran I read was The Last Dancer, and that actually worked out for me – it neither depends on nor badly spoils the previous works, and Moran was a much stronger writer when he wrote it. (Stronger to the point that when I finally got my hands on The Long Run, I was not as wowed as apparently most were, or as I was by TLD. Sorry, Trent fans.)
I first read Var the Stick, and it was at least a decade until I learned that it was the second in a trilogy. Sometimes I wish I had never read even one.
I skipped the first Dresden Files book because my sister lost my mom’s copy. I didn’t get my hands on a copy until after I read book five. It actually made reading book 3 make more sense because I assumed the flashbacks were from book 1. Imagine my surprise when book 1 was not about fighting a demon.
I read William Gibson’s Sprawl series 2-1-3, but that was fine because they’re essentially standalones with a common background.
I read SGA before I read EGA (ok, I’ve _never_ read EGA), and I somehow skipped SGA 3.
Does that count?
I’m probably not the only person who read Lord of the Rings out of sequence. In 1965, the year I graduated high school, I checked a copy of the pirated Ace edition Fellowship of the Ring out of a library that was about to close (long story.) Had never read The Hobbit or heard of Tolkien, didn’t know there was a trilogy. Some months later, at the pool hall downtown–I didn’t shoot pool but stopped by occasionally for a chili dog and a look at the wire rack of paperback books, mostly genre fiction–and there was Return of the King. Of course I bought it. Was thoroughly confused about the whole Rohirrim thing, the return of Gandalf, Faramir, the Ents, the Uruk-hai, etc. Two Towers had to wait a few more months. I still have all three, including that library copy of Fellowship; pretty sure the statute of limitations has expired by now.
The worst for me was where I was a kid and had acres to a very limited library. If was very similar to yours but even worse.
I read Children of the Lens first. If was quite spectacular and a little confusing.
Does Becoming alien work as a standalone? The local library has a circulating copy of that one, but not of Being alien.
Thanks.
I’ve done my fair share of reading out of order lol. I think I was the only one who actually checked anything out of the SFF shelf (yea just 1) when i was kid/ teen. I remember reading Zelazny’s Amber series all out of order… I started with Sign of the Unicorn lol. So many to remember right now. I also read The Great Hunt first. I remember picking up TEotW a few weeks earlier but for some reason (the names lol), I thought was another Arthur story (it is, kinda), & I had just finished one, can’t remember now. But I like to read out of order. If 2nd or 3rd book is interesting, the 1st book, the hook, often is.
16: It does. It doesn’t spoil the first book too much, though obs you will know going in that despite Tom’s circumstances as an Appalachian meth seller at the beginning of the book he ends up working for aliens.
Like nails on a chalkboard to me.
When I was a kid, it took me about three tries to read Erin Hunter’s Warriors series in order because I kept checking out books from the wrong six-book arc. When I started, there were only three arcs. A Wikipedia search tells me that Warriors is now up to seven arcs and shows no sign of stopping — and if past is any precedent, none of those arcs will make any sense without having read the arc that came before! I loved Warriors, but damn could it get convoluted.
@6 I had the exact same problem with the Redwall series. A chart would have been very helpful!
I read “Sign of the Unicorn” first, the third in the Amber series (maybe because it had “Unicorn” in the title – I don’t know). But the rare first-person narration by Random about his attempt to rescue brother Brand caught my interest, and when I read it aloud to my wife we both decided we had to read the whole series.
That rescue attempt is still a great stand-alone section of the series, and I believe the only major section not narrated by Corwin. As things turned out in the series, I’m pleased that it was Random that drew me in.
I read Wizard and Glass just because of the title and didn’t know anything about Dark Tower Series. Oddly enough I picked a book in which half the book took place before the book 1, so it kind of worked.
On holiday on the West coast of Ireland, I was ill in bed and my mum managed to find the only SF book available locally, which was Children of Dune. I thought the world was amazing, but I was very confused!
I also started Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni series with the second book, Deryni Checkmate. I loved the swashbuckling and the magic, and went on to read the rest of the series in order (I found Deryni Rising eventually).
I got introduced to Discworld with Men at Arms, because it was the only book the library had in at the moment. And my first Niven Known Space book was Neutron Star, purchased because I recognized “The Soft Weapon” from its adaptation in Star Trek: The Animated Series. (Immediately mail-ordered the rest from the back of the book, for 95 cents each.)
I was working my way through the Hugo/Nebula joint winners and came to Bujold’s Paladin of Souls (which I had gotten from a used bookstore) without realizing it was part of a series.
The good news is that it stands alone really well. The bad news is that part of the reason it stands alone really well is that it thoroughly spoils the events of The Curse of Chalion, and it’s also most excellent so you want to immediately go out and read everything else in the series….
I absolutely hate reading/watching things out of order; I missed the Season 5 finale of Smallville and refused to watch the rest of the series until 10 years later, when TNT was playing all the episodes in order.
For books, my main challenge has been voting for the Hugos. In the first couple of years, and later on the fairly uncommon occasion where a later-in-series volume was nominated but the earlier ones had not been, I would try to read the previous ones. The one major exception was when the 15th Dresden files novel was nominated; I obviously wasn’t going to read the first 14. That actually worked pretty well for me; I obviously missed a lot of connections and backstory, but it was enjoyable enough that I went back and read the rest of them. They’re now on my list of regular re-reads; and, in fact, I’m currently reading Book 6.
Neutron Star is an interesting example. As discussed here
https://www.tor.com/2010/10/15/ringworld-40th-anniversary-getting-the-most-out-of-ringworld/#135529
“Spike” MacPhee discovered if he sold readers new to Niven Ringworld as their first Niven, only a third bought a second Niven. If he sold them Neutron Star, two thirds of them bought a second Niven.
I love reading out of order. It creates more mystery and makes much of the world building more organic than just the info imp showing up. It also gives the wonderful pleasure of ah and oh now I get it moments when reading or watching the earlier items. I did Firefly after the movie-I think it made the movie better (everything was new and no expectations) along with giving a gravitas to the show as I took every Wash and Book scene to heart more.
Reading Niven out of sequence is almost inevitable. What comes first? At any rate, I, too, read Ringworld before I’d read any other Known Space stories, and it led me to buy every book he’d written, and led me to The Mote in God’s Eye and the rest of his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle (some, obviously, better than others).
Trying hard to think of other SF&F books I’ve read out of order. There was, of course, the series of James Blish Star Trek episode collections, where it didn’t really matter if you read Star Trek 8 before Star Trek 3, so that’s not a brilliant example.
I can’t even imagine trying to read any Dune novel before reading Dune. Come to that, I haven’t read any Dune novels except Dune. I think I tried Dune Messiah and gave up.
For me, this happens far more frequently with mystery and thriller series, where it doesn’t seem to matter as much (except if the author happens to mention who did it in the previous entry).
Maybe I’m just too anal-retentive to even consider reading books in the wrong order.
I once got about 100 pages of prologue (all from secondary-character POVs) into one of the later volumes of Wheel of Time (I think Winter’s Heart) before realizing that I’d skipped a volume in the stack of four I’d bought, and needed to go back.
Of course, the first novel I ever read was a Hardy Boys book, and I started at chapter 12, because it had the least-intimidating chapter title … that didn’t work well, so I started the book from the beginning.
I, too, read Children of the Lens first, mostly because that was the book in the pile of thin SF&F books my mom picked up at a garage sale. The book actually made sense to me, and while I was glad to read the rest of the series, Children of the Lens remains my favorite.
I made the mistake of picking up book four of David Weber’s Safehold series, A Mighty Fortress, and trying to make sense of it without the first three books. That was a no go. Totally confusing. I had to go buy the first three books, and then book four made sense.
And then there’s the situation where the author initially writes stories out of sequence, and then later goes back and rearranges them chronologically — for example, Elric, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, or Horatio Hornblower. In all cases, I read the series in “proper” internal chronology because that was the edition that was available and I didn’t even know that it had ever been anything else.
My first run at Lord of the Rings (after seeing the 1977 Hobbit cartoon on TV) was going to the library and coming home with The Two Towers (because all of the copies of Fellowship were checked out). It did not end well, until my aunt graciously lent me her boxed set.
