Today’s Tuesday Thingers question from The Boston Bibliophile: Today’s question: Series. Do you collect any series? Do you read series books? Fantasy? Mystery? Science fiction? Religious? Other genre? Do you use the series feature in LT to help you find new books or figure out what you might be missing from a series?
Yes! I have all of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout. Most are in paperback, but I have been slowly but surely acquiring the old hardcovers. Archie Goodwin was one of my first literary crushes, although eventually I fell hard for Saul Panzer. I also have nearly all of the Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker. (Remember the old tv show “Spenser: For Hire”? Based on the books. Spenser is much better in print, but now, when I read the books I hear Avery Brooks’ voice whenever Hawk speaks.) I don’t think the recent novels have been as good as the older works, so I haven’t been buying them lately. And now, as I’ve posted before, I have gotten hooked on Robert Crais and his detective Elvis Cole. Elvis and his sidekick, Joe Pike, are great fun to read.
I’ve also been acquiring the Dresden novels by Jim Butcher. I understand that some of these are being re-released in hardcover, so I may hold off and buy them in hardcover. (My love of hardcovers is well-documented.) I have Tanya Huff’s Blood Ties novels with Henry Fitzroy, one of the most interesting vampires I’ve come across. I’ve also got the Dexter novels by Jeff Lindsay (three so far, maybe more on the way) and I’ve got the first 2 books in the Captain Alatriste series by Arturo Perez-Reverte, but I’m not sure when the rest are being translated into English.
If trilogies count as series, then I also can count The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein and The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. I don’t think I’ve ever used any of the LT features to track the series, but I do belong to the Nero Wolfe message baord.
When I started this post, I didn’t think I had a lot of series – what a great question, when it makes me discover something new about my own library!