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

[hafren]

I don't really get the concept of spoilers. For me, if I find things out in non-chronological order it just changes the interesting question - not "what happens next?" but "what brought that about?". The Colour of Magic is definitely not the place to start with Discworld because it's nowhere near as good as some of the later ones.

With the David Wishart Corvinus books, I did start at the beginning and since they follow Roman politics thre is some sense in that. I don't think it would have absolutely ruined things if I hadn't, though.

[callunav]

For me, it matters. Well, it matters oddly: Given my druthers, I'll read anything that's really a series scrupulously in order. It's partly that I truly do dislike spoilers, and it's partly that, although I can piece it all together eventually, I don't emerge with a strong sense of the greater story's arc. Since big arcs are things I love, this matters to me.

It also matters to me which order I read (or recommend to others) sets of books which are loosely joined by a chronology, but not really a series. I'd put the Miles Vorkosigan books in this category, as well as Sayers (possibly minus the 4 Harriet Vane books, which are more like a series within a set). In that case, I think of it more in terms of how I recommend it to other people: I want to give them a strong example to start with, but not the very best, and preferably get the weakest in before the last one, so that the sensation of reading them ends well. The Sayers novel I read last was Five Red Herrings, which was a disappointment to me. For me, I think an ideal

[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

[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.

[cliosfolly]

I read Karen Traviss' Matriarch first of all a few months back, without realizing that I'd gotten hold of the third or fourth book in a series. I also read Bujold's Memory first of all the Vorkosigan books. Both places worked well for me.

When reading Traviss, I loved all the hints at backstory--I kept thinking it was fascinating to have so much history hinted at but not told. And then I found out it was not the standalone book I thought it was. I then got and read the other books in order, and enjoyed seeing how my interpretations of the backstory hints were correct or not; and then I got to re-read Matriarch with all this new info to hand, offering another interpretation of the story than my first read had provided.

This isn't my preferred reading method, but it works; it's just a different kind of engagement with the story--a more active reading, for me, in some ways, as I try to assemble a puzzle around the piece of a specific book, rather than anticipating a single progression of unfolding events.

[ankaret]

I yearned in the same way for Falconer's Lure - I used to have recurring dreams in which I owned and read it - with the result, when I got it, that I was always very faintly disappointed in the childish figures in the illustrations and by the bits that weren't how I expected, and it took me a long while to see it on its own merits.

I don't mind that much about reading things out of order. I will quite often skip ahead and look at the last chapter of a book if I'm, for example, desperately worried that a beloved character won't make it. Paradoxically, though, it really annoys me when back-cover blurbs lazily give away major plot points that the author obviously meant to keep a mystery.