And I’m about 95% certain I read some random assortment of those U.N.E.X.A. books — I have vague memories of going into the teen section at the public library (this in the pre-YA days) and finding this series about a group of characters who are mostly flying into space, but in one book they actually explore some kind of Verne-style underground cavern system, and when I checked the series entry on LibraryThing, I saw one of the books was The Caves of Drach. (It also looks like Gateway will be putting them out on Kindle in November — might have to check them out then.)
There’s also the situation with, e.g., Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew or Tarzan where there’s a million books in the series and you just kind of read whatever random titles come to hand in whatever order you find them.
I think I read the Robert B. Parker Spencer series out of order, so I saw the aftermath of Spencer’s spectacular failure before the failure itself. Oh, and the first Travis McGee book I read was The Green Ripper, which is late in the series, and almost entirely unlike any of the others.
Oh, and the first John Carter of Mars I read was The Warlord of Mars, which really took the zing out of the cliffhanger at the end of The Gods of Mars.
I read “The Book of Three,” and “The Black Cauldron,” and then picked up “The High King” without knowing there were two other books in between. Then I found “Taran Wanderer” and “The Castle of Llyr,” so I ended up reading the whole Prydain series in an order that looked something like a Klein bottle.
I was at the mercy of libraries and bookstores when I first got into Star Wars books, so I ended up reading book 2 first in The Thrawn Trilogy, The Corellian Trilogy, and The Jedi Academy Trilogy. There were enough references to the first book that I was able to catch on to the plot pretty easily. In the case of Assault on Selonia, there was even a “What Has Gone Before” section before the book began to recap the first book’s main points.
The first Tolkien I read was The Two Towers, at the age of … eight? nine? This worked okay, since there’s a “Previously on Lord Of The Rings” section before the main book… but the Previously On neglected to make any mention whatsoever of Saruman, so I carried some confusion through the first half of the book.
Picked up N K Jemisin’s The Broken Kingdoms at the airport. I’d never read Jemisin before– I don’t think I’d even heard of her– and I didn’t realize it was the second book until it was too late. Still thoroughly enjoyed the series, but the dramatic irony “mystery” of Shiny was an actual mystery to me.
I hesitate to include Discworld, being how every book is technically a standalone… but The Fifth Elephant was, in retrospect, probably not meant for an introductory episode. Didn’t stop me from going back to the bookstore the next day for Eric, then Mort, Interesting Times, Sourcery, and several others. (That same Steimetzky’s in Jerusalem was also my introduction to Tom Holt… and almost Douglas Adams).
Wait Rebecca Ore wrote a trilogy? I’ve only ever read Becoming Alien. I read Dragon Singer before Dragon Song by Mccaffrey but was careful to read the main Pern books in order. I also read the Dresden Files as 1.2. and 4 because our library’s copy of 3 was missing. It was years before I read it when I picked it up at the used bookstore.
@38 I, too, started Discworld with The Fifth Elephant, so it must be a decent place to start as I now have read every book at least twice over.
My first Earthsea book was The Tombs of Atuan, which I loved, and probably got me to continue the series, as when I went back and read A Wizard of Earthsea I was a bit underwhelmed (I came to love it on a second read, though, with less preconceptions of what it should be).
Nothing wrong with starting in the middle, and sometimes it’s to be preferred. As I understand it, the original Star Wars movie was a tribute to that fact. It began with episode IV to evoke the kind of old fashioned serial that, more likely than not, you would have picked up at some point after the start. There was no initial intention to ever make episodes I-lll (and I wish they hadn’t).
I read volume 2 of the Sandman comics first, and honestly I think that worked out for the best. Volume one was very different in tone from the rest of the series, much more straight up horror, dark and grimy, while The Doll’s House (despite the serial killers and the Corinthian) was closer to what the series was actually like. Also, the version of The Doll’s House that tiny teen me happened to pick up and devour happened to start with the issue that introduced Death (nowadays I think that issue is bundled into the previous volume instead). Honestly I’m not sure if tiny teen me would have kept reading long enough to meet Death if she’d started from the beginning and had to slog through the torture diner. So I’d callthe fact that the bookstore she was browsing was sold out of volume one a stroke of luck.
@42 — That was exactly my experience with Sandman as well, and I agree it was a better introduction than beginning at the beginning. (Although in my case, I didn’t really have a choice — the Doll’s House trade paperback had just been released and they hadn’t yet collected the opening issues, and prices for the first few issues of Sandman at that point were … high.)
McCaffrey’s Dragonquest was my first of that series. i was a little bit lost at the beginning, but I became a fan.
I dove into Bujold’s Mirror Dance after seeing her at an ALA convention in NYC many years ago. It was the only Bujold on the shelves of the late, great Coliseum Books. I gobbled it likepopcorn, and have been a fan ever since,.
My Pratchett gateway was Night Watch. I wasn’t much for fantasy, but when Margaret Drabble blurbed it, I figured it wasn’t run of the mill. Surprise! All hail Sir Terry!
Had some trouble with early Brian Stableford series – read the “Dies Irae” trilogy backwards, and the Daedalus books 4, 1, 2, 3, 6, 5. I survived the experience, though.
Sometimes there is no right order anyway – e.g. Narnia (publication order or chronological?) or Lensmen (do you start with “Galactic Patrol” or “Triplanetary”.) My first Known Space was “Protector”, my first Pratchett was “Mort”: both worked, for me.
I often started Analog serializations in midstream beacause I couldn’t find the previous issues. In those days, they had handy summaries of what had gone before to bring you up to date. And the old pulps were designed for readers to jump in at any point. That did lead you to be introduced to the backstory of Doc Savage in each and every book, which could be tedious.
Often, reading in order written rather than internal chronology is preferable. I’d rather join Captain Horatio at the height of his career rather than as a timid midshipman playing a long and tedious whist game. And join Kimball Kinnison in Galactic Patrol, rather than enter the Lesman universe in the long and tedious historical vignettes that open the book version of Triplanetary.
I started Pern with DragonSinger and The White Dragon, then later went back for the others.
A lot of children’s trilogies I would start with a later book and go back to read the earlier. Douglas Hill especially. And it was years before I got access to the early Three Investigators books, but they rehash the setting in every book so it doesn’t matter.
I did read a lot of serial works out of order – Vorkosigan, Dragaera, Recluce for example – but being mostly standalone stories it alsodoesn’t matter.
I read the “Dune Messiah”, “Gray Lensman”, and “Being Alien” in the proper order. I recently read Scalzi’s “Lock In: A Novel of the Near Future”, not realizing that there was a prequel. So now the prequel and the sequel are in my SBR (strategic book reserve).
https://www.amazon.com/Lock-Novel-Future-John-Scalzi/dp/076538132X/
I am not convinced that I read the Liaden books in the proper order. In fact, I am not convinced that there is a proper order for the Liaden books.
https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Variation-Liaden-Universe%C2%AE/dp/1439133697/
48: I have that issue with Newman’s Planetfall series. Specifically, when to read Before Mars.
bad_plyaypus@26: I missed an episode late in the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and haven’t gotten back into it. I liked it, too.
nellydreadful@42: That happened to my kid, who has still not made it to Volume 2, after encountering
That’s what put me off the series. A friend was buying them and urged me to catch up at around issue fifteen. And I hit that one and said this is gratuitous, and put it down for a long, long time–like, issue thirty-five or forty.
I myself think I did okay reading Ender’s Shadow before Ender’s Game.
@27: I miss Spike–had a few conversations with him in the late 70’s-early 80s back when I would visit the Harvard Square area. He knew his stuff.
ERB’s Mars books–before Ballantine reprinted the series in late 1973, the first book I found was Thuvia, Maid of Mars (#4). I drove my father crazy trying to hunt down the other books (which were sketchy to find at the time). I even tried to order them directly from Ballantine, and got a nasty letter back from them because as a 12 year old, I did not structure my inquiry like an adult (they even took my money and did not refund me any of it because the books were OOP). Pissed me off until I discovered the new editions out which cost me more than double what I paid for the original books. But I was then able to have all 11.
And don’t get me started about Perry Rhodan, which I stared with #43, and read all over the place…
Is there an article in series written in the wrong order?
Would anyone have rather read that first?
I don’t especially think so, I just wanted to say it.
