Have you ever done this, and then gone on to read the rest of the series? I have. When I was a kid, I read The Grey King in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series first, because my school library didn’t have any of the preceding books. (My guess is the librarian bought it because it won the Newbery Award that year.)
As a teenager, I read Dragon on a Pedestal, one of Piers Anthony’s Xanth books, first because I liked the cover. Only then did I go back and start with A Spell for Chameleon.
As an adult, my husband suggested I read Borders of Infinity, a group of novellas (including the title one) by Lois McMaster Bujold in her Vorkosigan series, before reading Shards of Honor and the rest of them.
Now, while there were obviously spoilers for earlier works, that didn’t seem to bother me, or lessen my enjoyment of these series. In fact, if I’d started with Over Sea, Under Stone (Dark is Rising’s first book) or Shards of Honor, I probably wouldn’t have gone on to finish those series, because I didn’t much like either book.
Generally I do this with mysteries: Jane Haddam’s Demarkian series, Joan Hess’s Claire Malloy and Mallory series, Sue Grafton’s alphabet mysteries, etc. But those are stand-alone novels in and of themselves. I did to that with Bujold’s Vorkosigan series and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (I started with Hogfather which I still love.) Usually anymore though, I check the internet to see where a series starts before I dive in, just so I don’t have to backtrack.
I started the Discworld series in the middle (with Hogfather), and I’m still not completely caught up with all of them. Due to some bad luck, I read “The Light Fantastic” but I still haven’t read “The Color of Magic” yet (I much prefer the Ankh-Morpork subseries).
This is one of the reasons I VERY much prefer loosely-structured series over the kind where it’s really one story, broken into episodes.
Jack Vance’s “Demon Prince” novels can be read pretty much in any order. His “Tschai” series is more order-dependent. Leiber’s “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” stories, beyond the first three (in internal chronological order) don’t much matter as to sequence, but those first three are best read first.
Forester’s “Horatio Hornblower” stories weren’t even written in internal chronological order; the author wrote them hodge-podge, so it’s perfectly okay to read them that way. Cornwell’s “Richard Sharpe” novels were written as a series…but he went back and wrote a prequel series.
The Sherlock Holmes stories were written totally hodge-podge, and, in fact, one of the fun games you can play with them is to try to re-assemble them into proper order.
Some series are dependent on your reading them in order. Others you don’t need to. A third category would be the books where each is a story sufficient unto itself but which also serves a bigger narrative.
The only time I can remember doing this with a series that had a definite beginning-middle-end was when I read The Castle of Llyr, the third book (of five) of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, before the others.
But there were quite a few series when I was a kid, and a few though not as many when I was a grown up, that could be read in random order, that I read in whatever order I happened to get my hands on them (Hardy Boys, Three Investigators, Oz, Freddy the Pig, Travis McGee, Nero Wolfe…).
I did this pretty frequently as a little kid, with mixed results. For instance, I think I read a bunch of Xanth books in more or less random order.
More recently, I read Thackeray’s “The Newcomes” before “The History of Pendennis” and I read “The Virginians” before “The History of Henry Esmond” (which I would really not recommend!).
The only Harry Potter I’ve read is the third one. Have seen the movies though. Maybe doesn’t quite apply?
Vance’s Cugel stories are only 2, but don’t really need to know about the first one before. You learn quickly that he’s a heroic asshole.
The fourth is the most stand alone IIRC. Most people know of the series from the Black Cauldron movie (or game), which takes the name from the second but is based a lot on the first one, too.
E-DUB writes:“Some series are dependent on your reading them in order. Others you don’t need to. A third category would be the books where each is a story sufficient unto itself but which also serves a bigger narrative.”
My impression would be that the majority of fiction series are such that – even with those that quite definitely run chronologically – the individual books can function as, and be read as, stand-alones; albeit with the “spoilers for earlier works” factor which Dendarii Dame mentions. It would appear to me that those series which are dependent on reading in order, are relatively a minority.
I seem usually to begin at the beginning, with a series; but like Dendarii Dame, I didn’t do so with Bujold’s Vorkosigan books – though in my case, that was by pure chance. I happened in the library, to come across Diplomatic Immunity in that series: read and enjoyed it – found it no problem to pick up from that book, the general idea of what Barrayar and the Vor were all about. While liking DI, and feeling that this scene had possibilities, it didn’t make me an instant convert; I have a way of often being rather slow to get “into” a series of books. A couple of years later, I got round to trying this part of Bujold’s works again, this time starting with Shards of Honor, to work through the Vorkosigan material anyway, in proper order or approximately so – this time, I was hooked more or less from the start.
(My “slowness of getting-into” tendency: an instance of that, though not involving series-starting out of order –- I first discovered Tolkien aged fourteen, by chancing on the first volume of LOTR, The Fellowship of the Ring, at the library. I found it strange and intriguing, and read it avidly for its duration; but it can’t have struck me as that wonderful a deal – notwithstanding the extremely cliff-hanging point at which FOTR ends, I wasn’t moved to seek the further books in the epic. I gave no further thought to Tolkien, until I was eighteen, when – prompted by the enthusiasm for LOTR, of many of my fellow-students – I started the first book again, was captivated at once, read all LOTR effectively non-stop – plus The Hobbit shortly after – and have been a fan ever since.)
