How linked does a series have to be? Ian Fleming's original Bond novels do carry plot elements forward from novel to novel (e.g. the death of Bond's bride in On Her Majesty's Secret Service affects his behaviour in You Only Live Twice, his recovery from near death at the end of From Russia With Love kicks off Dr. No) but the individual novels are by and large standalone. I'm just starting to read the John Wells novels by Alex Berenson (a current spy series) and they seem to be similar - events in one story affect and are referenced in others but it's not one ongoing story like a classic trilogy. John Le Carre's Circus novels are linked more tenuously, sometimes only by the presence of ongoing characters like the famous George Smiley (though the seventies novels Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People are a trilogy within that broader series dealing with the near-collapse of the secret service due to a Soviet mole that Smiley must ferret out in Tinker).

Mendalla

EDIT: And when I say Fleming's original Bond novels, I'm explicitly ignoring the movies and subsequent authors.

the ones that come to my mind are:

Game of Thrones

Mortal instrument series

Dragon Riders of Pern or pretty much everything Anne McCaffery wrote is in series form.

Nora Roberts also has a couple of relationship series as well.

A recent Canadian example that's popular in fantasy circles but hasn't had the mainstream success of Martin's Game of Thrones is the Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson (who live in, I think, Winnipeg). Basically, he took the world that he and his friends built for their D&D campaign, combined it with his academic background in anthropology, and used it for a massive (ten thick books and several shorter spinoffs) fantasy epic about world-changing conflicts in a heavily magical world. Not for the faint of heart or short on time (I bogged down badly in the first book and haven't tried it again since). His friend Ian Esselmont, also part of that original D&D group, has written some additional novels set in the same world but his do not, AFAIK, form a series of their own but fill in some bit and pieces not touched on by Erikson.

Mendalla

Jack Whyte wrote a long series of Arthurian novels.  The first starts with well before Arthur himself comes to be.  I like Jack Whyte's writing. He is exciting and non-sentimental.  Another series he has embarked upon is called 'The Forest Lairds'  Starting with William Wallace.  NOT a happy story but gripping all the same. (PS the last I checked he lives in fair Kelowna BC, the 34th most expensive place to live IN THE WORLD. No wonder we're so damn broke, living 45 mintues away.   We get the trickle down effect.)

But aside from that, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy was huge.

That could go in the trilogies thread, too, though there are neverending rumours that he either had a fourth under way or even that there is an actual manuscript for a fourth that is caught in legal limbo as his family and partner feud over the estate.

Mendalla

It's been a while since I've read a series.  The most recent would be some of the Robin Cook books, which have the same characters following a chronological order.  They don't really have a series name though, you have to read the summary to know if it's in the 'series' or not.

Most of the series I was into were kid/teen books.  Mostly junk reading

Fear Street (like Robin Cook, some were a series, some weren't - I think there was at least one trilogy).

Baby Sitters Club / Baby Sitters Little Sister

Sweet Valley Kids/Twins/High/University

I've recently been reading several mysteries by Louise Penny - a Canadian author!  While they are not technically a series, there are continuing characters, and references in later books to events that took place in earlier books.  They mostly take place in Montreal, Eastern Townships, Quebec City - so it's fun to read about places I've visited - and I do enjoy her quirky and interesting characters.

I've been re-reading a bunch of my old Forgotten Realms novels lately - The various Drizzt Do'Urden books and the Harpers books mainly.  There are some surpringly insightful bits in many of the Drizzt books that went right by me when I was younger.

I just started Shadow of Night book 2 of Deborah Harkness' "A Discovery of Witches" series.   If It wasn't for having to put the book down to go to work and sleep I'd have read it right through the first day.  As it is I am about 2/3 done (I downloaded it at 6am on July 10th which was the day it came out)

On rpg.net, Drizzt is something of a persona non-grata, or at least very controversial. Apparently he and other literary D&D characters (e.g. Elminster) completely ruined the Forgotten Realms as a setting for a lot of D&D players and dungeonmasters, either by inspiring players to try to play them (or characters like them) or by being the uber-character who puts all the player's character's actions to shame.

