Thinking over my remark in yesterday's post about having read several books that were well on in related series, that these particular volumes were not perhaps the place to start, I wondered, Why Not?
In the course of many decades' reading I have read a fair number of sequences myself out of order, for a whole range of reasons, either because that was the only one in the library/bookshop just after I'd heard the author recommended, or because the library didn't have one episode in the series, or just not realising that something was volume X of the Whatever Saga.
And how often does it really, really, matter?
I suppose if the reader really, really, dislikes spoilers and knowing what's going to happen, it's not a good idea to start in the middle. And it can be very annoying/confusing when narrator or characters allude to something that's happened in earlier books.
This was my experience on plunging into Dunnett's Lymond series at The Ringed Castle, which is possibly the worst possible place to start: it's number five in the sequence, it rests on an intricate structure of stuff that happened in parts 1-4, and it's also getting stuff in place for final volume. The result being that I read vols 1-4 in reverse order just to try and work out WTF was going on, and then circled back to vol 6. I'm not sure this is entirely the best recommended procedure, on the other hand, it didn't do me any harm, and I'm fairly okay with spoilers anyway, on the grounds that if a book is worth re-reading even when you know how it's all going to come out, reading it the first time in the knowledge that X thing is going to happen at some point in the narrative isn't going to be a major blight on my reading experience.
What can be annoying is reading something and not having access to one particular book in the series - the local library in my home town was missing Pigeon Post from the Arthur Ransomes, and it became a book I particularly yearned for and dreamt about finding.
When I was a child, we would sometimes go to the cinema, and for various reasons of timing, would arrive somewhere in the middle of the main feature, would watch it through to the end, see the newsreel, second feature, cartoons, ads, trailers, etc, and then watch the main feature through to the point where we came in (you could do that in those days). I don't remember having any problems with that.
Of more recent years, while pursuing Buffy and Angel via terrestrial channels (or by waiting until the DVDs came out) I would occasionally find myself somewhere which had access to channels showing either future episodes in the series or whole different series than the ones I was on. And I watched them.
In Isherwood's Lions and Shadows he describes writing his second novel, The Memorial, as writing 'an epic in an album of snapshots' of the same characters at different points in time, in which each episode adds a new meaning to the ones before, so that the readers goes back the first with all the 'difference made by knowledge'. A different kind of surprise.
Does order matter? Are spoilers a complete deal-breaker? Is suspense essential?
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