A new week, and a new Fantasy with Friends prompt! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about series reading order:

When reading a favorite fantasy series, which reading order would you recommend? For instance, when reading Narnia, do you think people should go by publication order or by chronological order? Or, if you like to recommend Tolkien, do you think readers should start with LotR or The Hobbit? Feel free to discuss any favorite fantasy series you have!

It feels like this question isn’t super relevant to my current faves, buuuut the prompt does help!

• C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia: personally, I always go with chronological order, starting with The Magician’s Nephew and placing The Horse and His Boy immediately after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (since they overlap). I like starting at the beginning, and I feel like it gives you a solid footing for the following books. Still, there are solid reasons to go by publication order, and that’s the information you have available: if you read The Magician’s Nephew first, you’ll know more than the characters about the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I personally think it works both ways, and have always read it that way, but… I can see the strengths of the other way too.
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: definitely read The Hobbit first. It has important setup for The Lord of the Rings, and it’s a better transition one into the other if you start with it and then let Tolkien bridge you into the higher fantasy tone of The Lord of the Rings: you can track the tone changing from the first chapter into the flight to Rivendell. The other direction would be a really weird transition, and anyway you’d have missed the introduction of the Ring and Gollum. You still have to be prepared for the fact that the audience is a little different between the two books and that the tonal shift is coming, mind you: I’m also open to the two books just being for different audiences, and only reading one or the other (though personally I love the whole).
• Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising: I rarely ever recommend doing this, but if you’re coming to it for the first time as an adult and you don’t have much patience with children’s literature, skip Over Sea, Under Stone. At least on your first read. I do think it has a great deal of merit and adds to the lore, but The Dark is Rising introduces the stakes a lot better and is less from a child’s point of view: the protagonist of The Dark is Rising is a human child as the book starts… but as he discovers, he’s also an Old One, and that changes his perspective a lot compared to the kids in Over Sea, Under Stone, who are just human. That said, I would suggest reading Over Sea, Under Stone before Greenwitch, if you do get into The Dark is Rising, because you need to know Simon, Jane and Barney and their relationship with Merriman before you can plunge into that.

As a kid, I’d have always said chronological order for anything, but I think publication order has a lot to be said for it because that order is pretty sure to give you the information you need in the order you need it… and I think authors’ recommended reading orders can be useful here too.

Mostly, I prefer it to be unambiguous: gimme series numbering and a recommended reading order next to the title page, please!