Regular visitors probably know I’m an avid reader. I read everything and anything I can get my hands on. I never can have enough of books. If you are thinking of sending me a gift, please send me a book.

When I was younger, I used to read two books each day. The librarians at the school’s library didn’t believe I could read so fast — even if the books were not that big — and sometimes wouldn’t let me borrow more books after I had returned the ones I was reading at the time. My love for books is one of the few constant things in my live. I have to avoid going into bookstores lest I spend excessively in books.

Of course, I have my favorite genres — namely, science fiction and fantasy. I grew up dreaming of becoming a scientist, and daydreaming about faraway places in distant pasts, remote futures, and imaginary worlds. Life eventually decreed I would follow a different path, which I’m still trying to see clearly.

Anyway, this is a rant from a book lover. Few free to ignore it. I had been intending to write it for a long time, and now I’m glad it’s off my chest.

I’m going to talk about book series. Series are traditional in literature. From stories serialized across multiple maganize issues to those split in multiple book volumes, writers who had a long story to tell always found a way to get it to their readers. Over the time, series became such an ingrained aspect of the industry that many publishing houses today expect writers to automatically think about sequels to their books — especially, of course, for those books who are wildly successful.

I like long stories. If the plot is engaging, the characters are compelling, and the book is not ridden with flaws, I’m willing to go along the writer for as long as he decides to continue with the story. I’m also more than willing to wait for the writer as he takes his time to perfect the story.

Long ago, when I still used to play RPG, I found them to be one of the most satisfying creative experiences I ever had. I always wanted to be the game master because that provided me with a way to create never-ending, always-expanding stories that followed characters for years. So I really like long story arcs.

However, in the past few years I have developed a strong dislike for book series. Except for a few writers, I can’t seem to stand them anymore.

Take, for example, Robert Jordan’s best-selling The Wheel of Time. It’s a good story. It’s full of interesting story arcs, has a rich mythology background and engaging ideas. Or rather, it was a good story. When I first started reading the series, I couldn’t put the books down. I kept wanting to know more about what was going to happen, where the story would lead. I read the first five books one after the other, always eager for more. Then came book six.

With book six, the series started to go down a different path. Book six was still interesting, but it lacked the fast-paced style of the previous five books. Long descriptive passages, with no plot movement whatsoever cluttered it. The next four books in the series went from bad to worse. Except for the ending of book nine, all other books were too slow. Book nine, by the way, was just a long setup for its last chapter — hundreds of pages just following characters around while they didn’t almost nothing. Book ten was the worst of the lost. Even die-hard fans were bored to death by it. I mean, the book was almost a thousand pages long and half of it was wasted with a single character who spends his entire time in the book waiting for something to happen. Fans now are debating whether Robert Jordan will finish the story someday or not.

George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire seems to be going down a similar path. The fourth book has been delayed for such a long time that fans don’t believe it’s coming anymore.

Terry Goodkind wisely chose a different strategy. When his best-selling The Sword of Truth series started losing steam, he announced he would write only more three books after the ones he had already written and that they would comprise a sing storyline — a nice way to stifle complaints that the previous two books were too dull.

(Terry Goodkind really deserves an aside. I’m always amazed at the things he says. I really don’t know where he finds the gall to say them.

I was once listening to one interview with him in a radio station, and he declared he had single-handedly killed the fantasy genre and that science fiction was a genre that had committed suicide. Last time I checked, both genres were doing just fine, thank you very much. That was after saying that he didn’t write fantasy, but “novels”. All because his books are packed with Objectivism, which he thinks is the One and True Doctrine. Later in the interview, I was amused to hear him declare that his editor once said to him that his books sold well because he routinely broke the rules of fantasy in his books and people were always wanting to see how he would do it in the next book. He couldn’t cite a single rule he had broken. Anyway, what would you expect the editor of a writer whose books always end up in the New York Times best-selling list say to him?

Don’t get me wrong. Terry Goodkind is a good writer. I’ve read all books in The Sword of Truth series, and I actually liked some of them. Books two and six have very good stories, and all books in the series have this evocative feeling to them that’s the mark of a well-written story.

