Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week they provide a prompt and book lovers join in with their own top ten list.
This week's theme is “Top New Series I Want To Start”. They clarify “New..let's say within the last year or two”, but I want to take a slightly different tack on this prompt. Rather than looking at new series, I want to focus on “new to me” series, some of these will be backlist books from authors I've recently discovered or even classics. Also, given that I'm designating 2015 as my Year of the Juvenile Novel, some of these will be middle grade or young adult series.
I've never read the entire Wizard of Oz series. Although I did read the first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while I was in high school, I think it's time for a re-read as an intro to the series. (There are 14 novels plus some short stories!) Since all of the books are in the Public Domain in the US, I'll be downloading copies from Mobileread.
The Lyra Novels are a series of five fantasy novels set on a mythical world named Lyra, where in a time long past humankind shared the land with folk who had magic in their blood and bones. The author says, “These books share a common setting on a world named Lyra. The books are only loosely connected ... take place in widely separate locations and times, and don’t include continuing characters ... and so may be read in any order.” I'll be borrowing the omnibus eBook edition from my local library.
While browsing books available through my library's subscription to the Freading service, I stumbled upon a very appealing series: the Alan Graham Mysteries by Malcolm Shuman. This five volume series features archaeologist Alan Graham as he tackles both ancient and contemporary mysteries in Louisiana's Bayou country. And, these books show consistently high ratings at Goodreads.com.
I'm cheating just a little bit with this series—I read the first book in James Alan Gardner's The League of Peoples in 2009, and then set about trying to accumulate the rest of the books so that I could read them in order. I was hung up on the second book, Commitment Hour, initially published in 1998, until the entire series was republished as eBooks by Open Road Media earlier this year. So, I'll re-read Expendable and then relish the rest of the series.
I first ran across Erica Kirov and her Magickeepers series in the online card catalog of my library. This series for middle grade kids stars Nick Rostov who has discovered he is part of an extended Russian family of magicians: the Magickeepers. He lives with his eccentric relatives in a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, where they perform daring feats of magic—real magic.
I love adventure stories written for kids. I grew up with the Bobbsey Twins and read Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series twenty years ago or so. But, I've never taken the chance to read The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. I have no intention of reading all 125 books in the series, but I will read at least the first dozen or so.
A rather short series that I intend to read in 2015 is Virginia Hamilton's Justice trilogy. It starts with Justice and Her Brothers, where we meet Justice and her twin brothers, Levi and Thomas. These teens manifest psychic abilities which enable them to travel to a future world where they battle an evil entity and attempt to rescue the inhabitants of the barren Dustland.
The first book that I read in 2014 was Mockingjay, the final book of the Hunger Games trilogy. I'm a real fan of dystopian science fiction novels, so I've been looking forward to reading the Divergent series by Veronica Roth. With the release of a movie made from the first novel, Divergent, I feel even more pressure to read the books so that I can see the movie when it comes to cable TV.
Another series that I found in the online card catalog is Lucinda Landon's mysteries for early elementary kids (ages 7-9, grades 2-4) starring Meg Mackintosh. Reviews mention the appeal of these books as being similar to Encyclopedia Brown and Cam Jansen—well-known young sleuths.
I spotted a series that looks like a lot of fun at the Freading web site: Real Mermaids by Helene Boudreau. There are only four books—so far—and doesn't appear to follow the stereotype of the svelte and sexy mermaid. In fact, Jade is described as “a plus-size, aqua-phobic mer-girl”. Lots of fun, right?
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