That happened to me many times: my elder brother would start reading a series as library books and he would purchase one of the later books in the series which I would then read. For instance, I started reading Piers Anthony’s “Incarnations of Immortality” series starting with “With a Tangled Skein”, number 3 in the series, because we had a copy in our house. Likewise, we had some Elric of Melnibone books but I don’t think we bought the first one until later.
I buy my books second hand so I read 'em as I find 'em. I’m partial to mysteries and I guess I’ve read all the series out of order. I read Harry Potter out of order too, although I have since gone through them in order a couple of times.
Did you know there was at least one major series that started out of order? The Whiteoaks of Jalna series, written by Mazo de la Roche, followed a Canadian family from 1850 to 1950. She started writing them in the Twenties and the first book, titled Whiteoaks, ended up number five in the series out of sixteen in all. I loved those books and the 1972 CBC miniseries.
I read a book called Speaker for the Dead, which was very well written, to the point that it really stood on its own. The book that came before I read some time later, just for the detail, because Speaker outlined it pretty adequately. Then the subsequent book showed up in Analog or somesuch, and it just sagged a bit, so I lost interest in the other parts of the series. They just seemed pasted on.
Most notably, though, was reading The Magician’s Nephew as the first book in the series: though it is usually called book 6, it comes first in the timeline, and one does not lose much from reading it first. I may have actually read Voyage of the Dawn Treader first, or, if not, at least heard it read on the local NPR station, before I got the box set for my birthday.
I did this with Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn series.
Heck, you can pretty much read the chapters of those out of order. They were pretty obviously loosely-connected serialized stories stapled together into something that could be called a novel, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the first and last chapters were written last, to provide a framing story.
That said, though, since adulthood, I’ve never been able to bring myself to read a series out of publication order, no matter how many people tell me that it can or even should be done with a particular series. If a series doesn’t get good until the third book, then tell me that, and I’ll slog through the first two so I can enjoy the third one “properly”.
The only series I’ve ever read out of order were kids’ books, like Danny Dunn (my favorites as a kid), or Encyclopedia Brown. And even there, it was occasionally jarring: Like, Encyclopedia’s always known Sally, but here he is meeting her for the first time.
I do this fairly often and almost always enjoy the process of filling in the gaps in the backstory as I read books that are older than the one I started with. The first Dresden live I read was White Night, for instance, and as I read the older books, stuff from White Night that referred to past events in an offhand way took on new meaning and significance. I have read Discworld books as I come across them and I read the Culture novels the same way. I don’t need my narrative to be strictly linear.
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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.)
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I did the exact same thing with that series.
I also did it with Honor Harrington. Don’t remember anymore which one I started with there.
I generally start books at the beginning of a series. With one series, that wasn’t possible for most fans until recently. Ralph Milne Farley*'s 1920s John Carter-esqueRadio Man series had its second and third entries reprinted by Ace books in the 1960s and 1970s – ** The Radio Beasts** and The Radio Planet. For some bizarre reason, although they had printed the first volume – The Radio Man – in the 1950s, it remained pretty much unavailable to the general public. You’d need a science fiction library with the original magazine versions or the obscure 1950s paperback edition. It wasn’t reprinted again until 2005. You can get it now on Project Gutenberg or as a e-book, but that did no good until the past couple of years.
In fact, there were several other stories in the series that weren’t reprinted since their pulp days until after 2009.
*His real name was Roger Sherman Hoar, and he wisely used the pseudonym. He was a state senator and later assistant Attorney General for Massachusetts
I asked for recommendations before I started Discworld. "Mort"was recommended but wasn’t on the shelf so I bought “Reaper Man” instead. I also got “Colour of Magic” and “Guards! Guards!” then too.
Yep, done that plenty of times.
Read The White Dragon first, then as many stories set on Pern as I could find. The Hardy Boys series (don’t remember which book I read first, that was too many summers ago). Got into the Honorverse with Crown of Slaves, and haven’t read a single story in order, though I have read several of them from the various series within that world. Read Piers Anthony’s Isle of View as my introduction to Xanth, and oh jeez now I don’t remember which of the Adept series I read first, I think it was either Phaze Doubt or Out of Phaze. Erm, does Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality count as a series rather than a collection? I read Wielding A Red Sword first. The last one that comes to mind right away is The Dresden Files, started with Fool Moon, and have read a few others, but haven’t completed the series yet. Oh and there was a trilogy, The Crystal Singer, I started with Crystal Line which was the second book.
Yeah, I read White Dragon, the Dragonquest, then Dragonflight (3-2-1), though I had read “Dragonsong” and “Dragonsinger” (1 and 2 of the other Pern series) before that (it was years before I read “Dragondrums” and I eventually read through to “All the Weyrs of Pern” as the later books came out).
I picked up James Lee Burke’s In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead cheap not knowing that it was part of a series, taken in by the title. Having loved it I then forced myself to find the preceding 5 books and read them in order.
guestchaz:
Absolutely it’s a series.
Yes. Ann McCaffrey’s Harper Hall trilogy. My middle school library only had the middle one. I had to wait until high school to make friends who were Pern enthusiasts, and could lend me the others.
It’s been my eternal regret that I read The Magicians Nephew before reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
The Magicians Nephew, which is more or less a flash-back as the penultimate book in the series, ties up some of the loose ends. That is, it’s full of spoilers.
And I prefer to start a series at the beginning anyway, on the basis that the first book was good enough to justify a sequal, which can’t always be said about later books.
Some mystery series, like Mick Herron’s Slough House series, have serious spoilers in later books about major characters that were killed in an earlier book. That’s a pretty short series so far. On the other hand, some like Nero Wolfe and a host of other series can be read in pretty much any order because each story stands alone and none of the stories has effects that need to be mentioned in later stories. That is, nothing much changes, no recurring character dies, the slate is tabula rasa at the beginning of each book.
I started Glen Cook’s Garret, P.I. Series with Cold Copper Tears and then had to go back and start at the beginning because it was clear there was earlier stuff referenced that I wanted the story behind.
The same holds true for John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee series.