On reading out of order

[oursin]

Thinking over my remark in yesterday's post about having read several books that were well on in related series, that these particular volumes were not perhaps the place to start, I wondered, Why Not?

In the course of many decades' reading I have read a fair number of sequences myself out of order, for a whole range of reasons, either because that

Comments

[wychwood]

I nearly always try and read in order, when I can. I feel the same about it as I do with TV spoilers - I can re-read as often as I want, read out of order, pick and choose, whatever, but I'm only going to have one chance at reading when I don't know what happens, and I value that experience.

With looser sequences like the Discworld series I'm less bothered - Wyrd Sisters, for instance, is a perfectly good place to start, because the first two or three aren't that great. On the other hand, each of the series within the sequence is best read in order - Guards, Guards before Men at Arms or Witches Abroad before Lords and Ladies, for instance - because they really do build on the previous volumes, and while you can certainly follow the story of Men at Arms without having done so, you're going to miss a lot of the detail.

Also, series I'm not that invested in can be read out of order - I recently read one of Lindsey Davis' Falco books, having jumped a couple, but I didn't mind because I'm not particularly invested in reading everything she writes.

Hm. Basically, I think it boils down (for me) to: read in order if you can, but if you can't that's not totally disastrous. But given a choice with a real series, I do definitely like to go in order, and ideally without knowing how it all turns out.

[callunav]

Yes. I generally think of Witches Abroad as the first Pratchett I read. It wasn't. I read Rites of Passage a few years before, found it utterly mediocre, and mentally relegated Pratchett to the files of authors whose work I did not like. Then I picked up Witches Abroad and was stricken with vast, undying love. I heartily encourage people not to read Pratchett in order of publication, but to pick and choose. There are people who I would recommend a Witches book to start with, people I would recommend City Watch books to start with, and, well, people who recommend Rincewind books to me. There are also the oddballs, which tend to be very good - Hogsfather, The Truth, Thief of Time, Monstrous Regiment, etc.

On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend reading the Tiffany Aching books out of order, personally. There's a much tighter continuity there than in most of his stuff.