Skip to main content

Wednesday reading experience #5

Read a whole series in the order of publication (or the recommended reading order), without reading other books in between. It’s up to you whether you choose a trilogy or something longer.


I did this with the Anne of Green Gables books – unfortunately I read them in chronological order rather than order of publication, and found a nasty spoiler in the one book that was published out of chronology. I have also done this with sub-series from the Discworld series.

The Harry Potter books might be a not too strenuous series to read like this.

What series would you choose, and why?
or
What series did you choose and what was the outcome?

Comments

Dorte H said…
I have no time for this right now, but I have planned re-reading Ruth Rendell´s Inspector Wexford series and write a post about his development later.
I have a good idea for a reading experience, however. I borrowed Andrew Taylor´s Roth trilogy (also called "Fallen Angel", I believe) two years ago and read them in the proper order, which is the present, the 1970s and the 1950s. Later I bought it, and began with the old one, moving up in time. That also worked quite well.
Bibliophile said…
Thanks for your insight, Dorte.
When you read a whole series like this, you notice things that you might otherwise not, both good and bad. On the good side are, for example, character growth, multi-book story arcs and foreshadowing. On the bad side I have sometimes noticed continuity errors between books in a series, like disappearing characters and in one case a character whose name suddenly changed without explanation. You also tend to notice formulas more.

Popular posts from this blog

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...