October Daye / Inheritance - Essay Series Part Five: Long Series and How to Read Them

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This is the fifth and final entry in a five-part essay series discussing two long-running book series by queer authors: October Daye by Seanan McGuire, and Inheritance by A.K. Faulkner. I chose these series because I love them both, they were intended from the start to be long series, neither of them are finished yet, and the authors have different structural approaches to developing each series across so many volumes. Purely coincidentally, they are both long-running contemporary fantasy series mainly set in California in or near the 2010's, with major characters named Quentin, and whose fast-healing protagonists have a tendency to quasi-adopt a gaggle of magical teenagers. After a brief moment in the 1990's, October Daye begins in earnest in 2009 and has reached 2015 as of the eighteenth book, while Inheritance is ambiguously set in the mid-to-late 2010's. Each of my essays focuses on a particular topic of importance to long series such as these two. They're designed to be intelligible on their own, and can theoretically be read in any order, but most readers will have the best experience if they start with the first essay and proceed linearly.

Long Series and How to Read Them - Somewhere Is Better Than Nowhere

Introduction

I love reading long series. I’m an avid reader, and I particularly love re-reading books. I also have difficulty remembering character names. I recognize them on the page within a single book, and for audiobooks I recognize them as a chunk of sound that I connect to a particular character, but if I’m trying to talk to anyone else about the books, I often confuse the names or am completely unable to recall them. Re-reading and reading long series (or my favorite, re-reading a long series) are part of how I mitigate this persistent gap in my memory so I can enjoy books. 

Spending a very long time with a particular group of characters, through whichever method, helps me to track their early appearances before they become distinct in my mind. By combining this with a new appreciation of them from a reviewer’s perspective, I've started caring more and more about the craft that goes into the structure of a long-running series. I've developed what I refer to as my “sequel check” for looking at individual books to think about how they work, both for longtime readers and people new to a series. Someone’s first encounter with a series or with an author might be to pick up a mid-series book with no prior information about them other than that perhaps this is a genre which that particular reader enjoys. Because my book reviews are also episodic in the sense that any one of them could be the first review of mine someone reads, I try to review books with as few spoilers as possible. I attempt to give new readers and old an idea of where the books I'm reviewing fit into their respective series if they have one.

[For more details on what goes into my sequel checks, check out my previous essay on the topic.] 

I generally advocate for starting a series at the beginning, but that's because I'm the kind of reader who is very sensitive to spoilers. With a long-running series, sometimes an interdiction to read from the beginning or not at all will mean that a reader who might have loved the series is dissuaded from even trying because they don't feel like they're allowed to read the most recent book and see if they like where it's going. This kind of reader then will have to deal with whatever spoilers they gleaned. Many authors know that sometimes people aren't going to start at the beginning. They have a few choices when accounting for this reality: make the series fully episodic, double down on linear storytelling, or provide new entry points throughout the series.

Episodic Series

If the author chooses to make the series episodic so that any book is an equally promising entry point (e.g. The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo, Redwall by Brian Jacques, Goosebumps by R.L. Stine), then there are further questions about how to handle continuity. 

R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series has limited continuity and only occasionally contains a book that functions as a sequel to some earlier volume. This means that the whole series can be read in basically any order without noticeable loss of continuity… but also that (with rare exception) there wasn’t any continuity to lose. 

The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo has slightly more continuity, but in a very flexible manner. It is purposefully constructed so that all the stories will make sense when read in any order, but doing so changes what information feels new and which characters are long-missed friends or just people mentioned in passing who take a while to appear. The series seems to happen to the characters roughly in the order in which they are published, but it would not disturb someone’s reading experience to read them in a different order. The sense of progression would be slightly altered, but not in an immersion-breaking way.

The Redwall series by Brian Jacques contains clusters of continuity, with a publishing order and an internal chronology which are so disconnected from any ideal reading experience that it’s difficult to know where to start, even when re-reading the series. Somehow it contains the best and worst parts of strict chronology and episodic entries, but in a way that balances out until any book is probably good enough, as long as you start somewhere (and then keep reading).

Linear Storytelling

Stories which double down on linear storytelling with little room to onboard new readers are many and varied in other respects, and in the best cases they tend to be short series. Duologies and trilogies are generally prone to this, as it’s not unreasonable to expect readers to begin at the start of a two-to-three book series. A few excellent trilogies which are especially reliant on the first two books to make sense of the finale include: The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty; The Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee; and Arc of a Scythe by Neal Shusterman. 

Periodic Onboarding

This leaves the final option for long series, and the style which prompted me to write these essays in the first place: A generally linear story with periodic onboarding points for new readers in a way which is friendlier to readers joining the series midway and continuing to follow it as things develop. Ideally, this kind of series will provide entry points of a kind, some more obvious than others, where every three to five books, a new reader could pick up the latest release and have a good time even if they don't understand all of the background to what's happening now. It is not, strictly speaking, a necessity, but it is a kindness to the audience and a very savvy choice for the author when structuring long series. In part two of this essay series, I discussed in detail how AK Faulkner handles this in Inheritance, and how Seanan McGuire handles this in October Daye. The short version is that Inheritance is organized into five seasons of five books each, with a planned total of twenty-five books. October Daye is less rigidly structured, but tends to have a suitable entry point every three to five books.