Then there’s the foundational sword & sorcery trinity: Conan, Fafhrd/Gray Mouser and Elric. All had their start in pulp magazines, were written and published at random and with little apparent consideration of chronology, and only attained a canonical order upon being collected in paperback. One of the earliest written Elric stories is the conclusion of his saga; at least 90% of his adventures were written subsequently. There’s no compelling reason to read such series in chronological order.
I try to read series in chronological order and succeed most of the time, the exception being Discworld, which absolutely did not work for me until I went out of order. Otherwise the only time I read something out of order was probably reading Return of Condor Heroes before reading Legends of Condor Heroes.
I’ve been thoroughly out of order with Discworld. Checking my records, I see I went “Hogfather,” “Thief of Time,” “Mort,” “The Truth, “Soul Music,” “Men at Arms,” “Feet of Clay,” “Maskerade,” “Guards, Guards,” “The Night Watch,” “Going Postal,” “Monstrous Regiment,” “Thud!,” “Carpe Jugulum,” “Small Gods,” “The Light Fantastic,” “Making Money,” “Unseen Academicals,” “Snuff,” “Pyramids,” and “Lords and Ladies.”
The weird one, I know, is reading “The Light Fantastic” without reading “The Color of Magic” – that has to do with being trapped waiting in a hospital for a few days, without any books but the ones available on the lending shelf there.
@48 Lee and Miller quite wisely built a number of stand-alone books into their long-running Liaden books, which provides lots of reader-friendly entry points. It’s one of many reasons the series has garnered so many fans, and is a model worthy of emulation.
I began Discworld with Mort, which I think is best.
My first Bujold was A Civil Campaign, because it was recommended in a Tor.com article (and seconded by at least one commenter) as an excellent comfort read. I then went back and read Komarr. It was satisfying to get the backstory, but I had loved A Civil Campaign as a standalone. I have since read a smattering of other Vorkosigan books, but I have never felt driven to read the whole series. I do own the omnibus Miles in Love, though, and the book with “Diplomatic Immunity,” so I guess I’m an Ekaterin completist. But it is A Civil Campaign on its own that has achieved “comfort read” status in my world.
Steve Wright @45: But there is a right order to read Narnia in, at least the first time: publication order, definitely. The child reader should not have any preconceptions about Narnia when following Lucy into the wardrobe. Nor any awareness of Aslan before the Pevensies first hear of him. Plus, The Magician’s Nephew is a pretty boring place to begin. Two or three lovely images, but not an immersive plot.
It must be a thing with Christopher- I too started with The City of Gold and Lead.
JDN @57: I asked a friend who had read all of Discworld which book I should give to a teenage boy as an entry point, and he recommended Mort.
And I just went and read that Ringworld thread, and am delighted at how quickly it turned into astronomical geekery.
I read the Chronicles of Narnia out of order, but I don’t think that was much of an issue.
I am another old one who first read Lord of the Rings in the wrong order. At the high school library, volume 1 was almost always out . After fifty years, I would not swear that I started with The Two Towers, and after that who knows? For just a few years, back then, I was rereading Lord of the Rings every year, in correct order.
The confusion really did not bother me. Perhaps I had read the Lensman books, I though sf&f was supposed to be confusing…
@15: I was going to call the columnist a lucky soul for having read only #4 first because I started in #5 (Second Stage Lensman), but you win with #6. OTOH, going by ISFDB cover pictures, I read the 1965 Pyramid, which began with a summary of the previous books; sounds like they left that out in the later editions, which would make reading them difficult.
I read Earthman, Come Home (Cities in Flight #3/4) some years before the others. OTOH, Blish wrote it first, so he had to make it something like a standalone (cf @32). The Vorkosiverse was also written out of order (and with branches, to boot); I think I’ve read all of the novels now, but I’m sure I’ve missed some of the shorter works.
I also read the Spencer and McGee series out of order — found a vaguely current one, and another, then dug up the start after a while. These both fit @29’s observation that mystery series tend not to rely as heavily on order as SFF; do editors push that, or did it just become practice by default, given that there were mystery series (e.g. Nero Wolfe) when SFF was doing very few novels of any sort?
@46: I didn’t read many of the magazines, but I do remember picking up the issue of Amazing with the last part of Herbert’s The Santaroga Barrier — which is quite weird enough when started from the beginning, thankyouverymuch. Ditto Schmitz’s The Lion Game (in Analog), which was even more difficult because the two-parter depended heavily on “The Telzey Toy” — IIRC the 1973 book has all 3 pieces.
I’ve now gotten to the point of having a shelf for incomplete sets, so that I don’t have to rely on fading memory as later books come out; instead I hold off and read them together. (Mostly — I wouldn’t try that with A Song of Ice and Fire.)
I would also argue that the correct order of Narnia books is publication order because the later prequel volumes have authorial asides that specifically reference events in the previously-published books. (Saying things like, “And that’s why there was that lamp post that Lucy found at the start of her adventure.”)
Here’s a fun one: What is the proper place in the sequence to read Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, which is simultaneously the 13th Tarzan book and the 4th Pellucidar book? When I was young and ambitious (and Netflix didn’t exist), my solution was to read the first 12 Tarzan books, then read the first three Pellucidar books, and then continue with Tarzan at the Earth’s Core.
I was in a gas station, looking at the spinner rack. Hoping for something to read.
I opened the most likely item. Someone was riding somewhere with someone. He seemed as confused as I was, asking, “Are there dragons in this land?”
That sounded interesting. So I bought The Return of the King. The Ace edition, no less. But what did I know? It was an interesting story.
Until suddenly I was with some other group, groping their way through some haunted marshes. Who were these people? What did they have to do with Pippin and the rest? That threw me out of the story for a while. I eventually took up the tale again. A guy’s got to read something.
It all made more sense once I found the other two books.
@62 The first Narnia book I read was Prince Caspian when I was 10. I still remember the feeling of utter transport after finishing it. In those days I was dependent on the bi-weekly bookmobile to bring in books, so it was a long time before I could read them in any order. But I asked for them for presents, so they were some of the first hardback books I owned. A long time ago, and I still have them, though I no longer read them every year.
Pity the poor person who decided to read the Skylark series in order and came across this printing:
For those who are unfamiliar with Skylark, Skylark Three is the second book in the series.
I started Narnia with Prince Caspian too. Now, more than 60 years later, I still re-read all the books frequently — heck, I know them by heart, pretty much! So my take on it is, whichever one you pick up, if you like it, it won’t matter what order you read the rest of them in.
I’m known for not even reading some books in the order they were written. I often leaf through a book that I am interested in to see if anything catches my eye and might start reading a quarter of the way in. Then I might get a little antsy and jump ahead 50 pages, then come back to the beginning.
I think I read Mort first of the Discworld books. @56 my first Liaden book was Carpe Diem which I picked up because I had a book voucher because someone had lost my copy of another book and given me a voucher. I’d seen people talking about the series on a Bujold mailing list so decided to give it a try. It was an interesting point to come in on, since it starts with the resolution of a cliffhanger from the original book, but I enjoyed it enough to search out and find the rest. I now just need to find enough spare time to get Trader’s Leap.
So much was determined by what was in the library I had access to.
I was given Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragondrums” to read but saw it was third of a fantasy trilogy, so I found “Dragonsong” and “Dragonsinger” at the library. That worked out well, since the stories are much more self-contained than the other Pern books, with just a few references to the larger world-shaking events. And the forward described the events of the first book, in which all the weyrs of Pern are brought back to save the day. So I went looking for that book and checked out “All the Weyrs of Pern”, which at that point was the last book in the series and began with someone waking up a supercomputer. I was very confused! The tech elements are introduced a bit more gradually if you read in order.
This also seems like a good place to point out that when Zebra published their edition of Talbot Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace, they misnumbered the last two books.
@65 — Now, for me, Tarzan at the Earth’s Core was the first Burroughs book I ever read.
I’m yet another who read “The City of Gold and Lead” before the other “Tripods” novels. While my local library also had a copy of “The White Mountains”, I didn’t get to read the concluding novel until many years later. Fortunately my adult self enjoyed it just as much!
I also read several of the Hugh Walters’ UNEXA novels out of sequence, courtesy of that same Library. Despite the gradual development of the characters and their background from book to book, they were written so as to make it pretty easy for new readers to come in at any point. By sheer coincidence I’ve just discovered today that several of them have now been issued as ebooks by Gateway; very welcome, as used copies of the originals now fetch ludicrous prices.
