Stuff to do while waiting for one of those slow writers to finish a series
It should be illegal for writers to take more than a year to bring out a trilogy, right? Or three years for a seven-book series, say, because we wouldn’t want to rush them.
Right?
Anyway, here’s a post from Book Riot about how to kill time while waiting and waiting and waiting for the next book in your favorite series.
My favorite suggestion is when Susie Rodarme says, Create puppets for every character in the books and put on a puppet show for friends who haven’t read the series. It’s definitely okay if you lure them to you with the pretense of “going out for dinner” or “I need to go to the hospital, can you drive me?”
Yep, pretty sure this one never occurred to me. I am not really an arts-and-crafts sort of person, so, yeah, no puppets. Anyway, fun list.
My actual solution: don’t start the series until it’s finished. This never actually works, especially since publishers don’t warn you when a book is the first one in a new series. So my REAL actual solution: don’t read the second book until the series is finished. I’m a lot more successful at that strategy. Then when the series is out, start over and re-read the first book and then go on.
The plus to reading the first book, then buying the others as they come out, then starting at the front and reading the whole thing is: the author needs you to buy the books as you come out, but you need to be fairly sure you will like the books. So, read the first one and then wait to read the rest. Not a perfect solution, but it works fairly well for me.
The minus: the number of series that I haven’t got around to reading even though they’re complete and I have all the books on my shelves/on my Kindle right now: more than one. Or two. The Raven Boys series is going to be another like that, I expect, when the last book hits the shelves this fall. Hey, if it turns out to be a five-book series instead of four, someone warn me, okay?
How about you all? Do you have a preferred way to handle series? Read ‘em all as they come out, avoid series completely, what?
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Estara, that's why I often buy second or third books as they come out but don't read them until the series is finished.I've read a couple of JD Robb's, but I must say, I wouldn't really want to start at the beginning and plow through the whole series.
I've gone on for a startlingly long time with a series after I really quit liking it . . . but I'm not sure that will ever happen again. Life's too short, and I DNF a LOT more than I used to.
Rachel wrote: " Life's too short, and I DNF a LOT more than I used to."Ditto! I could not handle the policy of buying a few series books and not reading them, how would I know if I enjoy the series enough to continue? Heh.
I have found that a lot of my comfort rereads these days are series books. Hmm.
I'm not surprised about the comfort reads being series books. Nothing's easier to slip into than a new book in a familiar world, and depending on the series you can be all but certain that your favorite characters aren't going to die. Plus you wouldn't have gone on with the series if you didn't enjoy it. For me, that's a formula for comfort reads.
So we have Foreigner at 16 books and Michelle Sagara with her Elantra Chronicles at 9 or 10 with no end in sight or Eileen Wilks and her World of the Lupi (or Mercy Thompson or Alpha&Omega, etc.), as they are chunk novels (according to Jo Walton's definition at Tor.com), accompanying the protagonists through major shifts in their story. I love those in particular, although of course they are a huge investment for people who want start at the start (but then again, if they don't like the first few they can drop them) - just consider J.D. Robb's In-Death series.
Some series I just lose interest in or don't like the direction and then I stop ^^