Series. . .Blessings or Evil Incarnate?

[Cris]

How do you feel about series? Are you willing to take a chance on a series that hasn't been completed (yet)? Do you insist the series be finished before you open a book?

[Mark]

I've taken many a chance on series that haven't been completed. In some cases, you have to. Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series never really finished; he stopped writing them in 2003 without resolving a central conflict, then died in 2011. Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series has been ongoing since 1983. He's projected 19 books (one for each of 17 houses, plus Taltos, for Vlad himself, and The Last Contract, for when he goes to kill a god), and is producing one every few years or so (with some detours for other books, and other series set in the same world). The Halfblood Chronicles by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey was a stand-alone book... that became a series... that seems to have ended because Andre Norton died.

With longer series, reading the whole thing at a go can be really distracting, as well... you notice things that the author, writing years later, seems to have forgotten... bits of characterization, small details and the like... because you're bingeing on a work that took a marathon.

[Beverly]

If I had waited for Janet Evanovich to finish her Stephanie Plum series, I would probably never get a chance to read any of them, because there are now 26 in the series, soon to be 27; and the series started in 1994. So I read them as they are published. The same with every mystery series that I follow, I read them as they come out. If I read the first in a series and don't like it, I don't read any more in the series.

[Cris]

I'm waiting to read any further in Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series. I'll probably read it regardless of whether it's finished or not--but I want to know if I get a series ending before I get too deep.

[Rowan]

It's hard with YA, because so much of it is series, often a trilogy that then gets an inbetween book and then a prequel and...So I typically pick up a book if it looks interesting and go from there. In some cases, I'm very pleased to find out there will be more (like Gideon the Ninth), and in others I wish it were just a standalone (like I'm pretty sure Wilder Girls). I don't think I've ever consciously waited on a series to be finished before starting it, just been very late to a series that happens to be finished.

[Mark]

Worst parts about series? Accidentally starting in the middle. Picking up a fairly sequential series and finding, oops, you're smack dab in the middle of the story, missing a lot of characterization that was done in the earlier books, and having to deal with the plot-catch-up summaries that they shoe-horn in.

Of course, those can also be downsides to marathoning a series... "Ok, here's the few pages where we MIGHT introduce new information, but we're mostly going to be catching up the people who haven't read the series, or who read the first book three years ago."