Tuesday Thingers: Series
Today's question: Series. Do you collect any series? Do you read series books? Fantasy? Mystery? Science fiction? Religious? Other genre? Do you use the series feature in LT to help you find new books or figure out what you might be missing from a series?
I'm not much of a genre reader, so I don't look for books that belong to a genre series (ie, the Wheel of Time books in science fiction or Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series in mysteries). I'm not opposed to them, I just don't deliberately seek them out. That being said, I actually use the series feature for work a lot. I'm a library assistant at a small public library and do both circulation and reference work, and quite often, patrons will come in and tell me that they're lost, because they didn't realize the book they were reading belongs to a series. The fastest way for me to find out where they should start sometimes is to check the series on LT. Amazon is too inconsistent with the information, so it's a lot easier for me to make LT my one-stop-shop (our in-house catalog/cataloging program leaves quite a lot to be desired, I have to admit).
As far as my own personal use goes, I do use it sometimes to make sure a book I'm interested in reading or purchasing doesn't fall into the middle of a series. Because there is very little that is more annoying than starting a book, hating the fact that the author seems to be leaving out pertinent details, only to find that said pertinent details are in other books in the series.
And I have to say, it is pretty fun to go to the series coverage page in my statistics section and see all the different series I've somehow managed to come across even without being a "series" reader.