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

[mrissa]

I like to give an author room to be building to something larger. It's not the spoilers for me, it's not the suspense, it's the weight of events. The classic example of plot vs. story ("The king died. The queen died of grief," or some such) is not a story I enjoy particularly much, because I don't know this king or this queen, so why should I care? Sometimes I can care in another sentence before or after that. Sometimes the weight of caring about a character or a place gets deeper with each bit of story I have.

Obviously, not every series is like this. I didn't care more about Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe more in book #20 than I had in book #5. They were the same. But there was a line of Ysabel that made me gasp, and it would not have made me gasp if I hadn't read the Fionavar Tapestry before it. And I wouldn't have had that gasp upon reading the Fionavar Tapestry, either. I might have achieved it on the second reading of Ysabel, the one after reading the Fionavar Tapestry, but I might not. And it wasn't suspenseful. It

[rysmiel]

I am pretty obsessive about things being in order, and in the order in which complexity grows, so that frex the Vlad Taltos books I always read in publication order, also the Dryco books despite everyone in the world including the author saying they are meant to go chronologically.

[sollersuk]

Yes, it does. I don't think I have ever fully recovered from reading Lord of the Rings in the order I - III - II in the 1960s.