Another one who read Amber out of order. My high school library was the lucky recipient of somebody’s SF Book Club castoffs. I saw “The Guns of Avalon” and though, well, that’s an odd combination for a title. But “Avalon” meant it was fantasy so I didn’t have high hopes, having read too much SFBC extruded fantasy product.
Within the first few pages Corwin had used the decidedly non-EFP slang “ratfink” and it suddenly got a lot more intriguing.
But the weirdest out-of-order I ever did was Blake’s 7 – in the second episode I saw, an amnesiac Blake is being told he used to be a rebel leader. In the first episode I saw, he was captured and several of the people with him were killed. Made total sense, until some of those dead people turned out to be alive…
@42 & @43,
Sandman Vol2 is exactly the right volume to begin with!
I read the 4th of Kage Baker’s Company series “The Graveyard Game” first. Loved the writing and the story intrigued me so much I had to know what happened before & after. I don’t think I would have loved that series nearly as much had I started with the first book as it was quite different in tone.
The first Star Trek TOS thing I ever saw was The Voyage Home. I had already seen most of TNG and Voyager, was already vaguely familiar with the characters, and was aware that there were Events of two movies beforehand, at least, but what an introduction!
(I still think most Star Trek could benefit from being more like The One With The Whales, frankly!)
Bookwise, the first Animorphs book I read was the fourth one, and solely because I was in the midst of a pretty intense dolphin phase at the time and the cover caught my eye. Thankfully, those are easy enough to pick up thanks to the beginnings being generally pretty repetitive and giving a recap of what happened every time.
I was home one day because of illness and saw that a number of the Battlestar Galactica reboot episodes were running back to back. I had missed the show when it originally ran, so I decided to watch. And soon realized I was watching the final episodes. Oops!
I suspect attempting to read Harrow the Ninth before Gideon the Ninth would be an… Interesting experience.
And the first time I watched Charlie Jade, I missed the first episode (the one that actually lays out the set-up with the parallel worlds and Charlie finding himself in our world instead of his). But TBH, I kind of liked it that way — it was fun to just be dumped in mid-stream like that, and I didn’t really have any trouble figuring out the broad strokes of what was going on.
I’m yet another person who read the Tripods books out of order. Perhaps there’s a reason for it happening to so many of us, possibly the books changed publishers or something? Fortunately I’d seen enough of the BBC TV series (whilst hiding behind the sofa, it was pretty scary to young me) to get the gist.
I suspect that like many others here, I read a lot of stories ‘out of order’ because I relied on a local library to sate my appetite for reading as a kid. I still appreciate it when an author has managed to make the beginning of a sequel into a “previously on…”, without it being clunky. I assume it’s a tricky thing to do well.
OK here’s taking it to another level:
When I was 8 or 9 we were on vacation and I found a paperback one of my brothers had left lying around. It had an exploding volcano on the cover, and some weird-looking guys riding something that looked like dragons. Those of you of a certain age will recognize this as the Ballantine edition of the Return of the King.
Well, I picked it up and started thumbing through it, and found a page with an interesting title and I thought “this sounds good, I’ll read this.” The title on that page? “Mount Doom”
Yes folks, the first part of the Lord of the Rings I read was the climax of the trilogy…
@75:
Also my experience; memory is weak (did I read Expedition Venus first, or one of the moon trips?) but I certainly didn’t start with the first. I remember those being a lot of fun even though there had been several USian and Russian people in space but none from the UK when I read them. They had some interesting ideas; AFAIK, EV is the first book to have a device tasked with reducing clutter in low Earth orbit. (We still don’t have a program for this, but there have been some promising attempts recently.)
My first book in the Polesotechnic League series by Poul Anderson wat Satan’s World. Back in the day, it was very hard to find paperbacks, so I don’t think I read the entire series until Baen Books produced the entire series as an eBook series.
Enjoyed reading them in order, too, although Anderson tended to set most of his stories while civilization was on the decline. (Which does tend to produce better settings for heroics, but may have colored my view of current society.)
Footnote 2 reminds me of Zelazny’s Roadmarks, where the chapters are titled alternately “One” and “Two” where the Chapters Two’s were written to be read in any order. I vaguely recall an essay where he said that the publication order was chosen at random. I miss him.
Satan’s World was the first Anderson I encountered that I liked, and it kicked off a couple of years where I haunted used bookstores, snapping up everything by him that I could find. I was very disappointed to discover when I reread it in … 2014, I think, that the suck faerie had got at what I remembered as a fun adventure.
I’ve started Elizabeth Peters’ Peabody series somewhere smack in the middle when I found one of the books by chance in a bookstore. Loved the blurb and only years later found out that this is actually a series. Started then anew from the start.
Seems like Prince Caspian must count as a good place to start with Narnia! My sister brought it home from her school library when I was a kid, and I liked it a lot, subsequently reading all the others whenever I found them. (In my youth, one did not read in order – one read what one could get.)
I originally read “The City of Gold and Lead” even more out of sequence than most: in the early 1980s, a graphical version (only of that book, not the rest of the trilogy) was published in serial form in Boys’ Life Magazine, and I picked it up in the middle of the story. It didn’t take long to realize I needed to get to the library and find the whole trilogy, though :)
I read Animorphs and The Dresden Files in the ‘wrong’ order, based on whichever books happened to be in the library when I was there. I watched Babylon 5 in the ‘wrong’ order (Season 5 first, when my family got a promo deal for extra TV channels – and for all that people trash it, I loved it enough to buy the DVDs of the rest of the series). Didn’t stop me from enjoying them. Reading/watching things in order isn’t nearly as necessary as many fans like to think.
There are exceptions. LOTR needs to be read in order, because it’s a single book in multiple volumes. The Stormlight Archive seems like it would overwhelming to start in the middle of just due to the sheer scale of the worldbuilding. But for the most part, do what works for you.
As a teenager in the 70’s I had this problem mostly with Piers Anthony. One summer I found Castle Roogna (Xanth book #3) in the very limited book section of the only convenience store I had access to. Later found the two earlier (and wish I had just stopped with that series are this point). I also read his Ox book, the third book in his Of Man and Manta series (this introduced me to Conway’s Game of Life for the first time). Quickly found the second book Orn, but didn’t find a copy of the first book, Omnivore, until probably 10 years later. It’s still a favorite of mine. His other books not so much.
My introduction to Discworld was actually an Atlanta Radio Theater Company production of “Guards! Guards!” (featuring John Rhys-Davies!) at my first DragonCon. And I actually tend to recommend that as a starting point for Discworld, to be honest. The Colour of Magic very much suffers from the fact that Sir Pterry hadn’t found his footing in the setting when he was just starting it. I read through the City Watch and Death sub-series in order, but ended up very nearly reading the Witches sub-series backwards, and I still haven’t read all of the Wizards sub-series.
While it’s technically a standalone book in a shared overarching setting, I also recommend reading Elantris after you’ve read at least the first Mistborn trilogy when it comes to Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere stuff, because while it is good, it’s definitely got a case of “this is the author’s first published novel”.
There is one book series where I recommend starting with the second book, then reading the first, though. The Gaunt’s Ghosts series in Warhammer 40k. Ghostmaker is a MUCH better starting point than First and Only, since about half the book is flashbacks that introduce you to the main characters in the regiment and explain the backstory of why the Tanith First has nicknames like “First and Only” and “Ghosts”.
Back in the day it was HARD to figure out what order books went in, or even if there were other books in the series. With different publishers coming printing the various books they didn’t always list the other ones in the series in the beginning, making it even harder.
I got the entire Susan Cooper Dark is Rising series for my birthday and spent the next day trying to decide what order they went in. It was a bit like those “the fox lives two houses down from the house where Camels are smoked” sort of puzzles. Back and forth between the books to work out the order. Eventually I took a marker and put a big “1” through “5” inside the covers.
The current HarperCollins set of The Chronicles of Narnia actually has the books numbered out of order. I feel for people who haven’t read them before and begin with the book numbered 1, which is The Magician’s Nephew–next to last in the series. It is both obscure in places if one hasn’t read the preceding 5 books, and it also spoils significant plot points if one reads it first. It’s really confounding what they were thinking when they decided to do this.
