Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Binge read - hum. One issue with many long running series or really serials, is that they were a bit repetitive. Many were serials in magazines that basically gave the reader a known quantity. I would say that Perry Mason, Ellery Queen, Tarzan, Doc Savage, Conan the Barbarian all fall into the same basic grouping. They were designed so that reading one didn't depend on reading the previous story. There was, of course, Sherlock Holmes.
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I’m going to disagree with your definition. To me, a series is composed of books with discrete plots that are complete in themselves (even if elements carry forward), and they
are repetitive and hence not suitable for bingeing. A serial is composed of books where the point is the continuing story, even if some kind of conclusion is reached at the end of each book. Those are the ones you binge on, because you want to see what happens next, and not because you want to regroup and start anew.
An example above of a serial that I think fits the binge bill is Anthony Powell’s
A Dance to the Music of Time; I’ll add Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic War series, the Aubrey/Maturin books.