Of course, licensed series are a dime a dozen now and some bookstores have two stacks of shelves just for them. Star Trek, Star Wars, and D&D are the biggies but many popular videogames have spinoff novels and other TV shows (eg. Babylon 5, Sliders, Battlestar Galactica) have had short novel series, though not as long running as Trek and Wars.

Mendalla

I never really played D&D so I guess I was spared having to resent the major characters from the books.  Besides a good Game Master sets out rules regarding the kinds of characters allowed for a game and discusses it with their players and makes sure everyone who will be in a give game 'gets it' before people even being making characters.  At least that's how it works in the LARP community.

Mystery:  Series:  Laurie R. King -- two different large series sets, and a few small ones.  The one starts with "The Beekeeper's Apprentice" and is about a teenage woman, Mary Russell, who meets and eventually marries the much older Sherlock Holmes.  Excellent quality writing and story.     Read the first one first.  

2nd of her set -- a detective series takes place in modern day California.  Again, excellent writing. You must read the first book first....coz, well, there is a gotcha that will blow your mind away as to how you missed it.  

third is a two book set, starts with Folly -- stands on its own.  Excellent summer reading.

********

Fantasy

Patrick Rothfuss's books:  Call of the Wind, and ______....awaiting the third to be written/released.   It is probably one of the best fantasy books that I have ever read.

Oh, that's the theory in tabletop RPGs as well (you're a LARP'er, are you? I've never pursued that hobby myself, though it somewhat intrigues me). The problem is that the makers of D&D wrote the damn literary characters into various Forgotten Realms materials for D&D and GMs then had to figure out how to yank them out without breaking things. I have heard from others like you who've simply read the books without reference to the game that some of the Drizzt books are pretty good though I've also heard the complaint with him that I hear with many long-running fantasy heroes - that after a while he gets just too good and too powerful and the stories don't have any meaningful conflicts in them, just opportunities to show him off.

To broaden this discussion a little, one thing about the D&D/Trek/Wars/etc. series is that they are generally run by a publisher rather than an author so that you can have multiple authors (sometimes many) writing about the same situations and characters. Some are better than others. I can't count how many threads I've read elsewhere on why Kevin Anderson's Star Wars books suck and Aaron Allston's rock and suck like. Or threads complaining about the inconsistencies in how a character or civilization or event is portrayed by one author versus another.

In a traditional single author series, if there is a major shift in how a character or society is portrayed, it's likely because the author has had a change of heart about some aspect of the character or has decided to consciously develop the character in a different direction. In multi-author series, it could happen simply because Author A thinks the character is a wuss and Author B thinks they "rock on toast".

I prefer a series that's by one author or that at least tries to maintain some degree of internal consistency and logical development of characters and events in spite of having multiple authors. The Wild Cards series, for instance, had multiple authors but the creator, George R. R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame, had a fair bit of editorial control to keep things somewhat on track even in the books he wasn't actually involved in writing.

And don't get me started on series that are "rebooted" or "continued" after an author's death, e.g. the Ian Fleming James Bond novels versus those by John Gardner and others or the neverending run of post-Doyle Holmes fiction that now seem to encompass several dozen different planes of reality (Holmes meets Dracula, Holmes meets the Cthulhu Mythos, Holmes investigates the Kennedy assasination, and so on).

Mendalla

Actually it's my husband who is the LARP-er.  I've read all the rule books for Vampire and Mage and have 'sat in' on a fair number of gaming sessions - kind of like a living prop. And I've been avidly pursued by more than one over enthusiastic Game Master who wanted another female player in their game.  I've sat in on a lot of D&D games too, usually as a 'chronicler' - I'd take notes so the DM and players would actually have a record of what had happened during that session.  I've never been comfortable playing in either kind of game.

