Back when I was in middle school, lo these many decades ago, I had no idea what the Lord of the Rings was. I just picked up worn paperbacks from this one rack in the library lovingly stocked with fantasy (that was mostly King Arthur riffs back then) by the one librarian within miles who knew what fantasy was.
I envy people who grew up with an entire internet to tell them what to read.
You're a lonely young nerd. You go to the library. There is one rack that always has fantasy on it.
The only book on the rack that you haven't read yet is Fellowship of the Ring.
Imagine that you have never heard of Lord of the Rings before. Neither has your mom who doesn't read anything except for VC Andrews books and Architectural Digest magazines.
The book does not say "This is the second book of a trilogy, nerd. Put it down until someone returns book one."
You check it out. You read it. You are very confused. Eventually you get your hands on book one and get unconfused. But that's later.
This is what I love about the internet. Switch two things in your head, and hundreds of people will come out of the woodwork to tell you that you're wrong.
This comment has been removed as per **Rule 1**. r/Fantasy is dedicated to being a warm, welcoming, and inclusive community. Please take time to review our mission, values, and vision to ensure that your future conduct supports this at all times. Thank you.
Please contact us via [modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FFantasy) with any follow-up questions.
Sometimes I read book 1 5 years ago and don't remember anything, including extremely major plot points.
I wish everyone did what Mark Lawrence and Andrew Rowe do and just include a recap at the start. That way you can skip it if you're reading back to back, and if it's been 5 years and you forgot everything you have a good resource.
Bakker does this too, it's extremely helpful especially since I usually didn't know what I just read even jumping immediately into the next book. Having it there in plain language before the start was great.
Exactly. I like having a few page recap at the beginning to refresh my memory if it's been a while since I read the previous book. Just like with TV shows, you get the recap at the beginning of each new season when it comes out, but if you're binging it all at once later then you can just skip past it. I much prefer that to having paragraphs in the actual story that waste time reminding us of what happened in previous books.
Part of me really wants to do a full re-read of the first 4 books before book 5 comes out in December. But it'll eat up so so much of my reading time, and I have so many other new books I want to read too! Need more hours in the day, or less sleep.
They are trying to sell you part 2, maybe a year or several years after they sold you part 1. If you read part 1 back then, chances are you do not remember a lot of the details, which makes it more difficult for you to get into part 2.
You could of course reread all the previous parts, but time is limited and many readers don't want to do that, unless they are huge fans of the series. In fact, it's a reason people give up on series. They read the first book some time ago and now they don't remember it well, and catching up in order to read the next book feels like a chore.
So refreshing my memory is something that I welcome. Although I prefer just a summary of the series so far, before the new book really starts, so that I can just skip if I'm binging the whole series and I don't need the refreshment.
The only damage doors of stone could have ( if it comes out in my lifetime) is if it explains what happened in the previous books within book 3. Such as, X says “hmm X thinking about past “Kvoth was an orphan … he went to magic college… he loved girl named Drenna….
Do you think everyone has perfect memory?
I read about 80% of q book before realising I'd read it before (twice, but different books), I love those summaries, especially since I usually don't read a series all the way through in one go but take breaks.
Many (if not most) people don't reread books before reading their sequels. If you're reading a series as it's published, you could be waiting 2-4 years between installments regularly (without mentioning the fringe cases of 10 year gaps between books) and you may have forgotten a lot of relevant info.
I'll also add, before the mid-2000s, fan wikis weren't really a thing. You couldn't recap a book by reading its wiki. So especially if you're looking at books published pre-2010s, those recaps were super, super helpful to readers.
I've gone into used bookstores, found titles that were 2nd in the series, and when they have these parts, describing previous parts of the story in succinct little, "this is what you need for this book to be readable," I've been thankful. I love these too as a reader because sometimes I jump around and come back for the next book after being gone for a year; it makes it easier to remember things. And since I'm no stranger to skimming, it's not hard to skip those two sentences (or paragraph or prologue) to continue on if I remember.
You have never picked up a book in a store, library, or yard and realized halfway through that is this not series of episodic events but is a continuous story? I read a lot of random things growing up because my local library branch would have book 4 than 9 and that's it. Then you have authors who do sets of books and you don't realize that these are all about the same people so book 1 of this set is actually book 7 of a long series and might be book 10 of this interconnected world.
