Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
That's all perfectly true for writing the stories in a series (i.e. you need continuity in them), but you don't have to read them that way if each story is written to be standalone. By that, I mean that each standalone novel contains the beginning of a story, the end of that story, and the information that you need to know to make sense of the story. Something may have happened in a previous novel, but if the necessary information is given in the current novel, then you don't need to read the previous one to get it. Lots of series are written that way (especially police/detective series as someone else mentioned).
Our brains are good at making connections and filling in holes. Reviewing new information against old ideas is what we do, so reading stories out of order isn't bad if each one is written to be standalone.
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The only novel of a series that is truly standalone is the first one as long as it has a proper ending.
Our brains want to know what happened before and not just get snippets that spoil a previous book.We don't want to read a previous book and find we know too much ahead of time.