This or That – 06/02/2017

This or That is a meme hosted by Rae at Bookmark Chronicles.

This weeks scenario…

When reading a series are you more likely to read each book upon release or wait until the entire series is complete?

*”It depends” is not an option*

For the sake of this question I’m going to say I read each book in a series upon release because that’s generally what I do, and I’m not allowed to say it depends.

However for the sake of a longer post (and the full truth) I do have to argue it does depend!

Firstly for me it depends on what you consider a series. Is it something with a definite end point right from the moment the first book is published, Harry Potter was always planned to be a series of seven books, His Dark Materials was meant to be a trilogy, or is it just anything with a common set of characters running through even if any overarching storyline is limited. For example I read a lot of crime fiction, and crime fiction in general has an awful lot of books that would fall into the second definition of a series. Things like Ian Rankin’s Rebus and James Oswald’s McLean books have character development throughout I’d be the first to admit, but the focus of each book is very much on solving the case of the moment, but there’s no end goal, no final battle to aim for and the writers will keep writing them potentially indefinitely, which certainly doesn’t bother me, but would make it very hard for me to not start reading until they were all released!

Then it would depend on do I know it’s a series – I have a habit of stumbling into books without knowing it’s necessarily part of a series. Recently I read The Edge of Everything by Jeff Giles (which I loved by the way) but it wasn’t clear from the blurb online that it was designed to be the first in the series. Now I’ve read the first one I’m far too impatient to wait until the full series was published, I’ll be reading the second as soon as it’s released.

I suppose leading on from this is how long is the series is, if I know before I pick up the first book it’s only designed to be a trilogy, and the second one is about to be released I might hold off knowing that the third isn’t too far away. A long series though, again I don’t think I’d have the patience to wait, my teacher read the first Harry Potter to us in class when I was ten, Deathly Hallows came out when I was 20, there’s no way I could have waited ten years for them all to be released, they were lucky to make it 48 hours after release date without me finishing them.

That said I do love a good binge read so if I discover a completed series that I’ve not read I’m in heaven, I swiftly made my way through Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials when I discovered it, quickly followed by his Sally Lockhart series.

What are your thoughts? Do you wait until a series is complete before you start to read? Are you like me and too impatient to wait? What are your must read series? Let me know below!