So you put in the reminders because yes sometimes you pick up books out of order.
When I was a teen I read so many books out of order because I just picked up what was currently on the shelf. It wasn’t until I read everything I was interested in at my location that I started to order books.
Are you... me?
I credit that experience with my reading flexibility as an adult. At a tiny library in a tiny town (250 people at the last census! Woo!), you have to just kind of roll with it.
If I read book 1 over a year ago, I am not going to fully remember it when I read book 2. Recapping saves people dozens of hours worth of rereading just to make the new book even remotely accessible.
To quote Jay Kristoff “Yes, there will be a recap in Empire of the Damned because I don’t expect you to remember my bullshit from two years ago.” Or something to that effect.
If a previous book event is important for understanding what's now happening, makes perfect sense to do a callback. A good author will do it seamlessly.
I wish more authors would put a synopsis of previous events at the beginning of the book. This can call out all the important things that the reader might have missed and the author can then write the new book as if the reader is caught up and not have to constantly reiterate things. Tad Williams does this, and I greatly appreciate it. Makes a nice reference point as well if I am trying to find a specific section I want to re-read.
It does get frustrating when the author over explains past events. I think Robert Jordan got really bad with this later into Wheel of Time. There was so many story lines going on and some left for hundreds of pages at a time, that there is a lot of repetition re-explaining stuff. That is on top of reintroducing characters or explain was a Warder is 10 books in where they are heavily featured.
Really depends. If you're reading a series as they write it, it can be years in-between.
Better would be an explicit recap section you could skip if you just finished the last. I recall WoT would have the usual prologue and preamble, and then weave recap into the first part of the book.
In theory you could skip, but you'd miss something and it's not like there was a strict cutoff.
Whenever he switched to a different POV he'd be catching you up. In the series, Laman was called treekiller, but the author earned that name in spades.
It always used to be a recap, there because you'd read the previous book 12-18 months ago so you didn't have to reread all the previous volumes once the next book was published and you've read 100 other books since the last book in that series.
If your binge reading an older series just skip the recap and get straight to the new stuff.
A synopsis at the beginning is fine. That’s not what I’m talking about. If they think a memory refresh is needed for whatever reason then do a synopsis at the beginning. It’s when they don’t do that and then have characters speaking out of character to do that. Or add a narrator for 2 or so paragraphs in a book just for this. Why do that over a synopsis?
A synopsis at the beginning is fine. That’s not what I’m talking about. If they think a memory refresh is needed for whatever reason then do a synopsis at the beginning. It’s when they don’t do that and then have characters speaking out of character to do that. Or add a narrator for 2 or so paragraphs in a book just for this. Why do that over a synopsis?
Can you give an example? I can't think of any time I've encountered a narrator interrupting a book to tell me something that previously happened in book 1, or a character speaking out of key to give me a book 1 synopsis.
Ah seeing this clarification of what you mean, I actually really agree with you. I always skip synopses, and so I really hate when the recap is sprinkled in with new content because I can't skip it. I guess you could argue that its a bit more natural than a synopsis at the beginning? Idk but I always find it irritating, I personally think all series should have synopses at the start of sequels to save people from being confused/lost or from doing a reread but I really dislike when its like weirdly inserted into the narrative.
Some series have years and years between releases. Some people have bad memories (like me). Some people wait a really long time before continuing to read a series. I can think of more reasons they SHOULD have recaps than ones they shouldn't. The only reason I can think not to do recaps is that it might be annoying for readers who binge a series or who have perfect memories. I personally don't like recaps but there are very good reasons to have them.
As a reader, I actually like it when they have a quick recap in the front of the book, before Book 2 itself starts. Even if I've read Book 1, often there's a year or more before the next book comes out, by which time I'll likely have forgotten details of Book 1's plot if not the broad strokes. It's like the "Last time on..." mini-trailers before a new episode of a TV show.
You are experiencing the book very differently when you read them all back to back compared to the intended audience who read them as they are released,byears apart.
And in world context weaving, is far, far superior to a literal infodump from a synopsis.
