This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is about satisfying series, so let’s see what I can come up with!

1. The Peter Wimsey books, by Dorothy L. Sayers. At first, Lord Peter seems like a fairly standard series detective, with a distinctive background and manner, but no real chronology or development between books. But then in Strong Poison a love interest is introduced: she doesn’t appear in every book (e.g. The Nine Tailors or Five Red Herrings), but over the course of the books where she does appear, her relationship with Peter slowly develops until she is certain of her feelings and ready to accept his hand in marriage. The series ends with Busman’s Honeymoon, in which they’re married and different threads of their characters and experiences come together beautifully, as she understands his shellshock and he finds something of a shelter from it and the world. It’s a heck of a journey from Peter’s first appearance on-page, and very satisfying.
2. The Phryne Fisher mysteries, by Kerry Greenwood. There is a thread of character development running through the stories, but they’re pretty episodic/mystery-of-the-week, and you can dip in at most stages and be able to follow the action. This series is satisfying because it has a few predictable elements (beautiful young men, lovely food cooked by Mrs Butler, ravishing fashion as worn by Phryne herself) and always delivers.
3. The Memoirs of Lady Trent, by Marie Brennan. A perennial favourite of mine. Rereading it is just as satisfying as a first read, maybe more so, because you can see how the pieces will come together and how Isabella’s great discoveries will be made, what they’re leading to, etc. Each book adds on another block, until the last book — well. No major spoilers, this one’s worth experiencing for yourself. She also gets a personal arc of loss, grief, and second chances which is very satisfying too.
4. The Imperial Radch books, by Ann Leckie. Mostly the original trilogy; I loved Provenance and liked Translation State, but the original trilogy is a safe happy place for me. Not that the books are in any way cosy, quite the opposite, but there’s something about Breq, Saivarden, and the cast of characters around them that just calls me back every so often.
5. Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. I don’t know of many authors so willing to look back at an earlier book, realise that there was something unpleasant about it — something they didn’t mean to say — and then work with it/against it so ably, within the world. Le Guin realised that A Wizard of Earthsea was sexist as heck, and then spent the rest of the books replying to it within the bounds she’d already set. And the best part is that A Wizard of Earthsea isn’t bad, it has a lot of beautiful stuff to say and is a book that’s very important to me, but the other books add to it and play with it and make it better.
6. The Dark is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper. I love these books so much. I read my copy to pieces, and every word of the books is familiar to me now, so much so that I’ve been giving it a long rest before reading it again. It plays with mythology and folklore, with huge and terrifying forces, and then at the end hands responsibility back to us. There are aspects that are a little iffy (the Dark rising with waves of immigrants who are then tamed by the land; I think this is mostly about invasions, like the Norse, the Saxons, the Normans, but it has worrisome connotations even paired with the scene where Stephen and Will defend an immigrant boy), and it probably feels very dated now to a young person coming fresh to it… but all the same, I love it.
7. The Greta Helsing series, by Vivian Shaw. Okay, I haven’t actually read the most recent book, but I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of fun. I love the idea of a doctor who treats monsters, and I love Greta’s dedication to the task, and the found family of Ruthven and Varney and Fass and Greta and and and. I admit I’d thought the third book was intended to be the end, and it would’ve been a very appropriate one, but I’m excited to read further.
8. Heaven Official’s Blessing, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. This story really goes places. It takes a while for all the pieces to come together, with two extended flashbacks filling in Xie Lian’s past, but when it does… wow. As a reader you certainly have to wait for the full payoff, and there’s a lot of suffering for Xie Lian (and various other characters, but primarily Xie Lian) along the way — but it really, really pays off. And there’s a reason there’s an AO3 tag, “Hualian invented love”: the devotion between Xie Lian and Hua Cheng is intense and their love story spans 800 years.
9. Fairyland, by Catherynne M. Valente. I reread this series every so often because I love the narrative voice. I don’t always love Valente’s writing — sometimes it gets too lyrical and purple-prosey for me — but it hits a sweet spot with Fairyland, calling on the same kind of warm, parental narrator’s tone as C.S. Lewis’ best moments, and September’s whole journey is a lot of fun.
10. A Side Character’s Love Story, by Akane Tamura. This series isn’t finished yet, but I already reread it once, because Hiroki and Nobuko’s relationship is just so cute. A slow-burner at first, but I love that they communicate and figure things out together, and the character growth they both get through the story. Plus there are some fun side characters, too.