Concerning The Dark is Rising: I indeed tried the first book of the series and found it totally off-putting – to the point that I managed only the initial few pages. I’m hard to please, maybe: my strong reaction was that it seemed utterly “twee and precious” – it was blatantly obvious from the very first, who the quirky elderly relative was going to turn out to be; and “who the hell cares anyway?” I do not see ever trying this series again. (Just my personal response to it: kudos and best wishes to those who do enjoy it.)
I too started with a latter Vorkosigan book, and my first Discworld was Lords and Ladies. But Discworld barely counts as a series, at least not the first dozen or so books.
On the other hand my second Tolkien, after the Hobbit, was Two Towers, which for some reason was alone on my high school library shelf. I thought it started a bit abruptly, but didn’t truly catch on until it ended without finishing the biggest narrative threads …
It was somewhat rough when the first Honor Harrington book I read was Honor Among Enemies - things made much more sense when I started that series from the beginning (for one thing, it became clear why Hauptman hated her).
I read them in some weird order. I know I started with 4 (Goblet of Fire), then I went back and read them something like 4-2-3-1-5-6, or possibly 4-3-1-2-5-6. It just so happened that Goblet of Fire was the first one I got my hands on, and then I just read the others ones as they got passed into my hands through friends. Never got around to reading the last installment, though.
Talbot Mundy (a sort of low-cal Americanized Kipling) did this with his Middle-East and Indian adventure novels. You actually can trace the bigger story through each of the separate novels…but you don’t need to.
In one particularly cute bit, a guy says to his buds, at the end of one novel, “You go ahead; I’ve got something to attend to.” In the next novel, he has a solo adventure. In the third novel, he meets his friends at the train station, with an easygoing, “Sorry I took so long.”
You could easily read the first and third, and have missed nothing whatever.
As far as supposed-to-be-read-in-order books go, the first N. K. Jemisin book I read was The Broken Kingdoms. I think I got it to read on an airplane. So I’m reading it, and it feels a bit like I’m missing something, and it turns out it was book 2 of her Inheritance Trilogy.
My brother is not on the whole a liker of sci-fi / fantasy; but he made something of an exception (with my having enthused about them to him) for Harry Turtledove’s “Worldwar / Colonisation” sequential series – reptilian aliens from a distant planet attempt in 1942 to invade and conquer Earth, and what proceeds therefrom. After the “Worldwar” first four books – the initial struggle 1942 – 44, ending in an armistice; there is the “Colonisation” trilogy – set in the 1960s, with rule of the planet divided between humans and “Lizards”, in an uneasy truce / balance-of-terror, mostly, situation. (Quite a number of readers rate this trilogy poorly, as seemingly weak and lame and “phoned-in” – but I thoroughly liked it.)
My brother read, and claimed to enjoy, the three “Colonisation” books; but it subsequently emerged that he had actually read them in “2-1-3” order. It maybe suggests sub-optimal quality re the trilogy, that he read its first two books in the wrong order without being aware of anything amiss, until told by a third party about his mistake. Turtledove’s IMO vague and perfunctory title-ing in the trilogy, admittedly did not help here: his calling the FIRST therein, Second Contact; and the second, Down To Earth; could be seen as asking for trouble in this respect.
As a teen the first Dragonlance book I ever read was Time of the Twins which was the first book in the second Trilogy. Even not knowing anything about the first trilogy I loved it. My friend who had loaned it to me only had the third book in the Twins trilogy so that was what I read next (while he didn’t own the middle book he had read it so he gave me a summary of the middle book; I learned later after reading it it myself it was a pretty poor summary).
I did eventually read the books I missed but it’s possible my reading order skewed my opinion. I never liked the first Dragonlance trilogy as much as the second and felt its conclusion was really anti climatic.
I once knew a woman who read all of the ***Poldark ***books in reverse order. Back, then, of course, there were only six instead of twelve, but what I still found weird was that she was simultaneously watching the series on PBS in the correct order.
Don’t know if I could do that. I think I’d lose interest watching something that for me had already happened.
I started reading Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series with “B” is for Burglar, and I’m glad I did, because I enjoy the series immensely, but “A” is for Alibi is very possibly my least favorite, and I might have given the series a pass if that were my first exposure to it.
I walk into the middle of a series once a week, because I’m cheap.
I listen to a couple of audiobooks a week. But they’re 3-5x the price of their used book counterparts, I check them out online (Overdrive) from my local library. So I’ll reserve a number of books in a series and whichever book comes up as available first, that’s where I start.
I seem to have the ability to come in mid-series and just roll with the parts i don’t understand… “Hmmm, wonder what the spaghetti incident is. Oh, well, maybe i’ll find out the next time one of these books comes up.”
Same with comics. I haunt the budget bins (shout out to the 50 cent boxes at Graham Crackers!). This means I might pick up a “Death of Superman” comic, a DC Rebirth “New Superman”, a John Byrne reboot where there’s no Superboy, a Superboy & the Legion, a Silver Age with a giant Jimmy Olsen, and one from Supe’s “Electric Blue” phase (never mind, I’d put that one back).