Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, in which we talk about a bookish topic and have fun making lists. This week, we’re considering series we haven’t read but sort of feel we ought to have.

“Ought to have” is a funny old phrase, and I don’t use it here with any sense of obligation – let’s start with some series that I hear great things about and am curious about. I’ve actually started in on two this year that would otherwise be on this list: Lady Trent and The Expanse, both of which I’m enjoying immensely (albeit in very different ways!). So there’s hope for all these series too:

The Craft Sequence – Max Gladstone

This falls into the category of series where I own the first book and once started to read it, but for various reasons bounced off and haven’t got round to giving it another go. Dead gods, magical lawyers, vampires and more – I really need to get back to it.

The Vorkosigan Saga – Lois McMaster Bujold

This is one of the classic modern space operas that I haven’t read, and everybody adores. That’s not a gimme (we’ll talk about Foreigner in a minute), but I have a good feeling about Cordelia.

The Song of the Shattered Sands – Bradley Beaulieu

A pit fighting heroine in a fantasy desert kingdom sounds right up my street, YA or no – I picked Twelve Kings up as my free book at Nine Worlds last year, but as it’s a trade edition it’s been too heavy to get stuck into yet.

The Erebus Sequence – Den Patrick

Another combination of intriguing elements – politics, intrigue and assassins – in a kingdom with a mad king and a corrupt court; it’s a great fantasy potboiler set-up by a truly lovely author. I have a copy of The Boy With The Porcelain Blade, so this is near the top of the queue.

The James Asher books – Barbara Hambly

I enjoyed Hambly’s Darwath trilogy (no, I haven’t read the later revisits), and the James Asher books seem like the next natural step for me: a Victorian spy-turned-professor is blackmailed by an ancient vampire to find out who is hunting his people down. Victorian vampire crime thriller? Count me in!

A War of Light and Shadow – Janny Wurts

I have actually read the first book in this series – Curse of the Mistwraith – but did so during the early stages of a chronic illness that affected my ability to concentrate, which did it a massive disservice. Half-brothers divided by war are inclined to make peace until an evil spirit comes between them; this is classic epic fantasy, and I do want to give it another go.

Of course, there’s plenty of other series out there that I vaguely feel I ‘ought’ to have read because of their towering reputations and/or genre relevance… but I’m not going to, for various reasons.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen – Steven Erikson

I tried. I read the first book, and by the end I still couldn’t tell the characters apart, and I was having to force myself to pick it up as I was 80% bored (and the other 20% didn’t show up on page often enough to keep me going). No way, Jose. Not going back.

Foreigner – C J Cherryh

Sadly this was another instance of me reading (most of) the first book and deciding it just wasn’t for me. Annoyingly, I can’t recall what it was that did it in the end – sheer boredom, I think, as while the world-building was promising, the characters did nothing for me at all.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – Stephen Donaldson

I’m not reading this one for the entirely predictable reason. I simply don’t care about the redemption of rapists; I don’t want to spend that much time with one. I’ve read Donaldson’s Gap series, and that will do, thank you.

Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas

I’m being unfair? Maybe. A competition to find a court assassin sounds promising and lots of people I respect enjoyed it to some degree – but from what I understand, these books are romances of the sort I find particularly irksome (a perfectly packaged heroine has a problem to solve and a love triangle to angst over – ugh). Not going there. Won’t do it.

 

What series do you want to sink your teeth into (or not, as the case may be)?