Series Starters

Usually I start a series and read through all the extant books before starting in on the next series. However, in the last couple months I've started four new-to-me series, and I'm currently in my fifth.

The Giver Quartet: The Giver was a victim of the "too many people told me to read it" phenomenon. This is one of those perverse little quirks in my personality wherein I get very resistant to watching, reading, doing something because too many people told me that they loved it. Inverse herd mentality I guess. I'm an anti-sheep. It's too bad really because I actually really enjoyed The Giver. I didn't love the enigmatic end but I did very much enjoy the feel of the world and the central conflict of the story. I liked it so much, in fact, that I immediately found Gathering Blue and Messenger both of which were very good in their way, if not quite as enthralling as the first book. I'm still trying to track down Son so that I can finish out the set.

Rats of NIMH: Like most people in my generation, my first exposure to this series was the cartoon "The Secret of NIMH" that was released in 1982. In fact, I had no idea that it was an adaptation of a book until a few years ago when it came up in conversation with my husband. At this point, I don't really remember much about the cartoon, but my vague sense of it is vastly different than Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I enjoyed the book very much, but now I want to track down and rewatch the movie.

The Underland Chronicles: Before Suzanne Collins started in on the Hunger Games, she wrote this series for a somewhat younger age group. Goodreads kept recommending it to me but I had quite a hard time tracking down a copy in the used bookstores. Eventually I gave up and ordered off of thriftbooks.com . So far I've only read the first book in the series: Gregor the Overlander. It was a very quick read since it's aimed at a middle school audience and it's the only book I've ever read that got me to cry over the death of a cockroach. I'm looking forward to reading the four remaining books in the series.

Canongate Myth Series: I found this series by mistake. My coworker, Ali, handed me The Penelopiad assuring me that I'd love it. It's an alternate telling of "The Odyssey" but from Penelope's point of view in Ithaca. However, Penelope is telling the story to us from the underworld so there's a lot of moving back and forth in the narrative and a sort of wry humor interjected throughout. It's written by Margaret Atwood and it's clear she was having fun and flexing her writerly muscles. I particularly enjoyed the use of the 12 handmaids as a chorus. Anyway, it's very cool and as I was reading it I noticed the roman numeral 2 on the spine. So I go and ask Ali, "If this is the second book in the series, what's the first." Ali's eyes got huge and she said, "It's a series?" Anyway to make a long story short, it is a series where each book is written by a different author and is the retelling of a different myth. Many of them retell Greek myths but there is a healthy smattering of other traditions including Celtic, Chinese, and African. I'm excited; I ordered a whole bunch of them off thriftbooks.com and they just came in last week. I've already dived into Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth which is the oddball of the group because it's a nonfiction overview of mythology as a human experience. I might have skipped it except that I had to read her Islam: A Short History for my history of Islam class and was impressed by how readable I found it.