Welcome to another Sunday discussion! Today I want to talk about rereading, but specifically about doing it just before a new book in an involved series comes out. There’s usually about a year between each book in the series releases, and for me, that’s just about enough time to forget almost everything that happened in the story. Some stories, like the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich, or certain cozy mystery series, aren’t as involved, and don’t need to be reread to follow what is happening in the series. But for something like the Crescent City series by Sarah J. Maas, a reread has to be done because there’s so much information and a ton of little details that wind up being important to the story.

The way I see it, I’ve got three options when a new book is released in a series I’m reading. I can just try to read the book and pray that I won’t miss out on too much. I’ve tried this before, and I promise, it’s not a great way to do this. I find myself wondering who the smaller side characters are, what they’re talking about, and what is happening in the story, and generally get frustrated and wind up going back and choosing one of the other options. The only time I can actually do this and have it work well is when the author is gracious enough to put a summary of the story so far at the beginning of each book. 

My second option only works well when three conditions are met. First, there has to be enough time for me to go back and reread the previous books. This tends to get problematic with longer series, as you can imagine. I find that reading books in audio format is faster, for me, but the books have to be available in audiobook format, and I have to be able to access them. Sometimes the waits at the library can be months long. 

The last option is to find a recap of the novel online. There’s one good site that I’ve found that does this, which you can access here. This site offers a detailed summary of all the important details and events from the novel, so that you can refresh yourself on what happened in a book before moving onto the next one in a series. I usually only rely on this as a last resort, mainly because I like to re-immerse myself into the world of a series before starting the newest book. However, sometimes I just don’t have the time or the option to do that. 

What do you do when a new novel in a really involved series comes out?