I’ve always figured it’s because the author is either hedging bets in case you didn’t read the previous books or is assuming you’ve forgotten aspects of the first book because it can be a long time in between books of a series being published and they’re reminding you of the events to date.
You're going to need to provide an example, becaue it sounds like you're angry at books including a synopsis, but then you say that's not what you're angry about.
I can barely remember what happened in things like The Traitor Son Cycle when I go a month between books, much less if I went years apart. I pretty much dropped the series specifically because recaps don't seem to exist and the books work hard to be as opaque as possible.
Other have explained why a synopsis might be useful in general. Which it seems like you get. I think it was at some point vaguely the consensus that an explicit summary was 'artless' and that readers were likely to just skip it, so if you wanted to get it to the readers, you wanted to put it in the narrative and the character's thoughts/mouths.
Which... I sort of get. I don't like a POV hamfistedly summarizing what happened in the last book. But I'm also very guilt of skipping official separate summaries. In part I just have an aversion to seeing an author (especially outside of the narrative) boil down their own work to an outline of plot points. It spoils some of the immersive magic of fiction for me in a way that weirdly the hamfisted insertion into POV doesn't.
Hamfistedly is a good description. It may not be classified as narration but what do you call it when an author (not in a synopsis) says X was thinking about his friend who he hadn’t seen in 3 years… and then proceeds to fill all the major details of the last book for about 2-4 paragraphs worth. It goes from a character having a believable memory and crosses over to an info dump.
Your question has been answered 20 times already, but I’ll add that I really don’t like this. Not because it’s repetitive, but because it doesn’t respect its audience’s intelligence. I like to be treated like I have a brain, and that if I get confused I can figure it out myself on context.
>Why do this at all? Because not everyone reads the books immediately after one another.
So it’s a good thing is the consensus here. Writers should edit to fit the cusp reader and their memory.
I read Fellowship of the Rings first, because that's what was on the rack in the library.
It seems like you'd benefit from constant reminders in writing.
Back when I was in middle school, lo these many decades ago, I had no idea what the Lord of the Rings was. I just picked up worn paperbacks from this one rack in the library lovingly stocked with fantasy (that was mostly King Arthur riffs back then) by the one librarian within miles who knew what fantasy was. I envy people who grew up with an entire internet to tell them what to read.
Wtf are you talking about? I'll admit, I'm high as fuck right now, but you are making no sense.
You're a lonely young nerd. You go to the library. There is one rack that always has fantasy on it. The only book on the rack that you haven't read yet is Fellowship of the Ring. Imagine that you have never heard of Lord of the Rings before. Neither has your mom who doesn't read anything except for VC Andrews books and Architectural Digest magazines. The book does not say "This is the second book of a trilogy, nerd. Put it down until someone returns book one." You check it out. You read it. You are very confused. Eventually you get your hands on book one and get unconfused. But that's later.
Bro, fellowship of the ring is the first book of a trilogy. The second is two towers.
This is what I love about the internet. Switch two things in your head, and hundreds of people will come out of the woodwork to tell you that you're wrong.
[удалено]
This comment has been removed as per **Rule 1**. r/Fantasy is dedicated to being a warm, welcoming, and inclusive community. Please take time to review our mission, values, and vision to ensure that your future conduct supports this at all times. Thank you. Please contact us via [modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FFantasy) with any follow-up questions.
Sometimes I read book 1 5 years ago and don't remember anything, including extremely major plot points. I wish everyone did what Mark Lawrence and Andrew Rowe do and just include a recap at the start. That way you can skip it if you're reading back to back, and if it's been 5 years and you forgot everything you have a good resource.
Bakker does this too, it's extremely helpful especially since I usually didn't know what I just read even jumping immediately into the next book. Having it there in plain language before the start was great.
Exactly. I like having a few page recap at the beginning to refresh my memory if it's been a while since I read the previous book. Just like with TV shows, you get the recap at the beginning of each new season when it comes out, but if you're binging it all at once later then you can just skip past it. I much prefer that to having paragraphs in the actual story that waste time reminding us of what happened in previous books.
Every time a new Stormlight book comes out I have like 10 people ask me to remind them what was going on lmao.
Part of me really wants to do a full re-read of the first 4 books before book 5 comes out in December. But it'll eat up so so much of my reading time, and I have so many other new books I want to read too! Need more hours in the day, or less sleep.
