The Blog Squad: A Blogger Collaboration - Part XXII

We are a group of three book bloggers situated on different continents but brought together by our love for books and a penchant for talking about them. We’ve joined our forces to create a collaborative series of posts about book blogging and we hope you’ll enjoy the discussions.

A MAGICAL WORLD OF WORDS - AmyNikita 

BOOKS.BAGS.BURGERS - Uma K 

BOOK REVIEWS BY DI - Di Hewlett

Do you binge read series? Or read them as they are released?

That totally depends! Sometimes I find out about some awesome series only after the entire series has been released so depending upon how much I like book 1, I might binge read or get to each book leisurely. Sometimes with some really popular series, you can’t not know about; I end up picking up the book as soon as it releases or requesting for an ARC.
 
I think both have pros and cons. Sometimes binge reading a series can put me in a reading slump and sometimes reading books right when they release is also a problem as I forget certain events in the previous book! But I just thought about it and I realize I don’t binge read that often!

 
For me, it’s more a case of “whatever books I can get my hands on, I’ll read.” I won’t read a series out of order, obviously, but if I see the first book for sale I’ll buy it and read it. And then get the others when they pop up.
 
I don’t make a conscious choice to hold-off reading a series because I want to get all the books in one-go. I’ll read it when the books are available to me - even if it means buying or requesting the second or third book just because it’s an option in that moment. But of course, I won’t start those till I can get the first book.    

In what order do you read series with novellas?

I mostly read the novellas after I’ve read the whole series. For some reasons, I’m scared of picking up novellas in the middle. I like not knowing certain things during the series and having them be revealed to me afterwards. Reading them while I’m reading the series feels like I’m giving myself spoilers! I think only once or twice have I read novellas while I was in the middle of the series.

Similar to my previous answer: just when I can get hold of them. I prefer to read the full series before novellas, but like I did for The Assassin’s Blade by Sarah J. Maas, it was in my library and even though I hadn’t read Empire of Storms yet, I took it because it didn’t really have a set place in the series and I could read it and not have any spoilers ruined.
 
Every novella is different, though. Some fit in a certain place in the series, and should only be read in that order if you wish to avoid spoilers. In that case, I’ll make sure to read the series first. But if spoilers, etc, aren’t an issue, then I’ll just read what’s available to me.      

Do you do ‘book by book’ reviews or whole series reviews?

I’ve only done book by book reviews so far but I’ve been meaning to do a series review for some of my favorite series like Harry Potter, Vampire Academy and The Raven Cycle. I read Harry Potter and Vampire Academy way before I started blogging so I haven’t even written book by book reviews of them! And I believe writing a book by book series now would be difficult as I’ve read the entire series! So yeah, I plan start doing series reviews sometime in the near future.

Up till now I’ve done book by book reviews, but I might change that a bit in the future. It depends on the books and how much I’ve enjoyed them, and how much I have to say about them.
 
If I’m doing a review of, say, the second book in a series then I’ll generally include spoilers because it’s only natural to refer to the first book. But I’ll always try to include a spoiler warning.

To see my answers make sure to visit the other collab posts!

A MAGICAL WORLD OF WORDS

BOOKS.BAGS.BURGERS

We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion post! Please talk to us and let us know YOUR answers below. What do you think of our responses? If you have any specific questions you’d like us to address in the future, please let us know in the comments section below. Stay tuned for next week’s questions!