If you read series, do you ever find a series “jumping the shark?” How do you feel about that?
And, do you keep reading anyway?
I read series. I read lots of series. Right now, I can't think of a series where I've seen a definitive “jump the shark” episode. But if I run into one, I will not have a problem abandoning the series—particularly if I feel the stories are deteriorating, though it will probably take a couple of books for me to come to the decision that I'm not going to continue reading it.
I've said many times that I often decide what to read by what mood I'm in. This means that I will often step away from a series for quite some time before I return to it. Sometimes this is necessitated by the discrepancy between how fast I read and how slowly the publishers bring out books in a series. I read so many series that I have found it necessary to keep a master of list of the series I'm reading and my exact position in the on-going series so that I don't inadvertently buy a book that I've already read.
One other peculiarity is that I don't like to read series books out of order. Where this has become painful is with the free or deeply discounted eBooks that publishers have been giving away for the past year or so. I've got Persuader by Lee Child, the seventh in his Jack Reacher mystery series sitting on my Kindle, waiting until I can read books 2-6 and catch up to this point in the series and continue. Likewise, I picked up The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters, sixth in her Amelia Peabody series, and I still need to read 2-5. And I was happy to take advantage of a “buy one, get one free” offer for Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand and Kitty Raises Hell, numbers 5 and 6 in Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norville series. If I didn't already have so many books on hand which need to be read, I might just stock up on either Kindle editions or used paperbacks. But, I'm trying to be somewhat restrained in my book buying ...
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