Serieses? Serii? Does anyone know the plural for this?
Anyway. So I’ve been catsitting for my mother this week and she left me a pile of books to read, including two new series* of supernatural fiction. One of which is very interesting – it’s set in a world where humans only make up 1% of the population, the rest being werewolves, vampires and golems – and I would like to continue reading it when more are published. Then I checked out the library website this morning and discovered that they have the latest Patrick Ness book on order, the third in the Chaos Walking trilogy, which I have been very very very excited about reading *bounces a little*. Then I was looking up colours for a friend to paint her nails, which led me very naturally to the Jasper Fforde website (or more specifically, the Chromatology page in the section devoted to Shades of Grey) and learned that he has a new series for children, starting with The Last Dragonslayer in November 2010.
So in the course of about 20 minutes, on my lunchbreak at work**, I realised that I’ve got 2 new serieses to follow and the latest installment of a third to track down. And that doesn’t take into account all the other serieses that I actively follow and tend not to post about as regularly as I (re)read them – the Sookie Stackhouse books, anything published by Tamora Pierce or Simon R Green, Jasper Fforde’s 3 ongoing stories, the Stephanie Plum series – or the ones that friends and family follow and therefore lend to me. That list is a lot longer, and includes Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld series, Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter series and Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden series, among others. And then there are serieses like Earth’s Children by Jean M Auel which are written so slowly that continental drift overtakes them. I forget that the other books have even been written before a new one comes out.
So here’s what I want to know – how do other people handle this? Do you avoid reading serieses altogether? Do you give up, as I did on Laurell K Hamilton and Kim Harrison, when the character does a 180 and turns into some sort of OOC-sex fiend? (This happens more often than I can say). Do you have spreadsheets, tracking what the latest installment is called and its release date just so you don’t end up staring at Amazon in confusion while trying to remember which ones you’ve read and in what order? What advice can you give me to help my series addiction? Is it time for me to go back to reading one-shot novels by literary authors?
*apparently it’s a plural and there’s no singular form. Which is boring. Henceforth, I intend to use serieses. I don’t care if it’s wrong!
**It is important to note that I have not been wasting work time on this post. Pinky promise. *holds out little finger*