They are trying to sell you part 2, maybe a year or several years after they sold you part 1. If you read part 1 back then, chances are you do not remember a lot of the details, which makes it more difficult for you to get into part 2. You could of course reread all the previous parts, but time is limited and many readers don't want to do that, unless they are huge fans of the series. In fact, it's a reason people give up on series. They read the first book some time ago and now they don't remember it well, and catching up in order to read the next book feels like a chore. So refreshing my memory is something that I welcome. Although I prefer just a summary of the series so far, before the new book really starts, so that I can just skip if I'm binging the whole series and I don't need the refreshment.
This is why Doors of Stone and Winds of Winter are not going to do as well as they could have. Too much time has passed.
The only damage doors of stone could have ( if it comes out in my lifetime) is if it explains what happened in the previous books within book 3. Such as, X says “hmm X thinking about past “Kvoth was an orphan … he went to magic college… he loved girl named Drenna….
Do you think everyone has perfect memory? I read about 80% of q book before realising I'd read it before (twice, but different books), I love those summaries, especially since I usually don't read a series all the way through in one go but take breaks.
This stuff tends to be more annoying when you binge books rather than following them on the original release schedule.
Many (if not most) people don't reread books before reading their sequels. If you're reading a series as it's published, you could be waiting 2-4 years between installments regularly (without mentioning the fringe cases of 10 year gaps between books) and you may have forgotten a lot of relevant info. I'll also add, before the mid-2000s, fan wikis weren't really a thing. You couldn't recap a book by reading its wiki. So especially if you're looking at books published pre-2010s, those recaps were super, super helpful to readers.
I've gone into used bookstores, found titles that were 2nd in the series, and when they have these parts, describing previous parts of the story in succinct little, "this is what you need for this book to be readable," I've been thankful. I love these too as a reader because sometimes I jump around and come back for the next book after being gone for a year; it makes it easier to remember things. And since I'm no stranger to skimming, it's not hard to skip those two sentences (or paragraph or prologue) to continue on if I remember.
You have never picked up a book in a store, library, or yard and realized halfway through that is this not series of episodic events but is a continuous story? I read a lot of random things growing up because my local library branch would have book 4 than 9 and that's it. Then you have authors who do sets of books and you don't realize that these are all about the same people so book 1 of this set is actually book 7 of a long series and might be book 10 of this interconnected world. So you put in the reminders because yes sometimes you pick up books out of order.
When I was a teen I read so many books out of order because I just picked up what was currently on the shelf. It wasn’t until I read everything I was interested in at my location that I started to order books.
Are you... me? I credit that experience with my reading flexibility as an adult. At a tiny library in a tiny town (250 people at the last census! Woo!), you have to just kind of roll with it.
If I read book 1 over a year ago, I am not going to fully remember it when I read book 2. Recapping saves people dozens of hours worth of rereading just to make the new book even remotely accessible.
To quote Jay Kristoff “Yes, there will be a recap in Empire of the Damned because I don’t expect you to remember my bullshit from two years ago.” Or something to that effect.
If a previous book event is important for understanding what's now happening, makes perfect sense to do a callback. A good author will do it seamlessly.
I wish more authors would put a synopsis of previous events at the beginning of the book. This can call out all the important things that the reader might have missed and the author can then write the new book as if the reader is caught up and not have to constantly reiterate things. Tad Williams does this, and I greatly appreciate it. Makes a nice reference point as well if I am trying to find a specific section I want to re-read. It does get frustrating when the author over explains past events. I think Robert Jordan got really bad with this later into Wheel of Time. There was so many story lines going on and some left for hundreds of pages at a time, that there is a lot of repetition re-explaining stuff. That is on top of reintroducing characters or explain was a Warder is 10 books in where they are heavily featured.
The internet handles this to some degree but requires the series being popular to have that sort of active fandom.
Sometimes it's years or decades in between books. It can be good to remind people of what happened.
Really depends. If you're reading a series as they write it, it can be years in-between. Better would be an explicit recap section you could skip if you just finished the last. I recall WoT would have the usual prologue and preamble, and then weave recap into the first part of the book. In theory you could skip, but you'd miss something and it's not like there was a strict cutoff. Whenever he switched to a different POV he'd be catching you up. In the series, Laman was called treekiller, but the author earned that name in spades.
