What series of books is the longest you’ve read? I count as a series books that have either a continuing story line or continuing characters and all told by the same author or author(s). So, no Hardy Boys or Dune.
I think mine would be the Hercule Poirot books by Agatha Christie. Wiki says there were 33 of them. Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 Inspector Roderick Alleyn mysteries, so that’s a close second (though it’s possible I haven’t read all of them. I’ve definitely read all the Poirots).
Well, I haven’t finished yet, but Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series is 20-21 books (there’s an unfinished manuscript of the last). I’m almost done with the eighth.
Well, I read a bunch of Doc Savage, The Destroyer, and The Executioner…long series, but I think there may have been multiple authors involved with each one.
Maybe a series of westerns…forget the name of the series, but the lead character was a good guy gunfighter called Dusty Fog…
Well, I haven’t read near all of them, but Balzac’s Human Comedy series was originally supposed to have like 100 entries, he didn’t finish them all but there were quite a few finished (not all of them are novels, some are short stories, but still, its quite a big undertaking).
I’ve got most of the first 100 Perry Rhodans. Haven’t read them all yet. I have about 70 Doc Savages, including one of the magazines. I have read all 22 or so Tarzan books. I’ve read a bunch of the Alan Burt Akers Dray Prescott books - probably 20 or so, and I have a few more. I’ve got 23 Avenger books - another '30s series.
I think Lester Dent wrote pretty much all the Doc Savages, but I’d have to check. I don’t know if he wrote the Avengers also, but Ron Goulart wrote the more recent revival.
Oh, and I’ve read my daughter 35 Nancy Drews and 10 Nancy Drew/Hardy boys. I think I read about 40 Hardy Boys books when I was a kid.
Another series i started as a teenager, and am still pursuing, is Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which has produced 8 books so far, with 2 still to come.
I’ve read every Discworld novel so that would be the winner for me. Next runner up is the fourteen books in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series.
And then there are far too many incredibly bad series that I read when I was younger that I’d rather not admit to. I will say that repetitive, poorly written Tolkien knock offs and line fiction are well represented among them. Usually seven or eight books each.
Hmm, if you believe Isaac Asimov’s tie-ins from his Foundation, Galactic Empire, and Robot series there’s at least 20 books tied in there together and dozens more short stories. Aside from that there’s the “Shannara” series, which is about twenty. There are dozens of “star trek” novels, do they count as a series? What about Dragonlance? There has been a series of fifty-nine(so far) novels inspired by and telling the story behind the game Magic: the Gathering. They tie in together in several places. I think you’ll need to be more specific as to what constitutes a series. A single author or team of authors working on all the books? A single subject? How narrow a subject? Some of us are bibliovores.
Not counting comic books (I read Uncanny X-Men from issue 1 to somewhere in the low 300’s, for instance) and collections of comic strips (big BIG Peanuts fan all my life, so a few hundred there), there are a few series I read avidly when I was a kid/teen:
Robotech/Sentinels novelizations-- 21 novels in all.
Lillian Jackson Braun’s “The Cat Who…” series, up through 2000 or so, perhaps 20-22 novels.
Encyclopedia Brown series up through 1985, for 16 books.
Choose Your Own Adventure/Choose Your Own Adventure for Younger Readers up through 1985, around 60 in the main series, 20 in the younger-kid series. Not sure if these should count though, as I never read the entire book, but worked through a couple of paths in each.
As a teen/adult, the closest I’ve come to reading a series was reading all of Vonnegut’s works, which invariably have minor characters and locations in common. 14 novels, 1 play, 4 short story collections, and 5 essay collections.
Carole Nelson Douglas’s Midnight Louie series ranks up there–there will be 27 books when she’s done, and book 20 was recently published (and read by me).
All the Ngaio Marsh Roderick Alleyn mysteries - I’ll take your word that there were 32 of them! - is probably the most individual works. Like others, I’ve also gone through the complete Aubrey/Maturin and Brother Cadfeal series more than once.
In numbers of words I think the prize probably goes to the linked Lymond and House of Niccolo series (six books and eight books respectively) by Dorothy Dunnett. Only fourteen novels but each of them is probably the length of three Christie or Marsh whoduits!