The Hugh Walters sounded interesting, so I went looking to see if it was available in ebook format. Interestingly enough, Gateway just started rereleasing the series this month.
My out-of-order books have been more modern books because a specific book sounded neat.
With Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series, I started with Dimestore Magic – because cool, witches! I didn’t realize it was book 3 of the series (but the first with this POV character) until much later, but it definitely provided more context of the world, even though with the differing POV the stories stood alone. It’s now one of my very top series.
I didn’t think I liked paranormal romance but Kresley Cole’s Dark Needs at Night’s Edge sounded so bonkers I had to pick it up. An entirely bloodmad vampire and the ghost of a 1920’s ballerina locked in a house in New Orleans together? So wild, with a mystery of “how in the world are they going to be together”. And it worked! I went back and read the whole series. And then I was hooked on paranormal romance.
In a non-SFF side, I started my current favourite, addictive series – a mystery series, the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series – from book 6, Bury Your Dead. I was going to Quebec City and things were talking about tours based on the book – I was curious! And what a killer character writer Louise Penny is (in more ways than one). I went right back and started from the beginning, and on my second read of Bury Your Dead, it was even better. She’s what I aspire to do in how she writes character change across many books
I LOVE this topic. Unintentionally reading a series out of order is how I got into some of the series that were some of the most formative reading experiences I had as a child and I’ve wondered a lot about how different I would be if I hadn’t made these errors.
@40 My first Earthsea book (and my first Le Guin book) was The Farthest Shore and I had the same sort of underwhelmed experience going back and reading A Wizard of Earthsea. I was 11 or 12 and connected emotionally with Arren in a way I know I wouldn’t have with Ged. Even just thinking about this book still makes me almost overwhelmingly emotional in a way I haven’t been able to connect with any of Le Guin’s other books.
@50 I also read Ender’s Shadow first and for as long as I recommended that series to people, pushed this error on anyone I could. I can’t imagine what reading Ender’s Game is like when you don’t already know what’s going on with Bean, it just so completely influenced my interpretation of everything that I read after. Regardless of how people view these books now, I think I’m not alone in them being my first real introduction to humanism as a child, and I attribute a lot of that to having gotten to Bean first.
I read James Blish’s Cities in Flight series out of order, but then again, he wrote it out of order, too. I started with “Earthman, Come Home,” in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (which turned out to be somewhat different from the version that he turned it into later). You can easily read these four books out of order; in fact, I think there are advantages to reading #3 (Earthman, Come Home) first – which takes you into the middle of the universe – then either #4 (The Triumph of Time, the closing of the saga, which might benefit from going later) or #2 A Life for the Stars. You could also read #2, #3, and #4, since those are in order chronologically and all take place in the space-traveling New York.
The first, They Shall Have Stars is technically the beginning, but apart from the origins of the technology and the human diaspora, it’s completely independent in style, tone, and character. Having said that, it is excellent (and prescient, in terms of foreseeing today) – but different.
The collection Cities in Flight collects them in order, with edits made by Blish to resolve some inconsistencies, and is fine as is, but this is one series you can genuinely read out of order without damaging your enjoyment.
I discovered SF & Fantasy at 11 when my aunt took us to library to pick out some books to read while we were visiting. Picked up Edgar Rice Burroughs Pellucidar because of the Frazetta cover. When I started reading it there were references to some previous story, but I wasn’t certain if there had actually been a previous book or if it was just a plot device for giving backstory. Only later located At the Earth’s Core and read it (along with all the other Burroughs I could find).
Read Ralph Milne Farley’s Radio Planet trilogy in reverse order. The Radio Planet was available in mass market paperback from my local bookstore. It was obvious it was not the first in the series, but I read it anyway. Pre-Internet days, so it was hard to track down the others. The second book – The Radio Beasts – showed up in print again a few years later and I was thrilled to finally read the beginning of the story, only to discover that it, too, was a sequel. Took more years to track down The Radio Man.
I know it happened many many times because I developed an absolute loathing of starting series out of order, and as a fantasy/sci-fi fan, there’s a lot of opportunities for that to happen. But like others I also had the “take what you get” experience with the libraries (or garage sales, or convenience store racks) of my youth so sometimes I just had to suck it up.
The ones that stand out to me most though were starting Narnia with “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” which I read several times before any of the others. I would say more than any of the others it probably benefits from having read “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” and “Prince Caspian” first, but it was still self contained enough to stand alone as a story I loved and remains my favorite to this day. I also read “Dragonquest” before “Dragonflight,” and “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” before HHGTTG. That one DEFINITELY needed some prior knowledge, although I may have developed a bit more sympathy for Arthur Dent’s constant befuddlement than I might have otherwise.
It’s a tangential subject, really, but I read a lot of Tolkien-esque fantasy before reading LOTR. I would have benefited greatly from reading LOTR first but it took me forever to get into the books because they seemed so…derivative. :D
Ah, like how Shakespeare’s plays can seem like famous quotations stitched together into narratives :)
Not literary – but reading through these examples I thought of how my wife and I started watching Farscape (science fiction/space opera) in a later season… when there were two versions of the protagonist with two sets of crew they flipped between every other episode. LOL. Talk about coming into something in the middle! We just thought it was a very edgy show with some really crazy conceits, not a temporary abnormality :)
@102 Exactly, hehehe.
103 I once converted a double column pdf to epub, not realizing Caliber treats two columns as one wide column. The odd thing was, the weird merged style worked for the first couple of pages.
I picked up Anne McCaffrey’s The White Dragon at the university bookstore in 1983 because I liked the paperback cover — cute dragon! I was buying it for a friend who had a thing for dragons, but I thought I would read it myself before I sent it to her. (I ended up keeping it and getting her some other dragon-related tchotchke instead.) I didn’t really “get” the deal with Thread until I read Dragonflight and Dragonquest but I was already hooked on the world-building. The only detriment to reading the third book first is that I’m not sure I ever fully grasped how much bigger the other dragons were compared to Ruth so my mental images were always at odds with the descriptions.
I had not read anything of Kage Baker before she died; people were talking about her, so I picked out The Empress of Mars at random (maybe I liked the title). It was clear that I was missing an awful lot of backstory, but it was promising enough that I soon read everything of hers that my library had – in order of publication.
AlanBrown (46): When I binged Wodehouse, I did get a bit tired of Bertie’s repeating certain reminiscences in every volume. Certain phrases also recur too often, like “bearing aloft through snow and ice the banner with the strange device”.
hoopmanjh (65): Even when the author doesn’t do that, it’s essentially why I prefer to read series in publication order, rather than internal order as I did with Darkover (as it was in 1981) to my later regret.
fcoulter (85): Is there an order to the Polesotechnic stories? I read them at random, never suspecting that there might be more continuity than in, say, most of the Nero Wolfe canon.
Paul Carter (92): Funny, I was never tempted to read them, but somehow I was sure that the sequence is Orn, Ox, Omnivore.
Curt Hayes (94): I like to write a book’s date on the underside, so that the dates are visible when I stack them face-up.
Shimarenda (95): Isn’t The Magician’s Nephew first in internal time?
JDN (105): There’s a political poem vigorously supporting Jacobites against Hanoverians, or vice versa, depending on whether you read it as one column (with caesura, I guess) or two. And maybe I’ve heard of a Chinese example?
“The Two Towers” from the local public library. (I owned “The Hobbit”)
“The Hand of Oberon”, another library near to my school, I think.
“Gray Lensman” probably; the library again, probably.
Maybe those volumes had more copies available.
Maybe someone needs to do something about libraries (of about forty years ago).
