series rant

Usually, I really enjoy reading series of books. Ever since I was a kid, when I started with Raggedy Ann and Andy, through my early teens with very nearly the entire list of LM Montgomery's various series, and including forays into Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Sweet Valley girls and the Babysitters' Club.  And onward: I still love Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series (and all the other books set in that particular universe --well, almost all of them, anyway) and others in the fantasy/science fiction genres I've come into contact with over the years. I love series that concentrate on one or two main characters over the entire course, with strong supporting characters who you can see develop over time, and a simply-directed story arc. I love series that focus on a group of people, with a different person or couple or whatever as the primary focus of each book.

That said, a series is really tough to do over the long haul.

My first experience with this was with LM Montomery's Anne of Green Gables series. Like many many budding young ladies, I fell in love with Anne when I was about 10 or 11. I read all the Anne books, and loved them all, but I found the last couple of books of the series to be...difficult. Somehow, at some point, there was a shift of focus, from Anne onto her children. As an adult, I realize that the books were directed specifically at young girls, to give them a road map to growth, and at some point Anne had grown as much as she was ever going to within the confines of a young-woman-to-be's ability to grasp. But having Anne on the outskirts of what were supposed to be her own books was jarring to me as a pre-teen, and I had a difficult time connecting with her sons and daughters -- the books skipped from one child to another and it was jarring to find yourself inside yet another head.

Sadly, that's not where it ends. That's just where it begins, I've since learned. I am -- or I WAS -- a fan of JR Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood. Perhaps, I'm both. I still currently love the books I loved initially, but the more recent books, not so much. There's just too much going on. The last one I read was Lover Mine (I think? John Matthew and Xhex?) and I just...it didn't work for me. I tried, I really did, but I couldn't keep track of all the story threads. I ended up having to skim through the book with color-coded post-it flags, flagging each change of character POV, and then go back and read each storyline individually. There were, like, 8 storylines. It was exhausting, and I wasn't ever really able to just immerse myself in the story. It was the written equivalent of budding hoarder, and I freely admit that I'm just marking time on the series. I own, but have not yet brought myself to read, the latest installment. I'm not interested any more in any of the main characters. I'd like to see a bit more of some of the former couples, and I'm heavily invested in one minor storyline, which is the m/m relationship (Blaylock and Qhuinn), which is probably never going to be a major storyline. She's said it's most likely to end up being a focused novella probably published digitally so as not to offend the readers who are against m/m pairings. 'Cause, y'know, we should protect people from the realities of life.

And I'm sad to admit that there are several long-running series that friends I trust have recommended, but I can't even get into the first books. I've tried, I really have. And I have to admit, the series I've loved the most have been the ones that I discovered about 4 books in, on a whim or out of desperation, like Katie MacAlister's Dark Ones or Alexis Morgan's Paladins of Darkness.  Both of those ladies are at 8+ books for those series with no immediate hints of stopping, and both series continue to hold my attention in a way others don't.