Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Even with prequels I have found that publication order generally works best. The writer and publisher know at the time they release a prequel that a significant part of the audience will be fans of the original books, so part of preparing the prequel for publication is making it acceptable to those who read the books as they were released. There tend to be spoilers whichever order you read.
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Yep. My one exception to reading the books in publication order was Bernard Cornwell’s
Sharpe series, where I went with chronological order. There were drawbacks to both methods. By reading in chronological order I got the full sweep of the Penninsular War and it was worth it, but there were both obvious discontinuities in referring to earlier events (that hadn’t been chronicled yet) as well as the constraints imposed by what happened in later books (already written). A side benefit to chronological order in this case was that the weakest books were buried in the middle, at which point you were most likely already committed to the series.