As for the dragging a series out to death thing I'm not really fond of authors who do that myself.  Look at the Robert Jordan books - they would have made a wonderful 3 or even 5 books series, 13 is seriously pushing it and some of them are depressingly hard to wade through.  Jean Auel killed her Earth's Children series by dragging it out, the last 2 books were just appalling.  Or Jim Butcher and  his Harry Dresden novels, although he's done a much better job of keeping the series fresh than a lot of authors do, he starting to run into the problems caused by constantly escalating his hero's skills and the badness of the bad guys.

Almost everything I read is in a series.  My favourites include:

Harry Potter

Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series

City of Bones

A Great and Terrible Beauty

Divergent (new series only 2 books in)

Jean M Auel's Earth Children's Series (Clan of the Cave Bear...although the final few books aren't that great)

The Giver (Lois Lowry)

There are lots of others, but I can't think of them all right now.

Mists, I read the Giver, but I didn't know it was a series.  What comes after? or before?

My Mom has the full collection of Anne of Green Gables books in their original editions. That must be worth something.

As for me, I'm too spontaneous a guy to dedicate myself to reading through an entire series. I have read a number of Star Trek novels.

The 3 books I know of are The Giver (1993), Gathering Blue (2000) and Messanger (2004). There is also supposed to be a 4th book coming out in 2012 called Son.

Mists

ahh yes the Outlander Series.  Now we have to wait for yet another one.

Two series that are still in their early stages which I'm really enjoying are The Kingkiller Chronical by Patrick Rothfuss and The Gentleman Bastard Sequence by Scott Lynch.

Yeah! The Arrogant Man - Rothfuss' series is best that I have read in a long long time - so glad to meet somone on this site who has read it

Haven't heard of Rothfuss, but everything I've read about Lynch has been positive.

For the Twilight fans out there, if you've never read any of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Saint-Germain series, I'd recommend it. She was doing romantic, heroic vampires before, I think, Meyer was even born. The first one came out in 1977 or so. Each story is set in a different historical period and Germain's lovers often become vampires themselves so that they pop up again in subsequent novels (and two have had their own novels as spin-offs). I haven't read the recent books in the series, but early ones like Hotel Transylvania (Enlightenment France), The Palace (Renaissance Florence), and Blood Games (Rome under Nero) were quite good. They often play out as historical romance as much as fantasy, though Germain's nature does tend to eventually pull them back to the fantasy end of the spectrum.

Mendalla

The Patrick Rothfuss ones are very good. I am really looking forward to book 3 whenever it happens to come out.

Another good series is Tanya Huff's Enchantment Emporium series. Book 1 is "The Enchantment Emporium", book 2 is "The Wild Ways".  

And if we're talking about Huff, there's also her urban fantasy-mystery series about PI Vicky Nelson and her vampire partner/boyfriend Henry FitzRoy (an illegitimate son of Henry VIII who became a vampire). There's four books in the original series set mostly in Toronto (though one has much of the action taking place in the London area) and then there's a second series that has Henry and another character named Tony in Vancouver. The series odd hook, besides Henry, was that Vicky was an ex-cop who was forced to leave the Toronto Police because she was losing her vision to retinitis pigmentosa so that her disability factors into the stories in places. Her former detective partner and ex-lover Mike Cellucci was a major supporting character. The series was turned into a so-so TV series called Blood Ties (the scripts were mostly bad to meh, but the actors' portrayals of Vicky, Henry, and Mike were actually pretty good). Only lasted one season, mercifully.

Mendalla

Xanth series by Piers Anthony, the series that never, ever ends :3 by a writer who can write really incisive and powerful stuff*, who groks the publishing industry and so, makes his living off of Xanth...

I'm envious of Him that writes 3 books at once...

*like his "Firefly" book and short story "In the barn"

I liked his Ox/Orn/Omnivore trilogy (very early stuff from Anthony) but never got into Xanth (or much else by him).

And I'll toss in the Callahan series by Spider Robinson into the mix. Bunch of guys and gals (some of them from Earth, some not so much) hanging out in a bar and saving the world in between worst pun contests. It's s-f humour that's heavy on the humour part but there's some decent s-f in the mix, too. Think of it as the version of Cheers where Norm was from Alpha Centauri and Frasier was an invader from another dimension. And for added fun (and sex) there's the series about Callahan's wife who runs a brothel with guests and girls from all over the multiverse. Highly recommended but requires a slightly skewed sense of humour to really enjoy it.