Does a name come to mind…
Robert Carnegie
Back in the day I had a very limited choice of English paperbacks here in Switzerland. They usually just stocked the most recent title in the series. So I started The Wheel Of Time with The Dragon Reborn (very confusing, would not recommend) and the Outlander series with Voyager (a very good starting point). Both are the third volume in the series, and the covers made me pick them up. Have read all the books in those series now, and also listened to them. I still feel that starting in „the wrong place“ did influence my relationship to the main protagonists. Especially in WOT, where I never truly connected with Rand. Perron though…
If I find a book by a new author and like what I read in the book I have, then I will go research their other works. I have read several fantasy and SYFY books by so many authors, that sometimes I will pick up a book because I like the description and cover before I realize it is part of a series. My latest author that I started reading in the middle of his series was Terry Brooks. I didn’t realize that he wrote the Shannara series in sets of trilogies and was confused until I found his website which listed the trilogies in their three-part set. I had started in the middle so I had to work my way back to the original set, which is actually a 4 book set, and then work my way forward again. This year I will finally finish the last set (I like to have all the books in the series to read one after another) once I get the final book. After dealing with the Gunslinger novels by Stephen King which took thirty years to complete that series, one eventually wants to read any series with the books present in order to fully follow the storyline as presented from the author’s viewpoint.
A little off topic, but I am SO glad to see E.E. Smith’s Lensman series praised. I cannot understand why someone has not pounced on it for serialization. True, for modern tastes some of the female roles might need a tweak or two, but I would really, really like to see the red headed Clarissa as the Red Lensman in action. Somebody is missing a sure bet for profit here. Lots better than Herbert’s stuff.
While technically not a series, as the others above, I’d point out that CJ Cherryh’s Alliance-Union novels can be read in any order. I started with the Faded Sun saga & translated to these books when I found out it was tied to a larger universe.
Speaking of Dune…
Reading out of order is an abomination. My spouse does it all the time.
To be fair, I was introduced to a number of serialized stories by starting in the middle, because those were the magazine issues I had. And I’ve started one or two series in the middle by mistake. But generally I start at the beginning. And when the next book comes out, I like to start at the beginning again, so that it’s all fresh. I used to, anyway. No time, now.
@40 I also read Tombs of Atuan first, then The Farthest Shore, and only then A Wizard of Earthsea. It took a bit of getting my head around just what Ged meant when he talked about his younger self as naive. Did not like it at all on the first read. Tombs remains among the most captivating things I’ve ever read, though.
My funniest out of order experience, though, was listening to an audio play and being impressed with the interestingly non-linear presentation of the plot, which turned out to be my mp3 player being set on shuffle. I think it was an improvement, unfortunately.
@23 – I managed to double down on starting Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni book wrong: I began with Saint Camber (#2 of the second trilogy) then moved on to Deryni Checkmate (#2 of the first trilogy).
@97 – I also started Kelley Armstrong with Dime Store Magic. Maybe it got wider promo after the success of the first two?
I started the Vorkosigan novels with The Vor Game, which was, um, confusing. At one point a character asked Miles in disbelief, “How many people are you, anyway?” I had been wondering that myself. And I started Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain series with The Palace (#2) followed by Blood Games (#3). I didn’t get my hands on the first book for years.
My out-of-order book was Changeling Earth by Fred Saberhagen, the (then) concluding volume of his Empire of the East series. There were reasons for that: Changeling Earth was published by DAW and widely available, whereas the first two books, The Broken Lands and The Black Mountains were published by Ace and possibly were only to be found in stripped cover editions by then. Years later I did finally find copies of the first two books.
As it turns out each book stands alone fairly well, and even forty seven years later I am forever grateful to DAW for publishing Changeling Earth by itself.
On at least three occasions I recall I’ve picked up a book at store or library, got well into it before realizing it was the second of a trilogy (never the third). Most notable was second of Asimov’s Foundation, which at the time I’d never heard of.
What’s The Hobbit?
this is what I would have said at age 13 after reading LOTR trilogy and declaring it the most amazing thing I’d ever read. Long before Harry Potter, Rick Riordan, and others came along to provide age appropriate fantasy for pre-teens.
When I finally read The Hobbit in college I never ‘got it’ and to this day still think it’s a subpar story next to the grandiose of LOTR.
I started massive book series with book two (never a later book than that) so many times. I think it’s really interesting that this is such a common thing.
Wheel of Time: I was around 8-9 or so when I found The Great Hunt at my library soon after the third book was released. The librarian kindly informed me that it was a very complex series with lots of characters. But they were used to me checking out stacks of thick books by then, so I just assured her that I’d take notes if I had to. I did start writing a few notes about Bors at the beginning, but soon the story sucked me in and I forgot all about taking notes. I think I devoured the third book next and only later went back to read the first book. I remember being quite astonished by the very beginning scene with Lews Therin, and then some of the character progression made a lot more sense after reading about how the group left Emond’s Field.
Sword of Truth: A lesser-known series that has some similarities to Wheel of Time, and one of those is that I again managed to read the second book first. This one is even worse for that though, because the second book starts during the cleanup of the mess caused by the bad guy who was defeated in the first book. I mean, it literally jumps into the scene minutes after the defeat. I was quite confused but read on anyway, and again got sucked into the story. So many things made way more sense after I read the first book though.
Dresden Files: More recently, I started reading Dresden a few years ago after hearing about how amazing it was. For some reason my library again didn’t have the first book, so I started with the second. This probably improved my experience, actually, since Butcher’s writing certainly improved significantly over the first few books. A few things referenced in the second and third books made more sense after I went back and read the first, but initially I hadn’t missed much. Now I’ve reread the whole series twice, including the first book and it’s one of my favorite series.
Chronicles of Narnia: I think I mostly read these in order, except that somehow I completely missed Prince Caspian initially. I had no idea it even existed until I randomly came across a copy in my church’s library and was excited that there was one more Narnia story for me to love.
I’m evidently not the only person who started Anne McCaffrey’s dragon books with The White Dragon. Suffice it to say that prologue had a huge pile of spoilers.
It was also weird discovering later when I finally did get to read the actual 1st book DragonFlight that it’s quite unlike the rest of the series — much darker and better in various ways, and I’m a bit sad she was unable to continue in that vein. Fax was one of the best antagonists she ever created in that world; it seems that after killing him off AM lost her taste for having actual conflict in her stories. I suspect if I’d read DF first, it would have raised my expectations too much for the later books.
Also also weird is that the first Anne McCaffrey book I ever read was Restoree which is also decidedly unrepresentative. I really liked it and had no idea at the time she intended it as a parody. Much like Neil Stephenson’s The Big U, I’m pretty sure this is a book that will get destroyed if you ever present it to the author for signing at a convention.
– – –
Also fun was starting Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books with Darkover Landfall, which you’d think would be the Right Thing given the way it’s always listed 1st in the internal chronology because it’s set 1000+ years before any of the other books, but it’s completely unlike them because it’s a lost-ship-starts-a-colony story that — aside from vague foreshadowing and a pile of in-jokes which, of course, go whoosh if you haven’t read any of the other books — has very little to do with the culture-clash theme that’s the essence of the rest of the series, .
Bradley is also someone you want to read in publication order (perhaps skipping her really early stuff and maybe also everything after she starts going off the rails in the mid-1980s),
….though I hesitate to make recommendations — my reading of her was all before I knew anything about her personal life, which now has us slamming straight into the Roman Polanski Problem (yes she’s dead but I’m told there are still one or two living complicit others benefiting from the estate). On the other hand, used book stores still exist. If nothing else, I’m pretty sure I will never be able to reread The Forbidden Tower.
– – –
Doc Smith’s Lensman books I also did what’s supposedly the Right Thing in starting with TriPlanetary, but this is arguably another case where publication order is better, adjusted for the fact that even though TP was published first, it was published as a standalone story in a distinct universe and only later retconned and pasted onto the front of the Lensman series, which I think was actually a bad decision. It gives away far too much of what’s going on with the Arisians and the Eddorians up front, whereas if one starts with Galactic Patrol you get the slow reveal that Smith originally intended.
(same reason you don’t want to start the Narnia books with The Magician’s Nephew…)
When I was a kid, buying books was a big deal (the buying part, not the books part)…so buying one book was a big deal, let alone an entire series! Plus, often, first books in series tended to be sold out at book stores, meaning that even if you did want to buy it, it simply wasn’t there. This meant borrowing books from the library or friends. And since popular series meant more demand, reading books in order was often a luxury.
So I ended up reading Goblet of Fire first, was thoroughly stumped, then started with Chamber of Secrets, loved it, moved to Philosopher’s Stone, and then the rest in order. With WoT, I started with The Great Hunt, was similarly stumped, then started on EotW, and read the rest in order (save Crown of Swords, which I read before reading Lord of Chaos!)