The problem with Terry Goodkind is that he doesn’t care about the consistence of the books, which sometimes contradict each other, and that he resorts to deus ex machina resolutions way too much. If he didn’t have multiple storylines going each time, that would kill him. But he can tell a good story so he survives despite them.

I didn’t like the last two books in the series because they get too preachy on the readers. The main character would suddenly stop everything he was doing to give an extended lecture about the dangers of altruism and to extol the virtues of Objectivism. I’m talking here about real info dumps thinly disguised as dialogs.

What’s more funny about the whole thing is that the core value for the main character in the series is freedom. The whole series is an apology to the freedom of the individual, in opposition to collectivism. But if you visit the official site for Terry Goodkind and try to post anything critical about him there, you will get promptly banned and all yours posts will be deleted before anybody has a chance to comment them. I lurked there for a time, and I saw lots of polite posts, with created interesting discussions around them, be deleted because the maintainers didn’t like the things they said about the series or the author. I’m not talking about personal attacks, but about valid criticism.

But I digress.)

The authors I mention above are all good writers. They can create a compelling story when they want. But I doubt their last books would have sold so well if people were not dying to know how the stories end.

I still feel the bitter taste of disappointment in my mouth when I finished the tenth book in the Wheel of Time series. I only finished it, reading every single word on it, because I kept hoping the story would start moving ahead soon. It didn’t, and I lost count of the times I simply wanted to throw the book against a wall. How is it possible to spend twenty pages just following a character as he walks around the place where he’s camped moaning about how he can do nothing about the fact that his wife was captured?

Those three authors are but a few writing series. Everywhere you look, you see others. Terry Brooks has been writing his The Sword of Shannara series for over thirty years, interspersed with other minor stories. Granted, most of the books in the Shannara series could stand on their own, even though they form a long story that you need to follow to understand the whole picture.

As I mentioned before, the book industry now expects authors to automatically start writing sequels to successful books. I once read an article by a writer who just had her first book accepted for publication. As she recounted the events that lead to publication, she mentioned that her editor had called her and advised her to start writing a sequel for the book as soon as possible. Series do make commercial sense. That’s why they are so loved by the industry.

As I said, I have nothing against series as such. What I don’t like are series that exist only because previous books managed to form a following that now can’t help but buy the next books in hopes of finally finding out where the story is going. Such series tend to end in unsatisfying ways, mostly because their authors got tired of them. Others, like The Sword of Shannara series, begin to tell the same story over and over again, changing just the surroundings and the characters’ names.

My favorite writer of all times, Stephen Donaldson, is what I consider a proper series writer. Most of his books were part of larger series, but those series are all finished — except for one of them, whose last book wasn’t written yet.

Donaldson wrote two magnificent series about the same characters. Those series, known respectively as the First and Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, have three books each, and are deeply satisfying. Donaldson’s style is a bit verbose sometimes, but is strong, and he can tell a good story without needing ten thousand pages to do it. If he had written those other series I mentioned, they would need only half of the words to tell the same events.

When Donaldson wrote the Second Chronicles, he was already planning for the Third Chronicles, which he’s writing right know. He intends to finish them once for all, and he said in an interview that he will probably spend the next ten years writing the four books that comprise this last series. And I’ll tell something: I don’t mind waiting those ten years because I know the series will end and that it will be complete. Donaldson writes to explore the themes he set out to explore, not to show that he can handle a million characters and subplots or because he wants to go all preachy on his audience.

I’m now wary of buying any books saying they are part of a larger series. Of course, there’s a lot of good series out there. The Lord of the Rings is one of them. The Chronicles of Narnia is another. Stephen Donaldson, a fantasy reader himself, recommended Steven Erikson’s Tales of Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which I will probably buy some day. Nonetheless, I still think that the demand for series is eroding the quality of some of them.

I’m not saying writers shouldn’t write series. Quite the contrary. As I said, I love long stories. But as Nancy Kress once said, every time a story begins, whoever wrote it makes a promise to the readers that things will happen and that the readers will understand why those things happened. Series who go nowhere break this promise.

So what I ask from series writers is that they remain true to the stories they started. After all, solid series means satisfied readers, which means more money will follow towards the author — as it should, by the way.