What's a Reader To Do?

Returning to the premise that I write from the perspective of a reader, first and foremost, it is not reasonable to expect readers to intuit the best way to engage with a new series, because unfortunately, it requires a certain familiarity with the series to know how friendly it will be to new readers, something you can only know by having read it.

I have at some length earlier in this essay series given guidance on the various entry points for new readers to Inheritance and October Daye, partly because these series do such a good job of structurally accommodating people who are new to the series without alienating legacy readers. Because I am a reviewer who is very concerned with the structure of long series, when I review sequels one thing I comment on specifically is whether the particular book I'm reviewing would be a suitable starting point for someone attempting to join the series midway, but I'm just one reader and I can't do that for every book. Instead I'd like to leave you with a heuristic for gauging whether an unfamiliar series can be joined partway, even when you don't know much about it already.

Some of this is much easier to gauge when a series is complete. So I'll begin with my advice there, and then move on to series which are ongoing and unfinished.

Five or Fewer

If a series is complete, and contains five or fewer books, then my best advice is to go back to the beginning of the series and read from the start. While this is many people's unnuanced advice, I do have particular reasons for it for a series that is this short. If you think that a five-book series is actually quite long, let me assure you first that it's not, and that this might mean you are not someone who enjoys truly long series, which is perfectly fine. The reason to always start from the beginning if there are 5 or fewer books, is that if you join such a series midway there isn't some place far back enough in the series where you are likely to feel as though you are encountering the characters at a previous stage of the narrative, so much as you are just reading something out of order in a way that will make your overall experience worse. 

I would insist on this for duologies and trilogies in particular. For duologies, the second book is almost always the latter half of a story begun elsewhere. If the duology in question happens to be one that was carefully constructed to be readable in either order, then this advice to start from the beginning will do you no harm because the series accommodates it anyway, while the reverse does not hold. 

Trilogies likewise are best read from the beginning because while there are a few main configurations for how they could be constructed, many but not all trilogies began as a story intended to take place across two books, and then one of the volumes turned out to be so large that it was split in half. This is obviously not true of every trilogy, but it happens often enough that it is fairly common for the middle book of a trilogy to feel either like the second half of book one or the first half of book three. Reading the trilogy from the beginning ensures that either way, you'll experience the full story in an order that makes sense.

Quartets start to be long enough that if you know a little bit about the series you might be able to find a good midpoint, but I would only advise this in cases where you know enough about the quartet to know that you don't intend to read either the earlier or later books. Once the books that you do not intend to read in the quartet are identified, then this can be treated as either a duology or a trilogy depending on how many you're skipping. Again, this requires a certain degree of familiarity with the quartet, but if the series is popular enough to have a fan-wiki then you might be able to get a sense of this beforehand.

Quintets exist in an odd spot for me because they aren't nearly as common of a series length, at least not in Western literature, which is most of what I read. A quintet is the longest series where I would feel comfortable recommending that it should be read from the beginning for a good experience, but also where I wouldn't continue to insist if someone were determined to start partway through and hope for the best.

Six or More

Once a series has six books, it could have any combination of possible starting points, but the good news is that a series which has made it to book 6, whether or not it is complete, is more likely to also have a wiki or a fan page or some kind of information giving guidance on good places to enter the series. For finished series of this length, check a fan wiki to see if there are any books to avoid or any which are a good test (i.e. if you like this particular book then it's worth reading the whole series). My general advice for series that have six or more books and are not yet complete is to try the most recently released book, or at least read the first few chapters, then decide whether to try reading it from some earlier point. There are a few reasons for this:

Trying the first few chapters of the most recent book will help give a sense of how this author has approached onboarding new readers. You won't yet be familiar with the character names and implications of new events based on happenings earlier in the series, which means that while you will technically encounter spoilers, they will lack most of the context which makes them informative or disruptive to your enjoyment of the series. If you like the author's style, then you can check a fan wiki to see if it's generally recommended that the first few books be avoided, or if the series as a whole is thought to be consistent with the most recent books. Sometimes authors have a very steep learning curve from the early books in a series to the later ones, especially if that series was their debut as a published author.

No one wants to be told to just keep pushing through a miserable couple of books because "it gets really good in book four". While that might be true, it helps to have one's own sense of what they are aiming for. It's especially frustrating to get to that promised fourth or fifth book and discover that while the series has hit its stride, even this polished edition is not something you enjoy. Trying just a little of the most recent book can help with that assessment, without the time sink of slogging through several volumes just to get to the good bit. 

Once you have tried enough of the most recent book to have an idea whether you want to read the whole series (or some significant portion of it), my advice is to put that book down and go find the earlier volumes. The end of the most recent book probably won't make sense without context you're missing, and if you actually read the whole thing before going back to read the others in order, you will have spoilers which will likely disrupt your experience of the earlier books. 

Conclusion

Starting somewhere, even if it's not the "correct" place, is generally better than never trying a series at all. If you need a random person on the internet to give you permission to try a series midway through, you may have it! Just know that you'll probably be missing some context, and this is NOT permission to bother the author about it if you're confused. Conversely, if someone is insisting that the only way to enjoy a particular series is to go back to the very beginning and then suffer through several volumes until it gets good... then it's completely up to you as to whether you're likely to enjoy the series with that method. This is to say, the important thing is to read.