Quote:
Originally Posted by Tarana
I think the only author that does this is Terry Brooks. Which is great. Each trilogy is fresh. So many series just blah out by the 6th book.
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Yes; in the beginning, he wrote stand-alone novels. The Sword, Elfstones and Wishsong form the original Shannara trilogy, but it's not really a trilogy; it's possible to read each story on its own and understand it perfectly.
With The Heritage of Shannara, he started to write multi-book stories; in this case, a quadrilogy. It's not possible to just start reading the second or third book. One of my pet-peeves with this quadrilogy is that Brooks sometimes leaves a plot thread hanging too long, making me think "So what the frack happened with...?"
I'm actually now reading the last book of that series.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
R. A. Salvatore's The Legend of Drizzt does this.
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Yes. The first six Drizzt books are must-reads. Later on they become a bit weaker with some books, but I've yet to read everything after "The Hunter's Blades".
Warning: "Servant of the Shard" previously was a Drizzt book, but because Drizzt doesn't feature in it (apart from being mentioned a few times), it was taken out of the Drizzt series. It is now the first book of the spin-off The Sellswords Trilogy; this series focuses on Jarlaxle and other characters that have sub-roles in the Drizzt books. I have yet to read that trilogy.
By the way, it's quite common in the Forgotten Realms universe that a series of 3-6 books is written by 3-6 different authors, or that a series is started by one author and finished by another.