Mendalla

There's a pretty nifty novel that was co-written by Piers Anthony and Mercedes Lackey called "If I Pay Thee Not in Gold". It was their one and only colaboration and it's out of print so you have to get it used (abe's books is a wonderful website), but if you can find it it is well worth the read.

Aaah - Mercedes Lackey - memories of days consumed by wandering used book store section and then heading home to curl uo on a cozy chair with my finds

I have to admit I enjoy Mercedes Lackey's earlier books a lot more than most of her newer stuff. A lot of the new books all 'feel' the same - like she's done them before.

I haven't read much Lackey but I know the feeling. I've abandoned more than a few authors for that particular sin (Stephen King comes to mind, though I hear he got better again).

Which reminds of another series that hasn't been mentioned and that I really should finish someday - King's The Dark Tower. Seven volume fantasy epic that he wrote over the nineties and early naughts.

Mendalla

Barbara Hambly's Darwath Trilogy (which has one of my favourite ever terse descriptions of an encounter with mind-shattering horror) and Those Who Hunt the Night (with my favourite vampire of all time -- Don Simon Ysidro)

Another favourite is The Incomplete Enchanter by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt...scientist  transported to a fantasy world where he discovers that magic works through symbolic logic and he learns how to use this knowledge :3

Robert Aspirin has my favourite 'shared world' series (Thieves' World), my favourite book series translated into comic form (Myth Adventures--"so that would make you a PERVERT." "No, that's PREVECT!") -- I have nearly died of apoplexy from it -- and one of my favourite dinger dystopian books, the Cold Cash War.

If I want to feel good, need a pick me up, I read some Heinlein or Spider Robinson.  It is from Spider where I first heard of the phrase "Pain shared is pain lessened, joy shared is joy increased..."

If you like Stephen King, the Dark Tower is pretty intense adult fantasy.

I <3 his Dark Tower series -- it has one of the few books where I have cried in the first chapter...the series strikes me as being Spiritual for Stephen King -- he says that he wasn't really writing it as much as he was watching his characters...

I just noticed Ron Howard is going to make it into a trilogy and TV series.

Actually, I thought that project had died but maybe I'm thinking of a previous Dark Tower project (or maybe I'm right but it was resurrected?). I'm not crazy about a Dark Tower adaptation. It strikes me as one of those things best left on the printed (or e-ink) page. OTOH, I used to say that about LOTR, so what do I know?

Mendalla

One series no one sle has mentioned that is rather goos is Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid series - Hounded, Hexed, Hammered, Tricked and Trapped (coming Nov this year).

The TV series TrueBlood is based on a series of books. It's like Twilight for adults, the mortal woman loving the vampire guy. But that is where the similarity ends. The setting is Louisiana so there's lots of Southern Twang going on. Most amusing.

I think those would be  the Charlaine Harris books.   I've never been able to get into  the books or the TV series myself but I know people who are practically addicted to both.

I used to like the Anita Blake books by Laurell K Hamilton until I decided I didn't like where she was going with Anita's character.  There are a few very good authors who rather killed perfectly good series the same way.  Kelly Armstrong for one (she wrote Dimestore Magic and Industrical Magic among others - I think her series is called Women of the Otherworld) and Kim Harrison for another (she writes the Rachel Morgan series - Dead Witch Walking, The Good The Bad and The Undead, etc)  They all took nice strong interesting female lead characters and turned them into whores.  The first few books in all their series are good then they go downhill rather sharply.

Charlaine Harris. That's right. I have read 2-3 and I am starting to see a pattern or formula already. I hope that changes quick.

I don't watch TV as a rule and I doubt I would ever have the opportunity to watch thos shows if I wanted to. So I will stick to the books. My sister in law loaned them to me after talking about them for so long.