It’s been going on for a good many years – binge-watching your favorite TV shows, one after another. Writers have been accommodating this practice by making their series more complicated with long-running side stories, and TV channels and networks have also jumped on the trend by producing shows that are designed to be binge-watched.
That brings us to binge-reading – a long established method of reading. How many of us binge-read our way through the Babysitter’s Club, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Harry Potter, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and so on? As adults, we can also binge-read Jane Austen, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, Agatha Christie, Game of Thrones, and more – much more. That’s why I like book series – you can go deeper and deeper into characters, get to know them to the point where they seem very real – you become invested in them. Well written book series are worth their weight – and more – in gold, for both reading pleasure and publisher profits!
While there is a slight difference in binge-reading versus just going through a series, I still prefer to use the term for both obsessive reading in one go, as well as reading one book after another in a series, albeit with some spacing or time in between. Sometimes, we get to the end of the published series and must wait impatiently for the author to finish up the next story! Hooray for these great authors who keep a series going, such as the incomparable Sue Grafton who took us almost all the way through the alphabet with her “Alphabet” mysteries series featuring Kinsey Millhone. She started with “A is for Alibi” in 1982 and at the time of her death in December 2017, she had published “Y is for Yesterday,” and was working on her final “Z” book. I love the quote her family gave after her death – “as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at “Y.”
I definitely prefer a series to a standalone, if only because I know there is more to come with the character that I’ve grown to care about. Though most of our ‘classic’ novels are standalones, there is certainly much to enjoy and value in a series that an author has carefully crafted over time. Go to my Reviews page to see a few series that are especially outstanding.