The good people at Books & Tea have proposed a Completing Series Challenge this year. The goal is to read the books from a series that you’ve started, but haven’t finished yet. I haven’t joined this challenge yet, but it did make me take a look at series that I haven’t finished reading for one reason or another, so I decided to make a post to talk about some of them and why I haven’t finished them yet.
The Murderbot Diaries
I love Murderbot and this is one of the series that I will probably follow until the end. A couple years ago I started this series by listening to the first and second audiobook, but since I struggle with audiobooks, I chose to wait until I had a physical copy to read this series from the start again.
Some friends got me the first four books, but that’s all I’ve got for now. Unfortunately completing the series is very out of my budget for the moment, so I’ll have to keep waiting, but this is a series that I definitely want to keep reading.
Red Queen
To be fair, I read this book shortly after finishing The Selection and it struck me as a very similar read, which probably lead to unintended comparisons. I really enjoyed The Selection and Red Queen just didn’t hold my attention the same. While I didn’t hate it, it just didn’t really captivate me at the time and I didn’t feel compelled to find out where the story goes beyond the first book. In spite of the great reviews, it just didn’t work for me, so I won’t be finishing this series.
Remembrance of Earth’s Past
This one’s a tough one to judge for me. I read The Three Body Problem and I have some mixed feelings about it. I love the ideas presented on this book and the immersive world where the story takes place. The characters are interesting and once you get an idea of what’s happening, it’s a really outstanding book. My problem was precisely getting an idea of what’s happening. I spent quite a few chapters being super confused and lost as to where things were going. It took a long time to set up all the necessary elements of the story and once it’s done, it all makes sense, but getting there was a bit overwhelming.
Maybe reading it again could be a more enjoyable experience and I have heard that the other books in the series are much stronger, so perhaps I’ll give this series another try soon, but for now I am not planning to finish it.
Red Rising Saga
Alright, look, this is a beloved series among lots of people and I can see why. Again, I only read the first book and I loved some elements of this story, but didn’t quite enjoy some others. Red Rising feels like an entire book spent setting up a story and it’s fine, the world-building and character development require some time. However, once I finished the book, it didn’t leave me wondering what would happen next. If anything, just like Red Queen, it gave me the feeling that I already know what’s gonna happen next.
From what I hear the original trilogy went the exact direction one would expect, but the series evolves after that and develops into a much more interesting story. I do think there’s potential and a great world to explore in this series, but ultimately it didn’t hold my interest enough to make me want to continue reading it.
In Times Like These
Having only read the first book of the series and starting to see a theme here of me reading one book and then dropping series, I will say that it’s far more likely that I’ll finish this series than any of the other three I previously mentioned.
The thing is I absolutely loved In Times Like These, it’s an original and refreshing time travel story that I enjoyed from page one. However, I am to this day still not sure if I want to dig deeper and explore the story of The Chronothon. The third book in the series does sound more appealing to me, but the second one really doesn’t. I’m also slightly afraid that those books will bring the romance to the foreground. That’s the one thing I enjoyed the least about the first book and I was happy that it wasn’t presented until the very end of the book. That said, this story was so enjoyable and unique that I will probably finish it at some point.
It must be said that I prefer reading standalones to series. If I start a series, I tend to go for ones that are already finished and read it completely in a short period of time. If I take longer than three months to start the following book in a series, chances are I just won’t pick it up. If a series has more than 5 books, chances are I won’t pick it up either.
How about you? Do you have any unfinished book series that you plan on finishing soon?
The Melody In Words 
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