Comment: Starting from the beginning

There is a dilema inherent in most genre fiction: Should I start at beginning?  Sometimes that choice is easier than others. Lord of the Rings comes in three parts, clearly numbered and in sequence. And once you’ve read them you’re done. A series like Terry Prattchet’s Discworld is more fluid though it helps to read about The Watch or the Witches or Death in sequence but you can read him in mostly any order you like as one book doesn’t, for the most part, depend on the events of the others. Then you have books which are sequels but not part of a trilogy or longer sequence, should you read those from the beginning? I guess the idea is that you find a book by an author you like and then go back and read to fill in the gaps.

So why has this thought struck me? One reason is that I’m halfway through reading Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn and I’ve been thinking what a new reader would make of it? Does it actually make any sense if you haven’t read the books that have gone before? I think that a new reader is going to find it confusing and disappointing and lots of the events, and people, and meaning is missing if you take things on face value. The trouble is that it’s got a completely different cover to the other books and it doesn’t really make any indication that there is so much history behind it. And it’s a shame as Chadbourn is amazing, he blows me away with his gift of weaving so many things into his stories. But they only have significance is you know that the Jack of the title is a hero from the first three books and his return was bought about by the end of the events in the second three (JoR is book seven) and that what is happening in Jack of Ravens has already happened but the events have darkened and aren’t working out the way things are supposed to be.

Have you read any books that are part of something larger only to be disapointed you didn’t start at the beginning?  Just wondering.