I suppose one must bring some expectations to reading a book

[oursin]

But wouldn't it be nice if the expectations were not actually preconceptions, as in the recurrent case of people who decide that they will read A Random Romance (quite probably one from Quite A While Ago) and feel entirely qualified to amusingly crap all over a very varied genre.

Do people do this with any other genre? I am sure one could do this with the prenatural resilience of the hero in numerous thrillers or the somewhat coincidental way our hawkshaw fortuitously encounters CLEWS in unravelling a mystery.

(Actually I would not be surprised if at one point there was a genre of people dissing on mysteries, especially the ones writ by lady-writerz, no?)

There has also lately been the instance of someone reviewing the sequel to a book they had not read and being dismissive -

- and I thought that was pretty bad, but I was a bit beswozzled by all the people commenting on this saying 'Should have read Volume 1 first'.

Because, okay, if you are reading something that is complex world-building and intricate character relations, etc, and there has already been a lot of set-up, you are going to miss stuff -

- but, I depose, and I realise I may be drawing on a life-experience of walking into movies at random points and grabbing the volume by author that happened to be on the library shelf that day* or actually on the shelves in Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed and this was not necessarily Where The Story Began. And maybe spending a fair amount of time and effort trying to find previous or missing installment...

The question should be, did this [middle book] engage me as it was, and did it also have things about it that made me want to read [first book] to get up to speed?

I am pretty sure that somewhere Diana Wynne Jones said that it was very liberating to write for children because they did not have all those expectations and they just let the story unroll because they expected there to be gaps in their knowledge - something like that, anyway. They did not need it all laid out for them in the way she found you had to for an adult audience?

*As in the case when I had read something raving about Dorothy Dunnett and the Lymond saga and what happened to be on the library shelf was The Ringed Castle, no 5 in the sequence and heaving with backstory and intricate character relationships, and I actually read backwards to The Game of Kings and then Checkmate.