I’m yet another person who read the Tripods books out of order. Perhaps there’s a reason for it happening to so many of us, possibly the books changed publishers or something
And another – I read them in reverse order (Pool of Fire/City of Gold and Lead/The White Mountains) because that was the order I found them in.
First Bujold was Brothers in Arms which worked pretty well to be honest. Then, many years later, Diplomatic Immunity, then went back and read the rest.
Second Foundation/Foundation/Foundation and Empire, which was very confusing.
And of course I watched the Star Wars films out of order, like pretty much everyone else…
It is amazing to me that I can’t recall reading any SFF series out of order. Truly shocked that I can’t come up with a single example.
That … would be difficult at present, in as much as she passed away in 2011.
I read the third book of the Land of Stories series first!
Glad to see Dragonsinger mentioned here. I’m fairly certain that it was my first McCaffrey, and it remains my favorite.
And I love to see Kurtz’ Deryni books mentioned. I read them all up until The Bastard Prince and King Kelson’ Bride. I loved Morgan but just couldn’t get into the long awaited Childe Morgan series.
Agree on reading Narnia in publication order. I did read Wardrobe first, but I think our library just had that volume and The Last Battle. I waited some years before getting access to the rest.
@120 wrog
Nope! At the last minute, I decided to get a book signed by McCaffrey at the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon. I hadn’t brought any with me so I strolled through the dealer’s room to find something. I decided on Restoree as a book I’d always liked, and not just another Pern book. She was very gracious in signing it and chatted with me for a minute (as she was doing with everyone).
On books read out of order, several!
I think I read The Well of Darkness, volume 4 of the Gandalara Cycle, first. Anyway, it definitely wasn’t book 1. I tend to read out-of-order when a cover/blurb has caught my attention. I’m not usually bothered by being dropped into the middle of a story–less of that pesky setup, info-dumping stuff.
After reading a blurb about The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner in a Sunday paper magazine insert, I picked it up. Even after reading it, I was still amazed at the ending of the first book, The Thief. Book 6, Return of the Thief, is being released October 6!! This is 24 years after the first book was published.
I started the Amber series with book 2 of the Merlin Cycle, Blood of Amber. I liked the cover. It was much later that I read Corwin’s books. I don’t like Corwin so I prefer the Merlin Cycle although it did go off the rails by the end.
Like many others, I read City of Gold and Lead first and it was several years before I read the others.
Same with Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series. I think I started with Greenwitch or maybe The Dark is Rising. By the time I read book 1, Over Sea, Under Stone, I found it childish/written for younger kids and still rarely reread it.
I may also have read The Door into Shadow by Diane Duane first. I can’t recall for sure.
Genre-adjacent, I devoured what was out of Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolo series. People kept saying that the Lymond series was better so I set out to read it. OMG. Niccolo/Nicholas/Claes starts off as an apprentice and we seem him grow into power. Lymond (Francis Crawford) grew up privileged and we seem him already powerful. The first chapter has a bunch of “Lymond is back!” statements of people in awe of this Gary Stu. Ugh. I couldn’t get past the chapter. I did find someone recommending to skip to book 3, The Disorderly Knights, as an alternative starting point. I did that and was able to finish the series. I’ve still only skimmed books 1 and 2.
Then of course there’s comics. Spectacularly, I started reading Uncanny X-Men at issue 144, just after John Byrne left. However, that did give me the joy of hunting down all the back issues over the next 6 months or so! I read ’em as I found ’em so those stories were completely out of order.
@0 / @105: do you know of Damon Knight’s essay “A Brief Introduction to Logogenetics”? It introduces “The World of Null-Apples”, by A. Ray van Vogtbury. The book is long OOP, but a good library might have it.
@107 re @95: The Magician’s Nephew is chronologically #1, but #6 canonically and by writing order; as noted in previous comments, it refers to later events in books written earlier.
@112: that depends on how widely you define the Alliance/Union universe, and how granular you are. The Faded Sun books were written first, so it’s not surprising they’re separable (IIRC they’re millennia after the Company Wars), but they do have their own order; similarly, the 4 Morgaine books, the 5 Chanur, and the pair of Company War lead-ins (Heavy Time and Hellburner) each need to be read in their order; I suppose knowing a summary of Downbelow Station is enough for reading any of the later main-line books (Merchanter’s Luck etc). But the real test is whether you include the Foreigner series (which ISFDB doesn’t, but I’ve heard Cherryh quoted as saying it should be); reading any of the (so far) 7 sets (5 3-parters, 2 2-parters) out of order would be very confusing, and the sets cover a small-enough timespan that I’d expect anyone reading them out of order to be confused — there’s bits of recap but not a lot, and some of it covers events before any of the books.
@117: thanks for the reminder: I read Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation and could tell there was prior work I was missing, but to my ~12-year-old mind what was there was gripping enough that it didn’t matter — and I’m still not sure how much it does given the recap material in in F&E and the fact that Foundation is really 5 novelettes with no added glue.
@118: When I finally read The Hobbit in college I never ‘got it’ and to this day still think it’s a subpar story next to the grandiose of LOTR. This (those twee elves!), although I’m not as enchanted by LotR as I was at 14.
I am amused that when I started hunting up references the latest column on tor.com was a list of standalone fantasy novels for those with “series fatigue”
I also started with Voyage of the Dawn Treader, though I think I might have seen some of the BBCs animated series of tLtWtW a few years earlier, but I don’t think I associated the two together?
Yes, Harrow the Ninth would be very confusing to begin with.
The ebook reader I was using gave me sections of Peter Watts’ Blindsight out of order, which made for an extra confusing reading experience. I suspect I loved it more for just how hard I had to work for understanding it.
Back in the late 1960s through the early 1980s, quite a few publishers would put out boxed sets of series during the holiday season, which made it easy to get all the books at once–good times. Rarely done today due to the cost, and the fact that after the holidays, bookstores would either break open the sets and sell individually, or return them to the publisher.
I’m fairly certain I started the Pern books at The White Dragon because my mother had just read it and the cover was so pretty. Other than that I am pretty neurotic about reading series in order, even if the timeline itself jumps around, like with Narnia.
I’d been reading the Star Trek books out of order since I started reading Star Trek books in sixth grade, but now thanks to StarTrekReadingOrder.com I have a complete list of episodes and books, and I’m going back and re-watching the whole series, with long pauses to read the books.
And before that, I read the Baby-Sitters Club books out of order for the same reason: I read what I had access to when I had access to it!
Since then I’ve gone out of my way to read series in order, especially ones that are published over decades like The Dragonriders of Pern or Earth’s Children or even shorter YA series like Circle of Three. It’s something I’m adamant about now, because I need All The Context.
I read Ethan of Athos before I knew there was a Vorkosigan series.
I read Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen before I knew there was a Paratime Police.
I read The Return of the King before I know there was a Trilogy.
I read Stardock before I knew there was a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series
I read The Cosmic Computer before I knew there was a Federation.
I’d have had a less confusing time if I’d been less ignorant.
I remember reading Deepwater Landing by Ken Catran first (it was the second in the trilogy) and then when on to read book 3 and then book 1. I think I also read book 2 of the My Teacher is a Alien series by Bruce Coville first.
I did read some of the Pern books out of order but can’t remember if I read White Dragon or Dragonsong first.
No doubt due to the order in which Ace reprinted Piper in the 1970s and 1980?
I’ve read lots of series out of order, and in fact it’s my preferred way of starting a series. If the author doesn’t write well enough that book 4 or 5 is a good read, do I really want to invest in the whole thing?
The White Dragon was a great introduction to Pern. (Of course, I also liked Restoree, so what do I know?) The Castle of Llyr was my first Prydain book, and it’s still my favorite. Perry Mason was a random walk. I’m doing a reread of some of the J.D. Robb In Death books, and I just skip around among the 50 odd books. When my book club read King of Attolia, we were pretty much split between people who had read the first two and people new to the author; I think it’s a really interesting entry point since the viewpoint character also doesn’t know much of the backstory.
Of course, jumping in the middle means you have to be ok with not understanding everything all at once. I wonder if there is a correlation between people who like C.J. Cherryh and people who aren’t hung up on series order? I like the way she tends to start stories in the middle and assume the reader will catch on. Hmm, I think I read the Chanur books out of order too, and definitely skipped around in some of the series.