Okay, that took me a bit of thinking, and I’m sure I could come up with a whole different list if you gave me long enough — but there’s some nice variety here, so let’s go with this.

It’s definitely beginning to feel autumnal here, with the temperatures falling and some very rainy days. I’m all for it — I love rain, especially listening to it against the windows while I’m reading, because I’m a cliché, and I’m also not super keen on very warm weather anyway (despite the problems I have with my poor circulation meaning I’m easily cold).

So it’s time too to think about my fall reading list, thanks to Top Ten Tuesday. I know there are a lot of books releasing soon that I’m interested in, so I’ve included a couple of those, but mostly I’m trying to leave those on my wishlist for Christmas, and focus on some of the neglected books of my TBR.

1. Mockingbird Court, by Juneau Black. I love the Shady Hollow series, and the one is due out on 7th October, so it has to earn a place on my list. It’s also set in autumn, so it’s coincidentally seasonally appropriate, too! Even though there’s murder and danger, these books are so cosy to me — I can’t wait to settle down with this one.
2. The Beauty’s Blade, by Feng Ren Zuo Shu. I haven’t read any baihe (f/f Chinese light novels, equivalent to the m/m danmei) yet, but I heard about this one and it sounds like a lot of fun. It’s due out in November, and I need to snag a copy right away so I can check whether my sister will be interested in it. (I mean, probably: badass ladies with swords who presumably end up kissing, it’s right up her street. But I do have to check for a happy ending.)
3. The Library of Ancient Wisdom, by Selena Wisnom. I’d actually sort-of started this at one point, but got busy and didn’t dig into it properly, but it looks like a fascinating history of Mesopotamia through the library of Ashurbanipal, and I enjoyed the chapter I read. It looks like a bit of a chonker, but I think it’ll be one I gladly sink into once I give it the time.
4. Pagans, by James Alistair Henry. I’ve technically started this as well, but it wasn’t the right moment, and now I want to get back to it. It’s a mystery set in an alternative universe where geopolitics has worked out very, very differently (e.g. no Norman invasion, Britain’s kind of a backwater, society is largely run by Anglo-Saxons with Celtcs being a heavily marginalised group, etc). Parts of it don’t seem to totally make sense, but I didn’t get that far into it, and I’m very curious how things work out, all the same.
5. You Should Be So Lucky, by Cat Sebastian. It’s on my TBR for this month, but I haven’t got to it yet (given that I’ve been warned it deals with an amount of grief and loss, last week didn’t seem like the right time mentally). I really want to read it, though, so it’ll probably be one of the next books I pick up! I love Cat Sebastian’s romances in general, and I feel like she’s also always improving as a writer.
6. The Duke at Hazard, by KJ Charles. Another one that’s on my September TBR but hasn’t been read yet. This one’s definitely a priority — I don’t know why I’ve waited so long on it. I love pretty much all of KJ Charles’ work, so I expect to enjoy it.
7. The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club, by Christopher de Hamel. This is a bit of a random choice, but it’s been on my shelves for a while and I’d love to dig into it. I really enjoyed Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, and this one has in-page colour illustrations as well, so it should be fascinating. It’s a bit of a chonker, so I might not schedule it for the same month as the other chunky books I’m thinking about!
8. Folk Song in England, by Steve Roud. I like a lot of modern British folk, and the efforts of singers and groups like Jon Boden (and Spiers & Boden), Fay Hield, Eliza Carthy, Seth Lakeman and Bellowhead have given me quite the appreciation for traditional songs and their many variations. It’s another chunky book, so it’s a little intimidating, but I’m sure I can get to it!
9. The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, by Xue Shan Fei Hu. This sounds absolutely nuts as a concept, and I really want to dig in. I want to finish my reread of another isekai-type danmei, The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, first… but once I have, I really want to get to this one, especially as it isn’t super-long (four volumes, I think?).
10. Paladin’s Hope, by T. Kingfisher. I’ve been loving Kingfisher’s Saint of Steel books, and this is the next up! It looks quite a bit shorter than the last one, but hopefully it will do justice to Piper and Galen. Galen deserves some happiness now!

Yes, yes, I know — a very varied bunch. Very curious to see what other people are hoping to read soon!