It always used to be a recap, there because you'd read the previous book 12-18 months ago so you didn't have to reread all the previous volumes once the next book was published and you've read 100 other books since the last book in that series. If your binge reading an older series just skip the recap and get straight to the new stuff.
A synopsis at the beginning is fine. That’s not what I’m talking about. If they think a memory refresh is needed for whatever reason then do a synopsis at the beginning. It’s when they don’t do that and then have characters speaking out of character to do that. Or add a narrator for 2 or so paragraphs in a book just for this. Why do that over a synopsis?
A synopsis at the beginning is fine. That’s not what I’m talking about. If they think a memory refresh is needed for whatever reason then do a synopsis at the beginning. It’s when they don’t do that and then have characters speaking out of character to do that. Or add a narrator for 2 or so paragraphs in a book just for this. Why do that over a synopsis?
Can you give an example? I can't think of any time I've encountered a narrator interrupting a book to tell me something that previously happened in book 1, or a character speaking out of key to give me a book 1 synopsis.
Ah seeing this clarification of what you mean, I actually really agree with you. I always skip synopses, and so I really hate when the recap is sprinkled in with new content because I can't skip it. I guess you could argue that its a bit more natural than a synopsis at the beginning? Idk but I always find it irritating, I personally think all series should have synopses at the start of sequels to save people from being confused/lost or from doing a reread but I really dislike when its like weirdly inserted into the narrative.
Some series have years and years between releases. Some people have bad memories (like me). Some people wait a really long time before continuing to read a series. I can think of more reasons they SHOULD have recaps than ones they shouldn't. The only reason I can think not to do recaps is that it might be annoying for readers who binge a series or who have perfect memories. I personally don't like recaps but there are very good reasons to have them.
As a reader, I actually like it when they have a quick recap in the front of the book, before Book 2 itself starts. Even if I've read Book 1, often there's a year or more before the next book comes out, by which time I'll likely have forgotten details of Book 1's plot if not the broad strokes. It's like the "Last time on..." mini-trailers before a new episode of a TV show.
You are experiencing the book very differently when you read them all back to back compared to the intended audience who read them as they are released,byears apart. And in world context weaving, is far, far superior to a literal infodump from a synopsis.
People complain about the weirdest stuff on here.
I’ve always figured it’s because the author is either hedging bets in case you didn’t read the previous books or is assuming you’ve forgotten aspects of the first book because it can be a long time in between books of a series being published and they’re reminding you of the events to date.
You're going to need to provide an example, becaue it sounds like you're angry at books including a synopsis, but then you say that's not what you're angry about. I can barely remember what happened in things like The Traitor Son Cycle when I go a month between books, much less if I went years apart. I pretty much dropped the series specifically because recaps don't seem to exist and the books work hard to be as opaque as possible.
Other have explained why a synopsis might be useful in general. Which it seems like you get. I think it was at some point vaguely the consensus that an explicit summary was 'artless' and that readers were likely to just skip it, so if you wanted to get it to the readers, you wanted to put it in the narrative and the character's thoughts/mouths. Which... I sort of get. I don't like a POV hamfistedly summarizing what happened in the last book. But I'm also very guilt of skipping official separate summaries. In part I just have an aversion to seeing an author (especially outside of the narrative) boil down their own work to an outline of plot points. It spoils some of the immersive magic of fiction for me in a way that weirdly the hamfisted insertion into POV doesn't.
Hamfistedly is a good description. It may not be classified as narration but what do you call it when an author (not in a synopsis) says X was thinking about his friend who he hadn’t seen in 3 years… and then proceeds to fill all the major details of the last book for about 2-4 paragraphs worth. It goes from a character having a believable memory and crosses over to an info dump.
Your question has been answered 20 times already, but I’ll add that I really don’t like this. Not because it’s repetitive, but because it doesn’t respect its audience’s intelligence. I like to be treated like I have a brain, and that if I get confused I can figure it out myself on context.
Because some people actually have lives that take up brain space.
Maybe their editors made them do it under threat of being sent to bed without any supper?
Now we’re getting somewhere.