It’s fascinating that some people’s reactions to mistakenly reading a formative series in the wrong order is to ensure that never happens again, while others of us are happy to roll with it.
@114 I had a similar experience with a story on CD. It a middle disk for the audio of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and that section had some sexual violence in it. I thought it was really interesting how she had written it in such a temporally distorted way, and that it really brought across the disorientation and horror of the violence, and then realized that I had somehow hit the random button.
@@@@@ 136, James Davis Nicoll:
No doubt due to the order in which Ace reprinted Piper in the 1970s and 1980?
No doubt at all.
A little bodega in the basement of an office building in Wichita had a spinner of paperbacks back in the 80’s, with a copy of Yendi – second in its series. It sounded very interesting, but it was the second in the series so I passed it up for several weeks before the cover art (I am a sucker for shoulder dragons) finally did it for me.
Steven Brust has said Yendi is his least favorite of those books, *and* that the cover art is inaccurate (the ersatz-Vlad has no facial hair! The shoulder dragon is more bearded dragon than snake, and has too many limbs! The wing anatomy makes no sense!) but I don’t care, I still love it.
The series jumps around chronologically so it’s not too bad to read out of order, and as it happens the second book takes place before the first.
Fernhunter@134: I don’t think I’ve read a Bujold novel besides Ethan of Athos. I found it very understandable as a standalone. Did I miss a lot by reading it out of order? I do plan to get to her sooner than later. That’s a really good book.
I had a boxed set of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, but there was a printing error in my copy of the 5th book that I didn’t notice – aside from the cover, it was the 7th book. That made book 6 rather confusing.
Ethan of Athos is very standalone; no major spoilers for other books and you don’t need to know what happened in them
@@@@@ 140, John Arkansawyer:
Fernhunter@@@@@134: I don’t think I’ve read a Bujold novel besides Ethan of Athos. I found it very understandable as a standalone. Did I miss a lot by reading it out of order? I do plan to get to her sooner than later. That’s a really good book.
There is one character in Ethan of Athos connected with the rest of the Vorkosaverse. The mercenary, Elli Quinn. Nothing she does with Ethan affects the rest of the series.
Reading the books in order is a vexed issue. There are multiple starting points, depending on your interest. Click this link and get the word from the world’s expert.
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/293438-the-vorkosigan-saga-reading-order-debate-the-chef-recommends
Melita (127): Contrary to your experience with The Uncanny X-Men, I was lucky enough to pick up The Mighty Thor at 337, Walt Simonson’s first issue, attracted by the startling cover (a monster in Thor’s clothing smashes the logo).
Karen (139): Interesting to learn that Brust disparages Yendi. I thought it tried too hard to outdo Jhereg, and I did not go on.
John (140): I must have read Ethan of Athos (and Falling Free) before The Warrior’s Apprentice. WA clears up some points about Elli, but nothing vital.
Regarding reading order lists, unless it comes straight from the author don’t trust them. L’Amour’s Sackett series was reordered by the publisher a few years back. While doing a reread of the entire series I realized that they and the official website have it wrong. It didn’t spoil my reads but did reinforce that “official” isn’t always accurate.
@137 I love Cherryh, and how she drops the reader into the story, allowing them as they read to figure out what’s going on. She’s my favorite SFF author.
Tamfang@143: I picked up Falling Free next but found myself very slightly squicked by the quaddies, which is unusual for me. I’m not entirely sure why I had that reaction, but I did, and I stopped a little ways in. I was at someone else’s home reading their copy–Ethan of Athos had been on the same shelf, which was not alphabetized–so it wasn’t like I could just pick back it up the next week. Possibly I was just set wrong for it, or maybe I should pick up a different next book.
I dislike reading books out of order because it makes me feel as if I cheated! For that reason, I’ve managed to avoid this most of the time, with two notable exceptions.
Narnia is a big one. Someone bought me the whole set when I was a kid, but it was numbered beginning with The Magician’s Nephew, and that one pretty much left me cold. I did read the entire thing, but I was confused and not particularly engaged. I’m embarrassed to say that to this day I haven’t read the rest. I’m intending to rectify this, though, and try the series in publication order instead.
@50, 99: The Ender books are also a major example for me, but for a different reason. When I read Ender’s Game, I wasn’t yet aware of Ender’s Shadow (which was only a couple of years old), but I knew of the Lusitania sequel trilogy, and wanted to get to those immediately. Unfortunately, the public library’s copies of those always seemed to be out, my high school didn’t have any of them, and the only ones I found at the local used bookstore were Xenocide and Children of the Mind. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer; I relented and read those anyway. The problem is that the Lusitania books are really really different from Ender’s Game in terms of focus, pacing, backdrop (thousands of years later, totally different part of the universe), etc. And, of course, Speaker for the Dead is what does most of the work in terms of helping the reader acclimatize. I did like both Xenocide and Children of the Mind, but it was obvious to me in reading them that I’d missed almost all of the scene-setting. Also, I did buy a copy of Ender’s Shadow (the Starscape reprint from about 2005), but I’m about 75% sure I never actually read it. I don’t have it anymore, so I’m thinking I lost it somewhere along the way. Not that I’m not taking Orson Scott Card without a huge grain of salt these days, but I’d like to go back and read that one too.
@allthewayupstate: I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at age 8 and was blown away — but at that age I had no knowledge of ur-Stories and didn’t notice the Christian slant on them; this was also long enough ago that I didn’t notice the casual sexism (e.g., in giving for-real-use weapons only to the boys) — that was the way the world was. I read all the others soon after and missed a lot of attitude in those also. (There’s been a lot of discussion since then about that attitude, including multiple passes at an alternative to the abuse of Susan in the last book.) ISTM that the books may be worth reading today as curiosities written for a very different audience, but they are at least as troubling as anything of that period offered as canon (about which there seems to be a particular blowup going on recently, as opposed to the ongoing arguments).
Presumably Lewis never met Edith Garrud.
The episode of Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung I watched last night had an amusing scene in which a lady historian documenting a noble archery contest is mockingly offered a chance to try to hit the target. She’s asked if she’ll need a thousand arrows to hit the target. She, of course, hits the bullseye first try because she is an expert archer. To the alarm of the aristocrat who mocked her, she then proceeds to document the incident for the official court record.
I read the Lensman series and the Unexa series in whatever order I could get my mitts on them. I did eventually manage to buy most of the Lensman series for myself in the old Panther editions (and having checked, some of those books on my shelf are over forty years old). Alas, I never saw the Unexa books for sale either new or second-hand; but having just been inspired to go and check – they are as I type being released in ebook! Time for some quality reliving my youth, and hoping that the suck fairy hasn’t been reshelving books for me.
For several series, I’ve read the first couple of books in publication order, then been more random about which ones I’m able to find, especially for series that start throwing in prequels (Vorkosigan), or which were mainly available in used book stores (Amber, Kage Baker’s Company books, especially since she had publisher rights issues for a while.)
It took me a long time to read the Illuminatus! trilogy, because a conspiracy was preventing me from finding the second book. Eventually they slipped up and I found it, or at least that’s what they want me to think.
Reading books on Kindle has mostly made this problem go away; it’s pretty rare that they’ll be missing books in a series.
I recently reread some of Brust’s books in the collection format (my original paperbacks having gone in a bookshelf purge some years back.) Yendi and especially Tekla were better than I had remembered them being. And of course I agree with the people who said Pratchett’s first couple of Discworld books shouldn’t be the first ones you read; he got better. My intro to the series was Lords and Ladies, which seems to have been a reasonable place to start.
Te most extreme case I’ve had of this ws Perry Rhodan.
Where the first book I read was Spaceship of Ancestors. Which is number 73 in the English numbering and 81 IIRC in the German (There being three skipped books and 5 pairs issued as single volumes in the English translation.)
Luckily since it is one of the few entirely contained single storys in the series. It does only ave one of the major characters though. But what with a generation starship being found by accident by a FT Lone, robots and a teleporting alien it does give a reasonable view of the series.
@147: Oh, interesting! Thanks for the heads-up.
@156: I thought of it first. :-)
(Actually I may not have, I’ve lost track)
best series for reading out of order is Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, which starts with book #3.
@153: Sadly we may never find out ;-)