Book trilogies and series – what's the point?

It can be frustrating to be on tenterhooks for the next volume in a series to be published but a great trilogy is worth the wait

Hard hobbit to break ... Elijah Wood in the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Readers of the books today can read their way through the series without waiting for Tolkien to finish writing it.
The current enormous success of major trilogies, quartets or even longer series indicates that a large number of readers really like revisiting a favourite set of characters, place or storyline. Perhaps they don't mind so much about the details but they just want to get back into the world; certainly that was the case for some readers of JK Rowling's Harry Potter sequence even if there were others who retained all the rules of magic.

However, I am sure you are not alone in wanting a complete experience in one book. Many others will agree that not only that it is sometimes hard to remember details of a story well enough to carry over and pick up the threads at a later date but also that there is something unsatisfying about a story which doesn't properly end. Just now, there are a lot of first volumes of trilogies that introduce a host of characters and paint a vivid backdrop but only begin the action leaving the reader frustrated or impossibly hooked according to temperament.

It is not always the case. Eoin Colfer's WARP: The Reluctant Assassin, the first title in his new series, has a story that begins and ends satisfyingly in the single volume while also making it clear that there is more to come. Philip Pullman and Philip Reeve both do the same in His Dark Materials and the Mortal Engines quartet respectively. But even within these two excellent linked novels, the problem of how you remember what has happened earlier when you read the subsequent volumes remains. Patrick Ness helped his readers considerably with his Chaos Walking trilogy by having only short gaps between the publication of the three volumes. The Knife of Never Letting Go was followed at only yearly intervals by The Ask and the Answer and then Monsters of Men.

But this problem really only exists for the readers who are reading the books as they appear. With time, all the tiles become available at once. Think how easy and satisfying it is to pick up JRR Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring secure in the knowledge that you can move straight onto The Two Towers and The Return of the King without having to wait and remember what happened in the beginning. The frustration for a reader like you, devouring books as they are published, is short-lived and outweighed by the long term satisfaction of readers in the future./guardian.co.uk