Booklr Questions – Do you prefer stand alone books or series?
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Do you prefer stand alone books or series?
I love a good series, but I know from experience how heart-rending it can be to wait for the next book to come out – thanks Dark Tower Series – which is why I try not to read a series until the entire thing comes out.
I did this with Harry Potter – both the books and the movies. Of course, I have been know the pick up a novel and not realize that it’s part of a series. Then I read it, and it’s good – but it’s not over. What happens next?! It’s the bane of a reader’s existence. You don’t want to series to end, but at the same time, the waiting for the next one might as well be the Cruciatus Curse.
How do you feel about reading books in a series?
There are series and series. I do. NOT. like series behemoths that don’t make sense unless you’ve read them all, in order! If the author can write basically stand-alone books with the same parameters, then that’s fine. You know–same characters, same basic places, but different stories. That’s the way it used to be done, but these days there are far too many series that don’t work unless you’ve read all of them in the right order. Case in point, the Flavia de Luce novels. They’re pretty weak anyway (a common problem with the read-in-order-or-be-lost series), but if you tried to read them out of sequence it would just be ???
I had a similar problem earlier this year when I picked up a copy of The Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri at my local Goodwill. The book looked interesting, in the way procedural mysteries do, so I wanted to give it a try. I didn’t realize until after I got into it that it was the 3rd in a series. The book was still enjoyable, but there were some overarching plot points that got me lost in places.
What a shame US TV never runs foreign series. The Montalbano TV series is much better than the books–great actors. The actor who plays the title role (Luca Zingaretti) was first famous for playing Mussolini!
In general, the only foreign series we get on TV come via England on BBC America, or on PBS during Masterpiece. We also get Mexican TV via Telemundo and similar channels, but not much else. I have watched several foreign tv shows via Hulu – usually Korean dramas, but also some from Sweden and Australia.