I’m curious to know the answer to this question because I noticed my own behavior has changed as I got older.
When I was younger, I used to read a series all in one go: after I finished the first book, if there was a second, I would grab that one, and so on and so forth.
Nowadays though, I don’t like doing that anymore. Even when I like book one, I will not pick up the second book of the series until after a long while. I still haven’t finished the Annihilation trilogy (2/3) or the Earthsea pentalogy (3/5) or the hatching trilogy (1/3), just to give some examples. And I like the books, mind you.
I feel that one reason for this change is that I don’t like to keep reading the same flavor of book again and again anymore. I like to shift things around, pick up a new genre, get a fresh perspective… and then, when I feel the longing, I grab the book from a series I was reading to see what’s going on there. It feels like getting in touch with an old friend, and remembering why you were such good friends in the first place.
So, what about you? What’s your style? Binge-reading the series or taking your sweet sweet time?
I always like to read at least one other book in between each book in a series.
I think that this is, at least partly, to do with the pressure on writers to try to do trilogies out of everything these days. A planned trilogy will have a story arc where there is a climax in each book as well as building towards a climax for the whole series. And, IDK, when I have just reached the climactic end of one book, diving straight into the “slow bit” in the next one just feels - anticlimactic, I guess. I suspect something that wasn’t originally planned to be a series or a trilogy may be different, but what do I know…
In practice, I tend to interleave two - sometimes three - series (or “universes”) at a time; When I finish a book in one series, I pick up the next book in the other series. I like to make systems :D Incidentally, I also tend to get bored if I read books in the same genre back to back so I tend to have series in different genres.
Right now, I am interleaving